MediaBerkman

Felipe Heusser — Founder and Director of Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, a Latin American NGO based in Chile that uses information technology to promote transparency and active citizen participation, and a Berkman Fellow — gives an overview the spread of transparency policy through freedom of information regulation, and point out to the rise of ‘Open Government Data’ as the latest chapter of the transparency story, highlighting how it potentially may impact ‘open accountability’ and the rise of a new breed of online watchdogs.

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Felipe Heusser — Founder and Director of Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, a Latin American NGO based in Chile that uses information technology to promote transparency and active citizen participation, and a Berkman Fellow — gives an overview the spread of transparency policy through freedom of information regulation, and point out to the rise of ‘Open Government Data’ as the latest chapter of the transparency story, highlighting how it potentially may impact ‘open accountability’ and the rise of a new breed of online watchdogs.

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We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it’s becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Skulls don’t scale. But the Net does. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge’s new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power.

David Weinberger — senior researcher at the Berkman Center and co-director of the Harvard Law School Library Lab — talks about some important take aways from his new book “Too Big to Know.”

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We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it’s becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Skulls don’t scale. But the Net does. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge’s new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power.

David Weinberger — senior researcher at the Berkman Center and co-director of the Harvard Law School Library Lab — talks about some important take aways from his new book “Too Big to Know.”

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Many commentators have debated whether the Internet is ultimately a force for freedom of expression and political liberation, or for alienation, and repression. Rebecca MacKinnon — Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, cofounder of Global Voices, and a former CNN Bureau Chief for Beijing and Tokyo — discusses her new book, Consent of the Network, and warns that a convergence of unchecked government actions and unaccountable company practices is threatening the future of democracy and human rights around the world.

Mackinnon is joined by Ethan Zuckerman, Micah Sifry, and Andrew Lewman.

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Many commentators have debated whether the Internet is ultimately a force for freedom of expression and political liberation, or for alienation, and repression. Rebecca MacKinnon — Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, cofounder of Global Voices, and a former CNN Bureau Chief for Beijing and Tokyo — discusses her new book, Consent of the Network, and warns that a convergence of unchecked government actions and unaccountable company practices is threatening the future of democracy and human rights around the world.

Mackinnon is joined by Ethan Zuckerman, Micah Sifry, and Andrew Lewman.

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The Scratch Online Community allows young people to share and remix their own video games and animations, as well as those of their peers. In four years, the community has grown to close to a million registered members and more than two million user-contributed projects. Andrés Monroy-Hernández — the developer of Scratch, a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, and Berkman Fellow — presents a framework for the design and study of an online community of amateur creators, focusing on remixing as a lens to understand the social, cultural, and technical structures of a social computing system that supports creative expression.

Also in ogg for download

More info on this event here

The Scratch Online Community allows young people to share and remix their own video games and animations, as well as those of their peers. In four years, the community has grown to close to a million registered members and more than two million user-contributed projects. Andrés Monroy-Hernández — the developer of Scratch, a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, and Berkman Fellow — presents a framework for the design and study of an online community of amateur creators, focusing on remixing as a lens to understand the social, cultural, and technical structures of a social computing system that supports creative expression.

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How and why do nonexperts contribute to innovation? The conflict between expertise and innovation sits uneasily in academia, where the enterprise hinges on doling out official credentials. But a lack of expertise can in fact drive people to create the kind of disruptive technologies that really are game-changers. In this presentation Beth Kolko — Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington — connects the hacking and making/DIY communities at the point of disruptive technologies, demonstrating how the lack of institutional affiliation and formal credentials within each community opens up the space for creative problem-solving approaches.

Also in ogg for download

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How and why do nonexperts contribute to innovation? The conflict between expertise and innovation sits uneasily in academia, where the enterprise hinges on doling out official credentials. But a lack of expertise can in fact drive people to create the kind of disruptive technologies that really are game-changers. In this presentation Beth Kolko — Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington — connects the hacking and making/DIY communities at the point of disruptive technologies, demonstrating how the lack of institutional affiliation and formal credentials within each community opens up the space for creative problem-solving approaches.

Download the MP3

…or download the OGG audio format!

More info on this event here