Berkman In A Nutshell

So, I’m doing a talk today over at HBS, talking about how cool where I work (the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School) is. Instead of making up a slide deck, I thought I’d just use a web browser to walk people through the coolest stuff we do. And since my blog is the easiest way to publish HTML right now, hey… welcome blog readers to my pseudo-slide deck for my talk :)

• Global Voices– aggregating and editing bloggers from the third world and working with first-world media (mainstream, non-mainstream, whatever) to get those bloggers heard here. Led by the very awesome Rebecca Mackinnon (ex-CNN Tokyo, fluent in Mandarin) and the very awesome Ethan Zuckerman (founder GeekCorps and Tripod, back when Tripod was cool.)
• OpenNet Initiative– fighting the bad guys by studying and exposing internet censorship all over the planet.
• Digital Media Project– The most obvious confluence of law and the internet, to most people, remains the clashes over music and video, and we’re right there, studying it and doing it. The project is led by Prof. Terry Fisher, whose Promises To Keep is incredibly thought-provoking writing on the subject.
• StopBadware– where I spend a lot of my day these days. On the surface, the goal is almost a Consumer Reports-style cataloging of badware, with a very pro-consumer slant. More deeply, it is a pre-emptive attempt to figure out how the internet can govern itself without depending on traditional monopolies- either traditional kinds or newer ones.
• Center For Citizen Media– we believe strongly in the collaborative energy that the internet has enabled, and the Center for Citizen Media is how we’re getting involved in the ground-up news and media movement.
• H2O– H*cough* 2.0, our educational technology experimentation project.

Looking forward, we’re doing really interesting stuff with wikis, hosting Wikimania; we’re getting involved in research into virtual worlds; we’re continuing to help Harvard by hosting a Harvard-wide blog server. We have a slew of fellows working on their own projects, like David Isen’s Freedom To Connect on network neutrality and David Weinberger’s writing. And of course we teach, both through our professors and through our clinical program.

So, that’s where I work. Anyone want to come join us? :)