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Alexander Heffner senior at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

He is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Scoop08.com, an online national student newspaper dedicated to coverage of the 2008 presidential election. Heffner discusses how scoop08 is geared towards young adults and represents political ideas across the spectrum. Presently, Scoop08 has a network of several hundred student journalists across the country and abroad, and actively continues to recruit new editors and writers. Runtime: 01:14:23, size: 320×240, 165.4MB, .MOV, H.264 codec

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Fernando Rodrigues, Brazillian journalist and Harvard Nieman Fellow was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Rodrigues spoke about journalism and access to public information in Brazil.

Journalist Fernando Rodrigues assembled a database with some 25,000 records of Brazilian politicians showing electoral information and personal data –including the list of personal assets of each politician who run for office in the three past general elections in Brazil (1998, 2002 and 2006). In 2006, the day the website was last updated, it drew 1,000,000 viewers. It is a free access website and voters can check whether a particular politician has increased his or her patrimony in a compatible way with the declared income. The database has also been an endless source of news stories for media outlets all over Brazil.

Collecting all that information was not an easy task, since Brazil does not have a Freedom of Information Act. Mr. Rodrigues also works with the National Forum of Right of Access to Public Information, a new advocacy group in favor of a FoIA for Brazil. The Forum teaches people how to require public information from government agencies despite that there is no clear legislation about it.

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Deb Roy, director of M.I.T Media Lab’s Cognitive Machines group, and Chair of the Academic Program in Media Arts and Sciences was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Roy’s presentation discussed The Human Speechome Project, an effort to observe and computationally model the longitudinal course of language development of one child at an unprecedented scale.

The Project is “collecting audio and video recordings for the first two to three years of one child’s life, in its near entirety, as it unfolds in the child’s home. To analyze the resulting massive audio-visual corpus, we are developing new data mining technologies to help human analysts rapidly annotate and transcribe recordings using semi-automatic methods, and to detect and visualize salient patterns of behavior and interaction.”

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Michael Anti, New York Times Beijing bureau researcher and fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Anti discussed how the recent surge in blogging has changed the state-run media landscape of China and altered the centralized control the ruling party holds over free expression in the world’s most populace nation.

Michael Anti (Zhao Jing), a Nieman Follow at Harvard, is a journalism researcher with the Beijing Bureau of New York Times. He runs several political columns on Chinese top newspapers and magazines. He was a war reporter for a Chinese newspaper in Baghdad in March 2003. His well-known Chinese political blog was shutdown by Microsoft in December 2005. In the wake of this case, he turned to run a collaborative online weekly magazine on International politics. He is an international jury member of Deutsche Welle’s Best of Blogs competition in 2005, 2006 and 2007.
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This week the Berkman Center and the Research Center for Information Law, St. Gallen released the latest study on the state of interoperability: “Breaking Down Digital Barriers.” This joint report follows the Roadmap to Open ICT Ecosystems released in 2005, as it navigates the nuanced territory of consumer, corporate, and governmental interests in the benefits and roadblocks to interoperable ICT systems.

The report and accompanying case studies on DRM-protected music, Digital Identity, and Mashups are available for download on the project website. The presentation and discussion of the report and its findings, took place in Washington, DC. Runtime: 01:04:20, size: 320×240, 181.7MB, .mov, H.264 codec

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Gary Kebbel, journalism program officer at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Kebbel’s presentation, entitled “The Knight News Challenge and Digital Innovation: Challenges Posed by Intellectual Property, International Giving, and Grant Administration” discussed the foundation’s grant program. Just ending its third year, the Knight News Challenge is a $25 million contest to find digital news innovations that are used to create community in a given geographic area. At Knight Foundation, Kebbel also helped create the Knight Citizen News Network and the Knight Digital Media Center.

The contest was recently revised to meet new and evolving goals, such as making grants to individuals in foreign countries or focusing the wisdom of the crowd on weak applications so that they could be strengthened and resubmitted. Additionally, $500,000 was set aside for the ideas of people 25-years-old and younger. These changes create new problems of grant administration, intellectual property and having a minor win a monetary award.

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Eszter Hargittai, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology, and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Hargittai presented a new study using a unique data set on young adults’ Internet uses, skills and participation. She looked at differences in daily digital media uses by type of user background, access and skill level. 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.

Hargittai heads the Web Use Project at Northwestern University. 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.

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Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit.com and Tech Lead for the Open Library project, spoke at this week’s installment of the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Aaron spoke about how, thanks to new technology, the grand vision of a library containing every book in the world is now within our grasp. He discussed how 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.

Aaron 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

Berkman Fellow David Weinberger live-blogged the lunch, and you can check out his comments and summary here.

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The Berkman Luncheon Series continued yesterday with Oliver Goodenough, who, in addition to being a Berkman fellow, is a Professor of Law at Vermont Law School and an Adjunct Professor at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College.

Oliver discussed how the institution of game theory and other economic 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 included the internal psychology of values and commitment, informal cultural expectations, formal institutions like law, mechanical devices like a coke machine and computer code.

You can also read David Weinberger’s great play-by-play of the discussion and Q & A.

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.

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Drew Clark of the Center for Public Integrity joined an enthusiastic crowd at today’s Berkman Luncheon Series to discuss “Media Tracker, FCC Watch, and the Politics of Telecom, Media and Technology.”

Drew, a senior fellow and project manager at the Center, not only provided great insight into the difficult and confusing intersection of technology & politics, but also dove into specific examples such as, the FCC’s 700 MHz auction and the Connect Kentucky project.

For more information on Drew’s work, the Center for Public Integrity, and future luncheon guests, check out the Events & Webcast blog.

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This past Tuesday, 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.

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Not too long ago, a student was escorted out of the Harvard University Bookstore (The Coop) for copying ISBNs from course materials only available at that store. The Coop claimed that the student was infringing on their “intellectual property,” because they were going to be used on the Crimson Reading website, which allows students to compare prices of course materials available online.

Clinical student Angela Kang and the Berkman Center’s John Palfrey and Wendy Seltzer joined together in noting the unfounded claims of The Coop in a recent Op-Ed published by The Harvard Crimson:

We’re not sure what “intellectual property” right the Coop has in mind, but it’s none that we recognize. Nor is it one that promotes the progress of science and useful arts, as copyright is intended to do. While intellectual property may have become the fashionable threat of late, even in the wake of the Recording Industry Association of America’s mass litigation campaign the catch-phrase—and the law—has its limits.

Now Berkman TV, the new video production channel from the Berkman Center, has an episode featuring Angela and Wendy, as they elaborate on this argument and the trends in intellectual property claims. Visit MediaBerkman for this episode of Berkman TV and the many more to come!

About

Berkman.tv is a frequently produced video segment on internet-related news and hot button issues with comments from Berkman fellows, faculty, and friends. Berkman.tv will explore a broad spectrum of issues, including, but not limited to, the future of the internet, copyright, net neutrality, intellectual property, public radio, and more. Keep an eye out on this space for more informed commentary from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

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Michael Maier, former Shorenstein Fellow and founder and CEO of the German company Blogform Publishing, joined the Berkman Luncheon Series on September 25 to present on the next generation of digital media platforms in his talk: “Participation, Design, Search: How the Internet is Transforming.”

Michael’s thoughts centered on the idea that digital magazines are starting to pick up, by bringing editorial structure and integrated publishing. Search will not remain Google’s monopoly. The Internet is transforming from an experimental space to a quite mature and professional platform. The next generation (which is today’s) of innovation will introduce more sustainable models and hence change the old media much more than the shockwaves of Web 1.0.

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In the spirit of One Web Day, a celebration of global online life taking place on September 22nd, as well as Berkman’s 10th anniversary, we dedicated today’s luncheon series to a discussion on “The Future of the Net.”

In a packed house, four Berkman Faculty/Fellows talked about their visions of the Net 10 years from now. Presenters included: MIT Media Lab professor Judith Donath, CALI fellow Gene Koo, visiting assistant professor at Northeastern School of Law Wendy Seltzer, and Berkman co-founder Jonathan Zittrain.

Produced by Leah Weinberger.

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The Berkman Center kicked off this year’s Luncheon Series on Tuesday, September 11 with a stimulating presentation from world renowned physicist and professor at Harvard’s Department of the History of Science, Peter Galison.

Peter is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University, a MacArthur Fellow, and spoke on his work around the de-localized production of scientific knowledge–on the ways in which “trading zones” form at the boundary between different scientific languages and practices.

Peter summarized the kind of work he has done on contemporary, massive, spatially dispersed collaborations in physics experiments, and more recent work on the early telegraph networks that so shaped the early formulation of relativity theory.

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On June 19, danah boyd participated in the Berkman Luncheon Series to discuss her work and research in the area of social networks. She provided a great historical context to the various sites that have come and gone from the center of Internet activity, as well as some insight into what brought about their successes and failures.

Prior to her presentation she explained, “Publics offer youth a space to engage in cultural identity development. By engaging in public life, youth learn to interpret the cultural signals that surround them and incorporate these cultural elements into their life. For a diverse array of reasons, contemporary youth have limited access to the types of publics with which most adults grew up. As a substitute for these inaccessible publics, networked publics like MySpace and Facebook are emerging to provide contemporary American youth with a necessary site for peer engagement.”

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communications.

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David Weinberger, Research Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and author of the new book Everything is Miscellaneous, offers some final words at Internet & Society 2007 on June 1.

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Harvard Business School Professor and Berkman Center Faculty Fellow, Karim Lakhani leads the Working Group Report and Action Plan afternoon session at Internet & Society 2007 on June 1.

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Professor John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Digital Natives Principal Investigator, presents the conference keynote on being “Born Digital” at Internet & Society 2007 on June 1.

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Professor Mary Wong of Franklin Pierce Law Center presents a summary of day one and looks ahead at Internet & Society 2007 on June 1.

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Professor Charles Ogletree, Executive Director of The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice and Internet & Society 2007 Co-chair kicks off the conference with a special welcome from Professor Charles Nesson, Berkman Center for Internet & Society Founder and Internet & Society 2007 Co-chair on June 1.

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Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and Chairman of One Laptop per Child, presents the keynote address at this year’s Internet & Society conference, “University - Knowledge Beyond Authority” on May 31.

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This afternoon segment of the OpenNet Initiative conference allowed attendees to have an open discussion following their “breakout sessions” and was facilitated by Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey and Berkman Co-Founder Professor Jonathan Zittrain. From general thoughts on the product of the OpenNet Initiative’s study, to Q & A with the principle investigators, it served as a wonderful opportunity to discuss the past and frame the future of the project.

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This afternoon segment of the OpenNet Initiative conference allowed attendees to have an open discussion following their “breakout sessions” and was facilitated by Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey (above right) and Berkman Co-Founder Professor Jonathan Zittrain (above left). From general thoughts on the product of the OpenNet Initiative’s study, to Q & A with the principle investigators, it served as a wonderful opportunity to discuss the past and frame the future of the project.

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