Launched in 2003 at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society as blogs.law.harvard.edu with “the bright promise of creating intellectual community,” blogs at Harvard have been “an increasingly important communication tool” on campus. The platform has been overhauled a couple of times to improve stability and performance, with the most recent updates happening in 2013.

The blogs.harvard.edu service continues to improve and provide a space that “harness[es] the Internet to build intellectual bridges that would facilitate the flow of information and ideas between the University’s disparate schools and centers”. This once-radical project – the first blogging platform in higher ed – has become an established tool on campus. In 2014, blogs.harvard.edu moved from being a Berkman-owned to a central University service, concomitant with the domain change. Thanks to the generous support of the Arcadia Fund, management from the Harvard Library’s Office for Scholarly Communication, and the work of the Berkman Center, this move included a leveraging of the software to support innovative publishing and communication efforts.

Read more about the project’s history below:

“More often that you might think, we get asked about how the Weblogs@Harvard project got started and why we maintain it. I thought I’d write it up briefly as a first-person account, as a way to have some place to point people to when they ask. It also seems to me to be a useful, if odd, bit of history to record about the use of social media in an academic community. There are no doubt other ways to tell the story, but this is a blogs server after all, so I’ll lean into the medium as a way to deliver this message.

The story starts in the winter of 2002. I was executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. It was cold, as it is in New England winters, and I was sitting in what will probably be my favorite all-time workspace, a gray, woodframe building on Massachusetts Avenue, in the northwest corner of the Harvard campus. An email blinked across the screen, one of very many that day. A trusted friend connected me to a man named Dave Winer. We really really needed to meet, he said. And soon.

Within a few days, Dave was on my virtual doorstep, knocking on the locked door of the woodframe building. Why was it locked? It was locked because it was winter break at Harvard, a day or two before New Year’s, if I have it right. Dave was in a hurry. He had big ideas. I sensed that I didn’t want to miss them. There he was, ready to rock, he said, and what he wanted to work on would be transformative.

The basic idea was that we should encourage Harvard’s academics to start blogging. He had a simple idea: let’s put up a blogs server (he happened to own a company that made one, as it turned out) and invite anyone in the community to start blogging.

It wasn’t long before we had appointed Dave to be a Berkman fellow. It was very shortly thereafter that we had that blog server up and running. Dave wrote about on his own blog, Scripting News, as did the Harvard house organ, the Gazette:

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/04.17/13-blogging.html

The launch was covered by the Harvard Crimson:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=513307

The community took things from there. To where, we did not know, but it was fast and furious. Dave and friends established an active blogging discussion group around the service; for about six years, this group met on most Thursdays in the Berkman Center’s space, but was otherwise independent of the Center. Lots of people dug in; we argued about whether it was a good idea or not; and the community grew out of the conversation.

As a brief technical overview: The system we used was called Manila, a platform developed by UserLand Software (which Dave owned; he let us use it for free). Our deployment was very successful: about 500 people, including faculty, students, fellows, staff, and alumni, created blogs in the first two years. In 2006, we transitioned away from Manila to the evolving WordPress MU platform. We made use of the transition to close down old and abandoned blogs. The transition was difficult and complex, but provided us with a more stable and flexible blogging platform on a more powerful server.

Today, we still offer free weblogs to any member of the Harvard community. We allow registration to anyone with an email address ending in harvard.edu, hbs.edu, or radcliffe.edu.

Our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

One of the most common questions we get about the blogs server project relates to the legal work we’ve done to manage the way the service operates, so here are a few thoughts on that front. We use a terms of service and privacy policy that were developed in consultation with the community by the Berkman Center’s Clinical Program in Cyberlaw. Prof. Phil Malone and generations of HLS clinical students have developed and maintained them, building on our informal first drafts. These terms of service and privacy policy have been copied by many others, with permission — but we strongly encourage anyone to use, rip, mix, burn them in any way that helps your own project. I can say that they’ve held up remarkably well over time, with only occasional needs for updates. The call for dispute resolution has been minimal. So, we welcome others to use our policies, but recommend that you customize them to suit your unique needs and run them by your general counsel’s office first. If you do use our policies, we request but do not insist on a link back to W@HLS.

We have always supported the use of RSS to syndicate content on our blogs server. In fact, the Berkman Center, on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College, is the copyright holder (as a light-handed “Trustee”) of the RSS specification. Through the use of RSS, content on our blogs server is syndicated all over the web, as well as being used in other sites around Harvard that support RSS, such as the Harvard course management platform, iSites. Please find some further technical notes from my friends in the technical side of our house.

Academic Implications

The context in which we most often get questions about this service is from people interested in whether it’s been a good idea or not from an academic perspective. My answer is: yes, absolutely, for us, anyway. The benefits have been many.

The most immediate was that our in-person conversations were enhanced by the discussions that had occurred online in between our f2f meetings. We’d often be in a meeting of fellows or faculty, or in a class, and someone would mention one another’s blog post, and how someone else had responded. It was a common language and a sustaining force for the conversation that helped a highly distributed community to thrive.

On an experimental front, I think this project helped us in our desire to push forward the use of social media in academic life in ways that helps to build communities around ideas. Even when people in our community moved off to other blogs platforms or universities or the Dreaded Private Sector, the links that we built with one another on this server have persisted. Students have used this server as they began their important public careers; I recall Ory Okolloh starting her first blog in a class I was teaching at Harvard Law School well before the fabulously-successful Ushahidi project got going and her many other good works around the world. I think some skeptics about blogs (you know who you are!) got more interested in them through the early instantiation of this project and became champions of this and other important online media. The start of podcasting can be traced in part to the syndication of audio recordings that Chris Lydon, Dave Winer, and Bob Doyle (the wikipedia entry has more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_podcasting ). To this day, students, faculty, fellows, staff and alumni of Harvard cut their teeth on this blogs platform. A few of us have used it continuously since its launch.

Has W@HLS transformed the academy? Of course not. But eight years after its launch, it’s still a worthy experiment. Few such experiments are. This community and this technology are still changing and growing in important ways. I’m grateful to all those who helped get it started; have maintained it (Hal Roberts, Sebastian Diaz, and their teams leap to mind); and gotten into social media in the academic world by using it.”

John Palfrey
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
May, 2011