“I’m a right-wing economist, so they can’t call me a communist,” he is quoted as saying.

If there’s a limitation with Prof. McAfee’s approach, it’s that he seems to be doing it in a vacuum. The article mentions Connexions in an aside, which is more than just an e-publishing tool but, like eLangdell, an entire platform for exchanging teaching materials.

More discussion of this effort on Slashdot.

In this presentation, Professor Eric Gordon (Emerson College) and Gene Koo (Berkman), together with the staff of Hub2, will describe Hub2’s progress and challenges in working this summer with the North Allston neighborhood to participate in the design of Honan Library Park, which Harvard University is redeveloping as part of its larger Allston project. Joining this presentation will be the youth interpreters who have helped less technologically adept neighbors access the Hub2 technology and who in turn have learned to build and code in Second Life as well as understand urban planning.

Find out more and RSVP

Given the reality of Internet trolling (The Trolls Among Us, by Mattathias Schwartz, Aug 3), the New York Times’ own reader comment system is hopelessly naive in its architecture. Head over to the Caucus blog, read the comment threads, and ask yourself: how many of those who claim to be an “Obama supporter” or a “Republican in Iowa” can be believed? How many, instead, intend to sow discord or harvest “lulz”?

The question mattered during a Democratic primary where Clinton and Obama supporters seemed to trade vitriol directed as much at each other as at the candidates. And because the character of candidates’ supporters continues to matter (Obama supporters are “elitist;” McCain’s, “racist”), trolls can easily spread mistrust among the electorate.

Political trolling, whether coordinated or freelance, may be the newest weapon in politics’ arsenal of dirty tricks. But the Times need not serve as a proving-ground. Take a lesson from the Robot9000 example and patch your own blogs before real harm is done.

(See also “Don’t Let Internet Trolls Get Your Goat“)

Textbooks, free and illegal, online: Use of pirated works hurting publishers

I’m sure that piracy is cutting into sales, but as is typical, the story lacks any quantitative data substantiating its overall alarmist tone.

As far as eLangdell is concerned, this passage is particularly telling:

Some instructors avoid textbooks altogether, while still making use of the Web. “I have over the last five years or so stopped the practice of assigning textbooks,” said Vincent Rocchio, an assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University in Boston. “Instead, I publish a group of essays electronically on my course website.”

Rocchio said “the outrageous cost of textbooks” makes it cheaper for him to purchase electronic publishing rights and pass the lower costs on to the students.

Nine residents of North Allston sat down with our staff, experienced the space virtually on both the big screen and their own laptops, and brainstormed how the park could play a role in community life. We asked the residents to pick a theme from among the several that emerged from the formal design process being led by Harvard and the ICON Group. Among these themes were “playful,” “educational,” and “contemplative.”

Because the park is still in the early design phases, we focused on broad strokes rather than specific design, and participants knew we were throwing out ideas, not specific recommendations. Nonetheless, the residents were actively engaged in thinking through how the space might weave into the fabric of the neighborhood, what can realistically fit in the relatively small, L-shaped parcel, and what the community really needs. Among the general ideas were a fitness circuit, ampitheatre-type group space, a covered seating area, and a naturalistic pond.

The outcome of last night’s process will be available to view in Second Life through tomorrow afternoon, when a new community group will come in and do it all again. We’ll be providing Copley-Wolff Design Group, the landscape architects for the park, with these ideas as well as more specific designs later in the summer. If you’re a local constituent of the park, please consider joining us at tomorrow’s brainstorming session:

Harvard Allston Education Portal
175 N. Harvard St
1:30-3:30pm

We’d especially like to thank, among the Hub2 staff, our interpreters — local Allston youth who have been learning more about both the virtual world of Second Life and the real world of park design — who helped residents manipulate their avatars through the virtual space. Our hosts, the Harvard Education Portal, also worked extra-hard to ensure that the computers and network stayed up and running.

In 1974, Congress amended FECA to limit the total amount that individuals can contribute to individual candidates. One of the goals behind this cap was to somewhat equalize citizens’ voices by muffling the wealthiest (and therefore “loudest”) individuals. In reality, the cap remained high enough ($1,000 in 1974, $2,300 today) that while the filthy-rich could no longer buy the vote outright, the merely wealthy still had an outsized impact on elections. In 2000, of donors who contributed $200 or more to any given political contribution, those who gave more than $999 made up only 44% of contributors but constituted over 86% of the total dollars taken in.

Then Howard Dean came along and upended this cozy arrangement. The progressive Netroots helped Dean raise over $30M from small (under $200) donations during the 2004 Democratic primaries — just $4.4M shy of what Gore raised for the entire 2000 race. Suddenly, small donors became a viable way to fund a major campaign. And even though Dean was far more successful than his peers that year at galvanizing small-donor support — they made up 60% of his individual fundraising — both major parties’ 2004 nominees relied far more on small contributions than in 2000 (See chart).

Law matters, because without caps on the amount of hard money any one person could give to a candidate, neither Dean’s nor Obama’s army of small donors could keep up with the astonishingly deep pockets of the American mega-rich. Technology matters too, of course, because it is the mature Internet — one that citizens trust with their credit cards — that makes small-donor fundraising efficient enough to pursue as a serious fundraising strategy. But it took 30 years before fundraising technology realized FECA’s goal of (somewhat) leveling the playing field across campaign donors.

Policy — even if it’s no policy at all — always tilts the playing-field in one direction or another. Capping campaign contributions dampens the voices of the very rich; conversely, removing them would reduce the relative power of the small donor. Banning cash contributions altogether would favor those with time rather than money to give. Our laws define fair play: we can’t ban campaign money because it’s a Constitutionally protected form of free speech, but we don’t want it to be too influential, either.

For any given policy landscape, there’s a set of technologies and tactics that best advances the players’ strategic goals. It would seem that the Obama campaign has struck one such optimal combination, fusing Dean’s Netroots with old-fashioned grassroots. But lest Democrats feel too smug about striking that sweet spot, they might do well to recognize the Howard Dean of the 2008 Republican field: Mike Huckabee muscled his way to third place with half of his contributions coming from small donors. Broad-based, Internet-enabled fundraising has no ideological bias, only a small nudge for those with wide grassroots appeal.

I understood her distrust. I also worried about it, so when an anti-Hillary message showed up on an Obama mailing list, I shared my Facebook story and pleaded for civility. Soon enough the author of that email sent me a nasty message, questioning my judgment and obliquely threatening my family. A few discreet inquiries later I learned this fellow had been doing the same to other members of the list.

My email adversary was revealed as an “Internet troll” – someone who gets his kicks from goading others into emotional responses. Like their counterparts in folklore, Internet trolls live under bridges across the gulfs that divide us and exploit those divisions for their own perverse pleasure.

Trolls, of course, pervade all media. Clinton’s “iron my shirt” hecklers in New Hampshire were contemptible pranksters affiliated with a Boston radio show. But as the durability of that condemnable prank demonstrates, trolls had a big effect on this year’s political discourse.

One reason for this is that the compelling nature of this primary drew many people online not just to donate money, but to engage fellow citizens in conversation. Some were new to the rough-and-tumble of online discussions. I remember how one email list member who kept forwarding rumors became distraught and finally dropped out when others admonished her about listserv etiquette. I felt terrible that this person – clearly new to email lists – fell victim to a culture gap. That same gap can lead other relative newcomers to become easy marks for trolls. Those of us who’d engaged in meaningless online debates about TV shows or hobbies have developed some resistance to their antisocial behavior. They still anger us, but we’ve learned to discount their “flamebait” as background noise inherent to the medium.

Mainstream media also played a role in feeding the trolls. News shows regularly read from blogs when their pundits need to catch a breath of hot air. Despite polling data that, until recently, showed relative harmony between Clinton and Obama supporters, reporters kept hawking the acrimony storyline until it came true. Meanwhile, media stalwarts like the New York Times were busy trying to out-blog the blogosphere, creating poorly designed discussion spaces where trolls and newbies swam in a toxic mix, surely contributing to both reporters’ and readers’ sense that the Obamaniacs and Clintonistas were all rabid wingnuts.

So I’m not surprised that my friend saw me as a troll on Facebook. That’s what’s so pernicious about trolls: they are scammers who steal not money but our civility, and like other scammers, they erode our trust in each other. We might be tempted to run at them like the Billy Goats Gruff and knock them out with righteous fury. But unlike the fairy tale, Internet trolls are only emboldened by indignation.

The heated primary that just ended presages a general election that will be contentious enough without the meddling of trolls. So let’s remove the habitats that spawn them. Websites can redesign online discussions to dampen bad behavior, just as good email programs filter spam. Journalists can deny trolls the public attention they crave. And we, as individuals, can stay cool the next time some outrageous pundit, blogger, or email correspondent tries to get our goat. We might even work to heal the divisions that necessitate the bridges where they dwell in the first place. Personally, I’m looking forward to having lunch with my friend next time I’m in town. There’s no better cure for political distrust than a good dose of empathy, humility, and good cheer.

Twentieth century mass media offered a first-pass solution to the problem of scaling democracy to a rapidly-growing American republic. Whatever its virtues, the solution that radio and television provided is incomplete. Mass media atrophied our understanding of democratic participation, offering instead a politics that mimics the one-to-many structure of broadcasting. In that conception, we citizens participate directly in government through the singular act of voting. It’s a view that draws on a powerful strand of American culture: rugged individualism. But it is not the totality of our political traditions.

If the Internet offers another way to scale democracy to an even larger and more complex society, I believe it will be by pulling on a different thread of our political heritage: community organizing. The genius of America resides in our desire and ability to form associations that, regardless of political intent, can wield political power. From this perspective, groups – not individuals – are the building-blocks of our democracy.

Relationships are the cement of organizations; as it happens, relationships are also the very stuff of the Internet. Where broadcast shows unite yet isolate us from each other, online we are wonderfully fractured yet connected directly together.

Mass media politics turned our ballot into a synecdoche of democracy and fetishized campaign war chests. Such views postulate that American political life comprises nothing more than the sum of many arms-length transactions. Yes, the Internet offers a fundraising goldmine, and perhaps even a new venue for voting. But mistaking the outcome of political power (voting, donations, etc) for power itself is like confusing footage of King’s March on Washington for the Civil Rights Movement.

Really, I think, the Internet will be most powerful as a system that multiplies the scope and reach of our relationships, dramatically enhancing our capacity to form powerful organizations. Whether sharing photos of our cats, spontaneously expressing communal art, or engaging in virtual battle, we are coming together in astonishing ways. Some of these ways are powerful, and some will surely become more so.

Here are some qualities I suspect will remain crucial to politically powerful organizations:

1. Relationships. Unlike mere transactions, human relationships have the capacity to transform us, but for that to be possible, we must find ways to deepen trust and authentic communication online. As video streaming, virtual reality, and just general user interfaces continue to evolve, I expect the barriers to establishing robust human connections across geography will continue to fall.
2. Accountability. Fundraising succeeds online because it’s easy to see and measure. We haven’t yet found a reliable way to bridge the divide between offline action and online networks, and until we do, money remains an awkward currency by which we translate commitment into action.
3. Leadership. Leadership need not rest in a single/singular person, but every organization needs some process for making strategic and tactical decisions.

Among these elements, leadership will perhaps evolve the most dramatically in the shift towards online networks. In the coming years and decades, I expect to see organizational leaders offload more and more of the routinized aspects of their work to an increasingly smart system, and to discover that more of that work is amenable to such offloading. Still, even as their leverage grows, leaders themselves will remain indispensible, offering passion, personal skills, and savvy intuition – a human remainder that cannot be squared into an automated system.

A politics built fundamentally on relationships rather than transactions can (and probably will) also depart radically from our more liberal heritage. If it does, we will go from a politics of isolated individualism to one of hyper-connectivity, a middle-school lunchroom writ large. A wired North Korea may just figure out how to turn social networking sites into the most powerful snitchnet ever.

But before this imagined fall, let us first realize the promise. Today we face challenges of such magnitude that “thinking global, acting local” no longer suffices. If I have hope for 21st century politics, it is because our capacity to extend our organizing powers have grown as well. It will be the great test of democracy whether our power to act collectively has grown commensurate to our challenges.

As a lawyer-cum-techie at Massachusetts Law Reform Institute in the mid-2000s, I became aware of computer system called Beacon used by the MA Department of Transitional Assistance (a/k/a “welfare”) to distribute various benefits such as food stamps to Massachusetts residents. Occasionally, our clients would have their benefits reduced or cut off because of errors in Beacon programming, and our advocates would fight not only to restore their aid, but to fix the system.

What was happening in Massachusetts was happening around the nation, and indeed our errors were relatively benign by comparison. In Colorado, faulty software generated hundreds of thousands of incorrect benefits calculations, and in New York the state’s benefits distribution system was so egregiously broken that our colleagues there brought suit in federal court and won sweeping changes.

These are some of the mundane but vitally important ways in which software is becoming the mechanism whereby government executes laws. It’s not hard to find other examples, from “deadbeat dad” lists to terrorist “no fly lists” to the inner workings of voting machines, tax calculators, and even Predator drones. (Professor Danielle Citron, to whom I owe much of the following analysis, has documented many more examples.) So perhaps Lawrence Lessig’s profound observation, code is law, has a corollary: law is code. That is to say, if software is increasingly the guise under which laws manifest in our daily lives, it behooves a democratic society to begin treating that software as law.

Software that executes law (“codelaw”) presents a number of challenges to a democracy. The simplest are bugs, coding errors that lead to wrong results. Bugs present relatively easy cases: like potholes, if you find them, you fix them. As with potholes, the reality may be harder – a common excuse we heard was that the state just didn’t have the money to hire someone to patch the software – but in principle everyone agreed that these problems should be fixed.

The larger democratic challenge arises when codelaw isn’t so much wrong as it is not necessarily right: while it may not contradict the law, neither is this particular implementation the only way to construe the law. In short, the software assumes a particular interpretation of an ambiguous law, and in so doing, it essentially makes law.

By using codelaw to carry out policy, government shoves analog pegs into round holes, resulting in the same loss of fidelity that occurs when music is ripped into digital formats. The 20th-century administrative state in America relies on a particular cascade of power, carefully tweaked to ensure democratic accountability: the elected legislature passes law; an administrative agency, with public input, promulgates rules to implement that legislation; and agency workers carry out the rules. The gradual replacement of agency workers with codelaw reveals the cracks in this system. Because legislatures lack time and expertise to tight-fitting law, they delegate specifics to agencies for further rulemaking. But rulemaking isn’t comprehensive either: nuanced decision-making still resides in agency workers who interpret and apply the rules. Codelaw takes discretion out of the hands of human beings.

Eliminating discretion can be good governance: people are notoriously susceptible to bias, corruption, and just plain meanness. The real problem for democracy is the gap between the round curves of human laws and the sharp edges of computer code. Agencies have traditionally promulgated rules expecting people to fill the gaps later. With codelaw, the people who fill the gaps are not trained government employees, but software developers, often with no substantive knowledge of the law nor accountability to the general public.

So what can be done to ensure that in an era of increasing automation, codelaw remains accountable to the people?

First, software should be fully open for inspection. Democracy depends on laws and rules being accessible to the people; codelaw should be no exception. But because only the best-resourced lobbyists can bug-check machine code, mere transparency is not enough. There must be meaningful participation.

Existing principles that cover traditional (legal) code offer guidance on handling codelaw. For example, most state and federal rulemaking require a period of public “notice and comment,” during which concerned citizens can offer input. A publicly accessible quality assurance cycle would create a parallel process for codelaw. So when Massachusetts prepares to release Beacon 2.0, it should enable people like my colleagues at MLRI to submit tricky food stamp scenarios to test that the software gets the right results.

In the long run, new forms of “semantic code” that’s both human-readable and machine-executable may narrow the gap between fuzzy legislation and binary software. “Legalese” as a software language may not deepen public confidence, but it would at least enable more precision for lawmakers.

Finally, we need a more nuanced understanding of the appropriate role of codelaw. Deployed properly, software can ameliorate systemic human failings such as sexism and susceptibility to scams. But conversely, we should also recognize the limits of software, and identify the aspects of governance best entrusted to thinking and feeling human beings. Codelaw may herald a terrifying dystopia where machines arbitrarily decide our fate. But it also invites us to imagine a world where software augments our greatest capacity for just, compassionate, and human governance.

Harvard Law School’s faculty unanimously last week to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available
online for free. The school’s announcement, issued today, notes that Harvard is the first law schol to make this commitment to open access. (Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences had also voted unanimously for open access in February.)

Joe asked what new innovations we might expect with the appointment of John Palfrey to Harvard’s newly created position of Associate Dean of Library and Information Resources. Here is what he had to say about this new development:

This exciting development is something in which the whole Harvard Law School community can take great pride… The acceptance of open
access ensures that our faculty’s world-class scholarship is accessible
today and into the future. I look forward to the work of implementing
this commitment.

Law schools, quite unlike almost every other academic institution in the United States, occupy an enviable position because we almost all have retained full rights and permissions to our own scholarship. For all the grumbling faculty occasionally evince about student- rather than peer-edited journals, this has also proven a tremendous advantage for schools, as there are no contracts and rights to negotiate with third-party publishers. Thus legal scholarship has the potential to leap forward by large bounds with policies like Harvard’s in place.