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Upcoming Events: Innovating in the Open (1/29); Development in the Digital Age (2/3); Open Gov in India (2/10)

Upcoming Events / Digital Media
January 28, 2015
special event

Innovating in the Open

Thursday, January 29, 3:30PM ET, Harvard Law School, Wasserstein Hall, Room 1010. Presented by the Cyberlaw Clinic, Berkman Center, Harvard Innovation Lab, HLS Food Law and Policy Clinic, and the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative

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Join Matt Tucker, Harvard Business School Digital Initiative, Emily Broad Leib, HLS Food Law and Policy Clinic, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, New York University Stern School of Business and Jeff Warren, Public Lab for a conversation about open approaches to innovation. Hosted and moderated by Christopher Bavitz, HLS Clinical Professor of Law and Managing Director, Cyberlaw Clinic.

Efforts to innovate and promote innovation often proceed in black boxes, out of concern for intellectual property protection and first-mover advantage. An alternative model, however, prioritizes engagement with users, consumers, competitors, and the general public throughout the creative process. Devotees of this more open approach to innovation view the risks of early disclosure as outweighed by the benefits of drawing on the wisdom of the crowd. The Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society is pleased to present this panel discussion, featuring speakers from the HBS Digital Initiative, NYU’s Stern School of Business, and Public Lab, on the topic of open innovation and how it can be used to improve development of everything from consumer products and services to software code to policy proposals. Panelists will address the topic from theoretical and practical perspectives, and cover ways to get involved in open innovation at Harvard, including the Deans’ Food System Challenge.

more information on our website>

berkman luncheon series

Development in the Digital Age: The role of online platforms & payments in enabling entrepreneurship in emerging markets

Tuesday, February 3, **12:00pm ET** (please note new start time), Harvard Law School, Wasserstein Hall, Room 2004. This event will be webcast live.

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The Internet is democratizing access to the global marketplace for millions of people around the world. Thanks to online platforms, payment systems and logistics services, companies, nonprofits and individuals can embark on global journeys like never before. Join representatives from the Global Innovation Forum, eBay and Etsy to explore the opportunities for economic development that the Internet unlocks, and the specific challenges that global entrepreneurs and micromultinationals in developing countries face.

Usman Ahmed is Policy Counsel for eBay Inc. His work covers a variety of global Internet issues including international trade, intellectual property policy, and financial services. Jake Colvin is Executive Director of the Global Innovation Forum @ NFTC. Through GIF, Jake works with startup, business, education and nonprofit leaders to explore the opportunities and challenges associated with participating in the global marketplace in the digital age, and to assess the effect of public policies on international trade and innovation. Althea Erickson is director of public policy at Etsy, the marketplace for creative people to buy and sell unique goods. Althea leads Etsy’s government relations and advocacy efforts, focusing on educating and advising policymakers on the issues that micro-entrepreneurs and creative businesses face. She is also responsible for developing and advancing Etsy’s position on issues ranging from t axes and regulation, to open Internet and free trade, to IP and privacy policies. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

berkman luncheon series

Can the State use information technology to police itself? A study of open governance in Andhra Pradesh, India

Tuesday, February 10, **12:00pm ET** (please note new start time), Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

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This talk examines the attempted use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to eliminate corruption within a bureaucracy in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. In this initiative, the senior bureaucrats built a digital network to curb corruption at the “last mile.” By increasing the visibility and by controlling the “micro-practices” of the work done by lower-level bureaucrats, this digital system allowed higher-level bureaucrats to exercise more control remotely, bypassing the existing “chain of command” form of control and reducing corruption. Ideally, the system was imagined to centralize power through technology in order to eliminate powers of discretion at the lower-levels of the bureaucracy. What my fieldwork revealed, however, was a constant struggle to control the digital system: the lower-level bureaucrats found creative ways to thwart the intentions of the higher-level bureaucrats. Agency was not removed from local politics; instead it was constantly renegotiated through efforts by local politicians and local bureaucrats on the one side and higher-level administrators on the other to control the technological instruments of surveillance. The struggle over surveillance is not the "Scottian" state against citizen but contestation within a divided state. ICT did reduce corruption and created a more “Weberian” bureaucracy but only up to a point. Local actors managed to defend their power and some of their ability to extract rents in the last mile. The struggle continues, on the new digital terrain.

Rajesh Veeraraghavan is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Information, UC Berkeley, and a research fellow at the Transparency and Accountability Initiative at the Open Society Foundation. Rajesh questions the widespread belief that information technology can be used to "solve" either development or governance "problems," both by engaging in activism involving technological interventions and by using empirical methods to critically examine claims about the impact of ICT in governance. He studies how information and communication technology (ICT) is used in practice to regulate economic, social and political relationships. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

video/audio

Bruce Schneier Interviews Edward Snowden

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Bruce Schneier, Harvard Berkman Center Fellow, talks with Edward Snowden about government surveillance and the effectiveness of privacy tools like encryption to an audience at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. This conversation kicks off the annual symposium on the future of computation in science and engineering hosted by the IACS- Harvard's Institute for Applied Computational Science. video/audio on YouTube>

Other Events of Note

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