Berkman Center Events & Webcasts

Berkman Center Luncheon Series

Tuesday, October 30, 12:30 PM
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett St., 2nd Floor, Cambridge MA

Guest: Eszter Hargittai of Northwestern University
Topic: “ Digital Na(t)ives? Skill and Internet Use”

Based on a unique data set on young adults’ Internet uses, skills and participation, this talk will look at differences in daily digital media uses by type of user background. While all young adults in the sample regularly use the Internet, there are systematic variations in their familiarity with the Web and who does what online. In addition to exploring the relationship of socioeconomic factors and Internet usage, the talk also considers the important mediating role of skill in what people do online.

About Eszter

Eszter Hargittai is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology, and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University where she heads the Web Use Project. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University where she was a Wilson Scholar. She spent the 2006-07 academic year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Her research focuses on the social and policy implications of information technologies with a particular interest in how IT may contribute to or alleviate social inequalities. Her research projects have looked at differences in people’s Web-use skills, the evolution of search engines and the organization and presentation of online content, political uses of information technologies, and how IT are influencing the types of cultural products people consume. Her current work is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

Webcast

This event will be webcast live. Webcast viewers can join the discussion through IRC text chat or in the virtual world Second Life. If you miss the live chat, catch the podcast audio & video at MediaBerkman.

RSVP is required, as space is limited. To RSVP, please send an email to rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu by October 29 at 12:00PM.

Berkman Center Luncheon Series

Tuesday, October 23, 12:30 PM
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett St., 2nd Floor, Cambridge MA

Guest: Aaron Swartz
Topic: Open Library

Thanks to new technology, the grand vision of a library containing every book in the world is now within our grasp. The Open Library Project, a loose collection of technologists, publishers, librarians, and book-lovers, has taken up this challenge by trying to create a website collecting everything we know about books — including library records, publishers’ blurbs, full-text and scans, reviews, and more. Learn about the vision, the technology, the progress, and how you can join us.

About Aaron

Aaron Swartz is the Tech Lead for Open Library. He was previously a co-founder of Reddit.com, which was purchased by Condé Nast in late 2006. He was worked on Internet specifications for RSS and RDF and was one of the early team members of the Creative Commons project. He is the author of a number of free software packages and a co-founder of Jottit.com.

+ Open Library demo

+ Open Library vision

+ Aaron Swartz’s website

Webcast

This event will be webcast live. Webcast viewers can join the discussion through IRC text chat or in the virtual world Second Life. If you miss the live chat, catch the podcast audio & video at MediaBerkman.

RSVP is required, as space is limited. To RSVP, please send an email to rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu by October 22 at 12:00PM.

Mix and Mash: A Discussion and Screening of (Illegal) Remixes with Yochai Benkler

Tuesday, Oct 16, 7:30 PM
Langdell North Classroom
Harvard Law School

Join us for an evening of screening remix videos, playing music, and discussion with Professor Yochai Benkler, author of the Wealth of Networks. We’ll look at some recent developments in remix culture, discuss the (il)legality of remixing, and examine the consequences for culture at large.

Dinner will be served.

Map: http://map.harvard.edu/level3.cfm?mapname=camb_allston&tile=F6&quadrant=C&series=M

Sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Harvard Free Culture

(Image CC via Joi Ito)

Berkman Center Luncheon Series

Tuesday, October 16, 12:30 PM
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett St., 2nd Floor, Cambridge MA

Guest: Berkman Fellow Oliver Goodenough
Topic: “Modeling Cooperation for First and Second Lives: Suggesting a General Case”

The design of effective institutions of cooperation is a difficult task, whether in the analog or digital worlds. Many of the important opportunities in human economic life for plus-sum, mutually-enhanced outcomes come in defection-prone packages Classical economic modeling is not much help. Focusing principally on output, it often presumes the availability of property and contract and gives insufficient attention to the structural requirements of cooperative interaction.

A combination of game theory and institutional economics helps to redress the balance. We can suggest a fairly general description of cooperative structures as those where the dominant solution is such that the potential cooperators will be willing to choose to enter into the game. Thus institutions can be seen as part of a restructuring process of mechanism design, changing the dominant solutions in potentially fruitful interactions from those with poor cooperative outcomes to those that will make taking part “individually rational.”

Oliver will discuss how these institutions can take a broad range of forms, such as conventions of property, promise keeping, truth-telling, and submission to authority, and how they can exist in a similarly broad range of milieu. Examples include the internal psychology of values and commitment, informal cultural expectations, formal institutions like law, mechanical devices like a coke machine and computer code.

About Oliver

Oliver R. Goodenough is currently a fellow at The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, a Professor of Law at the Vermont Law School and an Adjuct Professor at Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. He has also held appointments as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Neurology at Charité Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge and a Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He is a Research Fellow of the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, and heads its Planning and Programming Committee.

Webcast

The event was webcast live, but if you missed it, as always, you can catch the podcast of this and countless other Berkman events on MediaBerkman. Please visit the Luncheon Series page to learn about future guests and be sure to RSVP to save your spot at these wonderful weekly gatherings.

*RSVP is required, as space is limited. To RSVP, please send an email to rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu by October 15 at 12:00PM.*

Berkman Center Luncheon Series 

Tuesday, October 9, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett Street, Second Floor, Cambridge, MA

Guest: Drew Clark of the Center for Public Integrity
Topic: Media Tracker, FCC Watch, and the Politics of Telecom, Media and Technology

The Media Tracker is a FREE database that tells Internet users who owns the media and communications networks where they live. By typing in ZIP code 02138 for Cambridge, for example, the user sees detailed information about the 29 television stations, the 53 radio stations, and the one cable company that reach some part of that ZIP code, as well as the 43 newspapers published within 100 miles. Clicking on any of the companies, e.g. CBS, then provides a narrative profile, shareholder information and a chart of the 36 TV and 104 radio stations held by the company – as well as the $2 million in political contributions and $5 million in lobbying expenditures by CBS. The Federal Communications Commission also says there are 13 broadband providers serving the ZIP code.

The Media Tracker is the heart of the “Well Connected” telecom and media project at the Center for Public Integrity. Combining data from publicly available sources in a new and unique way, The Media Tracker maps out ownership at the ZIP code level. Ownership is linked to lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions by company. The level of contribution by a telecom, media or technology company to any federal candidate can be viewed – documenting who has received what from whom. The project’s new FCC Watch database takes this oversight one step further, recording every lobbying encounter before the FCC. The most significant battle this year has been over the 700 Megahertz spectrum, a valuable swath of radio frequencies that has been the subject of extensive lobbying by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, by Google, by spectrum incumbents and by the Bell companies.

Drew Clark, senior fellow and project manager at the Center for Public Integrity, will discuss how the project tracks the politics of telecom, media and technology. He is also available to discuss the project’s broadband lawsuit, its free data policy license, and its telecom policy wiki on Congresspedia.

Berkman Center Luncheon Series

Tuesday, October 2, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett Street, Second Floor, Cambridge, MA

Guest: James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center
Topic: The GPLv3

Yesterday, the Berkman Luncheon Series continued with a presentation and discussion by James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center.

James is Counsel for the center, which seeks to “provide legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance free software.” In addition to his vast experience in a range of new media related cases, James has also contributed code and documentation to numerous FOSS software projects.

The event was webcast live, but if you missed it, as always, you can catch the podcast of this and countless other Berkman events on MediaBerkman. Please visit the Luncheon Series page to learn about future guests and be sure to RSVP to save your spot at these wonderful weekly gatherings.