What They DO Teach You at Berkman Cyber Law Harvard University is Free

Government as impresario: Emergent public goods and public private partnerships 2.0

Tuesday, January 14, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

Though we’re used to thinking that public goods must be produced by governments, there’s a fundamental and growing class of public goods that emerge from private interaction. A market itself is such an emergent public good, celebrated as ‘order without design’ by Adam Smith. So too is language. Today emergent public goods, like Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia, burgeon on the internet ushering in a new age. But there must exist a panoply of public goods which could be brought into existence by the right kind of partnership between private and public endeavor. This talk will explore that terrain providing compelling examples whilst expounding the principles on which such partnerships should be based.

Nicholas Gruen is a widely published policy economist, entrepreneur and commentator who has been a regular columnist in the Courier Mail, the Australian Financial Review, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. He has advised Cabinet Ministers, sat on Australia’s Productivity Commission and founded Lateral Economics and Peach Financial. He chairs the Australian Federal Government’s Innovation Australia Board, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and the Partnership for Digital Services for Ecologically Sustainable Development and is Patron of the Australian Digital Alliance, which brings together Australia’s libraries, universities, and major providers of digital infrastructure such as Google and Yahoo. He is a member of the Council of the National Library of Australia. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Internet Skills as a Culprit in Wikipedia Contributions’ Gender Inequality

Tuesday, January 21, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

Eszter and Aaron will present at the Berkman Center luncheon series on “Internet Skills as a Culprit in Wikipedia Contributions’ Gender Inequality”. More information to be posted soon.

Eszter Hargittai is Delaney Family Professor in the Communication Studies Department and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University where she heads the Web Use Project. Aaron Shaw is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. His research focuses on political and economic dimensions of collective action online. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Internet Skills as a Culprit in Wikipedia Contributions’ Gender Inequality

Tuesday, January 28, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

Robots will use surveillance for locomotion, communication, and for marketing. As robots are adopted for personal use, private third-party surveillance will expand to new locations and scenarios. This project explores how the pending increase in robotic surveillance poses new questions for U.S. privacy law, particularly the application of privacy torts. Some robotic surveillance will be necessary, some will be superfluous, and some will be deliberately intrusive. Some will be automatic, while some will depend on a robot’s deliberate decisions. Is it possible–or desirable–to craft meaningful laws or guidelines before widespread private adoption of robots?

Margot E. Kaminski is a Research Scholar in Law, Executive Director of the Information Society Project, and Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. She is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School and a former fellow of the Information Society Project. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Jerome Hergueux on Cooperation in a Peer Production Economy: Experimental Evidence from Wikipedia

From Wikipedia to Open Source Software, Peer Production –- a large-scale collaborative model of production primarily based on voluntary contributions –- is emerging as an economically significant production model alongside firms, markets and governments. Yet, its impressive success remains difficult to explain through the assumptions of standard economic theory. In this talk, Jerome Hergueux — Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Sciences Po (Department of Economics) and the University of Strasbourg (Institute of Political Studies) and Berkman Fellow — reflects on the prosocial foundations of cooperation in this new Peer Production economy, taking Wikipedia as one paradigmatic example, and asks: how can we start to build a workable theory of individuals’ motivations to freely contribute time and efforts for the provision of global public goods?video/audio on our website>