John Palfrey

For the reax and take-aways from today’s Mobile Identity workshop, see Berk-people Urs Gasser, Doc Searls, Dave Winer, among others. And if you’re in downtown San Francisco this evening (Friday, 1/26/07), swing by the Hotel Vitale for the Berkman West reception!

With a year and a half to go in the ‘08 cycle, the idea of presidential candidates using the Internet is big news today, apparently. Eugene Robinson has a clever column today in the Washington Post, in which he compares the web sites of Clinton, Edwards, and Obama. I think he got it mostly right; his column is definitely worth the read. Over the course of the campaign, it will be interesting to see if these same attributes continue to define the web sites, or if strategies shift over time. A second question is whether these differences reflect substantive or tactical differences in the candidates or the campaigns at large. And, most important, whether these differences have any impact on who becomes president.

Later this week, the Berkman Center heads west to San Francisco.  We’re hosting an unconference on Mobile Identity, led by fellows Doc Searls, John Clippinger, Mary Rundle, Urs Gasser and others.  It’s free and open, but you should sign up if you’d like to come, as space is limited.  CNet is kindly hosting us.  We’re also planning an informal reception for Berkman Center alums and friends; let one of us know if you’ll be in San Francisco on Friday night and we’ll ping you an invite.

Apply to come work with us this summer as an intern in at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA.  Applications are due on Feb. 15; the process is here.  College and graduate (including law, business, etc.) students interested in law, technology, politics, communications, new media, and so forth are encouraged to apply.  The work is meaningful and the experience is fun.  We’d love to hear from you.

Today, the Berkman Center joins Urs Gasser and all our friends from the University of St. Gallen in hosting a workshop on interoperability and innovation, in Weissbad, Switzerland. We are in the company of an interesting, eclectic group of technologists, academics, and NGOs leaders. The briefing papers are online.

This workshop is one in a series of such small-group conversations intended both to foster discussion and to inform our own work in this area of interoperability and its relationship to innovation in the field that we study. This is among the hardest, most complex topics that I’ve ever taken up in a serious way.

As with many of the other interesting topics in our field, interop makes clear the difficulty of truly understanding what is going on without having 1) skill in a variety of disciplines, or, absent a super-person who has all these skills in one mind, an interdisciplinary group of people who can bring these skills to bear together; 2) knowledge of multiple factual settings; and 3) perspectives from different places and cultures. While we’ve committed to a transatlantic dialogue on this topic, we realize that even in so doing we are still ignoring the vast majority of the world, where people no doubt also have something to say about interop. This need for breadth and depth is at once fascinating and painful.

In addition to calling for an interdisciplinary and international group of researchers or research inputs, there is no way to talk about interop in a purely abstract way: interop makes sense conceptually online in the context of a set of facts. We’ve decided, for starters, to focus on digital media (DRM interop in the music space in particular); digital identity; and a third primary case (which may be e-Communications, web services, and office applications). One of our goals in this research is to integrate our previous work on digital media, digital ID, and web 2.0 and so forth into this cross-cutting topic of interop.

Another thing is quite clear, as stated most plainly and eloquently by Prof. Francois Leveque of the Ecole des Mines: we need to acknowledge what we do not know, and we really do not know — empirically — to what extent interop has an impact on innovation. A major thrust of our work is to try to establish models of analysis that might help, in varying factual circumstances, in the absence of empirical data as to the costs and benefits of a certain regulatory decision.

This research effort is supported primarily by a gift from Microsoft (as always in our work with corporate sponsors, this gift is unrestricted and mixed with other such unrestricted funds, as well as our core funding from various sources, to mitigate the risk that we are influenced in our work by virtue of sponsorship). We have been blessed by our partners in industry, including many at Microsoft from the Legal and Corporate Affairs group, led by Annemarie Levins on this project, by their willingness to share with us an in-depth view of their work across a range of areas on interop. We’ve also been supported by the input from technologists at IBM and Intel in this event, and many other firms, through our interviewing process. We’d love to hear from other industry, and non-industry, players with an interest in this field.

This press release is actually big news. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Vodafone have been working very hard — alongside academics and NGOs — to produce a set of common principles guiding company behavior when faced with laws, regulations and policies that interfere with the achievement of human rights. There is an enormous amount of work to be done, but the process is headed in exactly the right direction, with leadership from BSR (Dunstan Hope & Aron Cramer), CDT (Leslie Harris), and many other good people. The companies should be applauded for taking this big, public step forward, as should the NGOs, academics, shareholders groups, and others who are committed to working shoulder-to-shoulder with them to get it right. Michael Samway of Yahoo! has a fine blog post on the topic here. Rebecca MacKinoon, always all over this issue, weighs in, too.

I am firmly of the view that this problem — of multinational corporations being required, as a matter of law or otherwise, to carry out censorship and surveillance at the behest of states — would best be solved by concerted action of the sort announced today, rather than through legislation as a first pass. One example of such proposed legislation is the Global Online Freedom Act of 2006 (as described here by RMack), which has recently been reintroduced by Rep. Smith. GOFA has noble ends, but is not the best means. The proposed bill would make it nearly impossible for US technology firms to compete in markets like China. If an industry code of conduct were to emerge that has real bite to it, and where NGOs and investors and academics are on hand to ensure that signatory companies live up to it, the results could be far better. And over time, it might well make sense to redact the global industry agreement into law or a treaty to ensure that it is enforceable, evolves over time, and has true public oversight.

For our part, we at the Berkman Center have been proud to have worked with our colleagues on the OpenNet Initiative, as well as the University of California-Berkeley (Xiao Qiang, Deirdre Mulligan, Roxanna Altholz), the University of St. Gallen (Urs Gasser), and the Oxford Internet Institute (JZ!), among others, as participants in earlier iterations of this process, which we called the OpenNet Consensus. Friendly funders from the Open Society Institute (Vera Franz) and the MacArthur Foundation (John Bracken) have stepped up, early on, to support various NGO/academic players in this subject matter area, such as the ONI and the ONC.

The initial participants in this now-public next phase of the process include:

# Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
# Boston Common Asset Management
# Business for Social Responsibility (Facilitator)
# Calvert Group
# Center for Democracy and Technology (Facilitator)
# Committee to Protect Journalists
# Domini Social Investments LLC
# Electronic Frontier Foundation
# Enterprise Privacy Group
# F&C Asset Management
# Google, Inc.
# Human Rights First
# Human Rights in China
# Human Rights Watch
# International Business Leaders Forum
# International Council on Human Rights Policy
# Microsoft
# Reporters Without Borders
# Trillium Asset Management
# United Nations Special Representative to the Secretary-General on business & human rights (Observer status)
# University of California, Berkeley School of Law-Boalt Hall
# Vodafone
# Yahoo! Inc.

Lee Rainie and John Horrigan have released the latest in their series of insightful reports about the impact of Internet use on politics. This report (covered by Frank Davies of the Merc) examines political activity and information access online during the 2006 campaign cycle. Good news for those focusing on digital natives and their use of the Internet for politics: young people, especially those with broadband, seem more likely to go online for political information and to get involved. (Congrats and thanks, Lee and John!)

The Sunlight Foundation has kindly chosen the Berkman Center at HLS as the venue for an all-day session today, “Political Information in an Internet Era.” We’re grateful to a dedicated group of civic activists who join us today on their holiday.

The frame for the event, as Zephyr Teachout and her team put it, is this: “All of us, in different ways, are trying to use the internet to improve citizen’s access to, and use of, important political information. Since so much political information is tied to local politics and local media, we are focused on the people working at the state level to educate and engage citizens in public affairs – using everything from new tools to new techniques to new voices on simple blogs.

“Our goal is to help those who are on the ground, using the web to improve political information on the local level. We also hope to foster connections that last beyond this meeting.”

Ellen Miller, Micah Sifry and Mike Klein came to Berkman last year at the time of the kick-off of the Sunlight Foundation. We were blown away then and we are blown away now by what they are up to. They’ve been congratulated many times on the extraordinary and fast progress they’ve made over the past several months, but it’s worth echoing here again.

One of the primary questions that the Sunlight Foundation’s work raises, and the subject of this meeting, is one that is core also to the work of the Berkman Center. Are people using Internet in a way that improves politics? Put another way, are people using Internet in a manner that strengthens democracies? The answer lies in the distributed group of people, some right here in this room today, and in other rooms like it around the world. The answer is that it’s “you.” Time Magazine got it right.

But there’s a ton of work still to be done.  For those on the contemplative end of the scale, there are also a lot of puzzles to be worked out. Three things on my mind by way of issues that one might consider in the context of this big topic:

- At the pre-meeting dinner last night, it was plain that the prevailing views on politics in America among people in the room ran a pretty short gamut, from skepticism and cynicism. As one shines more light on more injustices — on more corruption, to use a word in Z’s agenda — is there a way to calibrate the impact of this sunlight? Is there a realistic fear that more sunlight may lead not to more civic engagement, but rather lead to pushing more people from skepticism to cynicism? The answer, of course, is not less sunlight. But the question seems to me a genuine puzzle.

- The Sunlight Foundation’s project, and the projects of many of the participants in the room today, are focused on the United States. No doubt the United States, and our disparate local and state parts, need the help and the focus. All the same: how do we act locally when we know the issues we are tackling and the network we are using are global? How do we inform ourselves, share our work, learn from others, connect to others — in such a way that we are truly acting within a global framework?

- One of the cool things — perhaps even approaching a “truth” — about Internet & politics is the extent to which it’s both essentially about the individual (in Benkler’s terms, “autonomy”, for those who have read the extraordinary Wealth of Networks) and about collective action. There’s a beauty to that tension, and also a challenge, to each of us, whether as individuals and as members of a collective. What is our greatest point of leverage, as individuals — limited in our political activism only by our own imagination and the 24 hours in a day? Again, I think so many people running so many extraordinary projects related to Internet & politics are answering that question by how you spend each and every day — and the rest of us can learn a thing or two from that.

Five talented students in my Freshman Seminar at Harvard College have created a survey on digital media usage. They could use your help if you are currently an undergrad at a US college. Here’s the announcement, in their words:

“Do you condone stealing?

“Internet piracy is a prevalent issue on college campuses from coast to coast. Many times we, the students, are unaware or even uninformed about what is illegal and what is not. The purpose of the project is (1) to investigate the level of piracy in American college campuses and (2) to see if students understand what actions constitute copyright infringement.

“If you are currently an undergraduate college student studying in an American university and have 5 minutes of free time, please visit [this site] to take the 100% anonymous survey. We are five Harvard undergrad students seeking to understand the computer habits of our generation. Please help us out!

“Spread the word. Thanks. =)

“Andrei, Chen, Elizabeth, Eric, & Lauren
The PiracyEdu Team”

Note also that Chen has posted a real, redacted cease and desist letter on the site’s blog.  And they are working on an “online course” as well.