Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

In 2013, Elon Musk proposed an "open source transportation concept" of levitating vehicles zooming passengers through vacuum tubes at 760 miles an hour. It would be weatherproof, energy-efficient, relatively inexpensive, have autonomous controls.Its impact on urban and inter-city transport could reshape economies and families. Since Musk's proposal, a company in Los Angeles, Hyperloop One, has secured 160 million in financing, hired 220 employees, and began engineering and testing to make the hyperloop concept a reality. But engineers aren't the company's only inventors. A hyperloop transport system is so different from an airplane, train, or bus that a new legal regime is necessary. Lawyers and government officials in the US, Dubai, and elsewhere have been working on creating a new framework that could govern the deployment of hyperloop systems. Hyperloop One General Counsel Marvin Ammori will discuss the challenges and opportunities for crafting this new legal framework. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/02/Ammori

The question is whether we can observe the emergence of a new constitutional right of the Internet, a right that does not only protect individuals in their communication online but a right protecting also the Internet as an institution. What would be the forum where such a process of constitutionalization is taking place? Can fundamental rights also emerge bottom-up, from civil society rather than from a formally legitimized constitution maker? For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/02/Graber

Eric Osiakwan is an Entrepreneur and Investor with 15 years of ICT industry leadership across Africa and the world. He has worked in 32 African countries setting up ISPs, ISPAs, IXPs and high-tech startups. Some of these companies and organizations are Angel Africa, Angel Fair Africa , Ghana Cyber City, PenPlusBytes, African Elections Portal, FOSSFA, WABco, GISPA, AfrISPA, GNVC, Internet Research, InHand, Ghana Connect. He serves on the board of Farmerline, Forhey, Teranga Solutions, Siqueries, Amp.it, SameLogic, eCampus, Bisa App and Wanjo Foods, - some of which are his investments. He was part of the team that built the TEAMS submarine cable in East Africa and an ICT Consultant for the WorldBank, Soros Foundations, UNDP, USAID, USDoJ, USDoS as well as African governments and private firms. He authored "The KINGS of Africa Digital Economy", co-authored the “Open Access Model”, “Negotiating the Net” – the politics of Internet Diffusion in Africa and “The Internet in Ghana” with the Mosaic Group. He was invited to contribute ideas to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa. Eric is a Poptech, TED, Stanford, and MIT Fellow. He was previously a Berkman Klein Fellow at Harvard University. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2017/02/Osiakwan

With digitization and simultaneous democratization of the global information landscape, plus declining trust in media and health institutions, misinformation is pervasive. Audiences are forming homophilic social networks, reinforcing opportunities for selecting information that conforms to pre-existing beliefs, a phenomenon known as the creation of echo chambers. Echo chambers are not only problematic when misinformation reinforces certain beliefs, but they also make it difficult to disseminate evidence-based information broadly. In order to understand how public health echo chambers manifest themselves online, we used the Media Cloud suite of tools, an open access global archive of 5+ billion sentences from a set of 25,000 online information sources to conduct three mass media case studies on Ebola, Zika, and Vaccination. Our findings show that public health information networks are largely unsuccessful in driving an evidence-based information network narrative around any of our case study topics. Based on these results, we invite participants to take part in a round table discussion, assessing the role that the online media ecosystem plays in creating, spreading, and reinforcing health information and misinformation. We hope to analyze together how communication theory and network science can support innovation and new online communication strategies for public health. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/digitalhealth/2017/02/GyenesSeymour

Those responsible for technical design of the Internet are essential among the policy-makers for this large-scale sociotechnical infrastructure. Based on analysis of the RFCs (1969-1999), this talk looks at how these policy-makers thought and think about policy issues while addressing technical problems. Findings include basic design criteria that serve as constitutional principles; interactions between human and non-human users; tensions between geo- and network-political citizenship; early internationalization; and what Internet designers can teach us about decision-making under conditions of instability in everything from the design subject on. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/02/Braman

More than any other recent event, the Year 2000 problem (better known as the Y2K bug) established the public awareness of the temporal and calendrical contingencies of computer systems. This talk revisits the Y2K bug to see what lessons can be drawn from this (non) event. Using archival research conducted at the Charles Babbage Institute, this talk undertakes an analysis of the Year 2000 Problem and the large-scale practices of technological repair and management that addressed it. By recovering the organized response to the perceived threat of the Y2K bug, this project treats the crisis as one of the greatest, public-facing attempts to educate and train individuals and organizations to manage the unforeseen and potentially devastating effects old code can have on contemporary computerized infrastructures. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/03/Mulvin

The world is facing five global challenges: democratic, environmental, technological, economical, and geopolitical. Challenges that will require both enormous amount of knowledge and citizens capable of using such knowledge in scenarios that today are hard to predict. The University is clearly the main institution that could help society on both counts. However, if University truly wants to maximize its social utility, it needs--as argued by De Martin in his book 'Università Futura' (Codice Edizioni, Italy, 2017)--to critically question the last 30 years of its development and re-discover its roots, updating them for the 21st century. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/02/DeMartin

As the Internet grows more sophisticated, it is creating new threats to democracy. Social media companies such as Facebook can sort us ever more efficiently into groups of the like-minded, creating echo chambers that amplify our views. It's no accident that on some occasions, people of different political views cannot even understand each other. It's also no surprise that terrorist groups have been able to exploit social media to deadly effect. Welcome to the age of #Republic. In this revealing book, Cass Sunstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Nudge and The World According to Star Wars, shows how today's Internet is driving political fragmentation, polarization, and even extremism—and what can be done about it. Thoroughly rethinking the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet, Sunstein describes how the online world creates "cybercascades," exploits "confirmation bias," and assists "polarization entrepreneurs." And he explains why online fragmentation endangers the shared conversations, experiences, and understandings that are the lifeblood of democracy. In response, Sunstein proposes practical and legal changes to make the Internet friendlier to democratic deliberation. These changes would get us out of our information cocoons by increasing the frequency of unchosen, unplanned encounters and exposing us to people, places, things, and ideas that we would never have picked for our Twitter feed. #Republic need not be an ironic term. As Sunstein shows, it can be a rallying cry for the kind of democracy that citizens of diverse societies most need. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2017/03/Sunstein

As the internet connects makers, manufacturers and shippers across supply chains, a new form of producing and distributing global objects is arising, one that relies more on bottom up networks than top down oversight. When you look carefully, you see the signs of them: in the US, they might be t-shirts with hashtags on them, pussyhats at marches, and creative protest signs, and in Shenzhen, China, we see a plethora of hardware objects, such as selfie sticks, hoverboards and e-cigarettes, that rapidly reach global markets. What sorts of objects do new forms of hardware culture enable, and what role does the internet now play in all steps along the way, from ideation to sales to manufacturing to shipping? How might we now incorporate physical objects into our notions of internet memes? And what does this suggest about the future of object culture more generally? For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/03/Mina

Shoppers with Internet access and a bargain-hunting impulse can find a universe of products at their fingertips. In this thought-provoking exposé, Maurice Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi invite us to take a harder look at today’s app-assisted paradise of digital shopping. While consumers reap many benefits from online purchasing, the sophisticated algorithms and data-crunching that make browsing so convenient are also changing the nature of market competition, and not always for the better. Computers colluding is one danger. Although long-standing laws prevent companies from fixing prices, data-driven algorithms can now quickly monitor competitors’ prices and adjust their own prices accordingly. So what is seemingly beneficial—increased price transparency—ironically can end up harming consumers. A second danger is behavioral discrimination. Here, companies track and profile consumers to get them to buy goods at the highest price they are willing to pay. The rise of super-platforms and their “frenemy” relationship with independent app developers raises a third danger. By controlling key platforms (such as the operating system of smartphones), data-driven monopolies dictate the flow of personal data and determine who gets to exploit potential buyers. Virtual Competition raises timely questions. To what extent does the “invisible hand” still hold sway? In markets continually manipulated by bots and algorithms, is competitive pricing an illusion? Can our current laws protect consumers? The changing market reality is already shifting power into the hands of the few. Ezrachi and Stucke explore the resulting risks to competition, our democratic ideals, and our economic and overall well-being. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/03/Stucke

Speech on the Internet is often viewed as unregulated, yet platforms still have Terms of Service that prohibit defamation and community guidelines that prohibit incitement. How do we reconcile the reality of online life with the legal meaning of those terms? What do we lose when we try to adapt words torn from centuries-old American jurisprudence to online spaces? In this talk, Kendra Albert explores how introducing legal terms of art invoked for their weight but often divorced from law, known as “legal talismans”, impacts online platforms and how we can move beyond legalities to systems that are more considerate of all users. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/10/Albert

There is abundant research on commons-based Peer Production communities, from free/open source software and wikis to fablabs and even community gardens. Research shows how these communities, regardless of their type, follow a deeply unequal distribution of effort (the 1-9-90 rule). This fact frequently generates feelings of frustration and guilt among contributors and users. How can we translate social research into evidence-based interventions to aid these communities? Which online tools would help reduce the invisible wall between contributors and users to facilitate participation? How can we ensure the tools we build respond to the communities' needs? Associate Professor Samer Hassan shares three years of research within the EU-funded P2Pvalue.eu project, aimed at translating social research into the building of online tools to increase the participation and sustainability of commons-based peer production communities. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/10/Hassan

The Responsive Communities Initiative led by Susan Crawford at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University addresses some of the most important issues of economic development, social justice, and civil liberties of our time – those prompted by Internet access. The program has three areas of research involving the Internet, data, and government: Internet Access Infrastructure, Data Governance, and Responsive Communities Leaders. Come learn about the current state of the program's research, what they hope to achieve, and how Internet access could be regulated as a utility and open government data can improve our communities. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/09/ResponsiveCommunities

Organizations that develop open source software are often inherently fragmented and loosely-networked, which can make governance and decision-making a challenge. In addition, as the open source community grows and becomes more global, so too has the need to establish strong governance models and corporate structures that allow an organization to achieve its mission, and foster a sustainable community both creatively and financially. In order to do this, it is helpful for open source organizations to understand the corporate structures and governance models available to them so they may evaluate the pros and cons of different approaches to institutional management and financial structure. In this session, we plan to discuss the various corporate structures and governance models available to open source organizations, including a discussion on when it is appropriate for an open source organization to seek tax exempt status. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/05/Ritvo_Hessekiel

Dr. Adrian Gropper is working to put patients in charge of their health records, arguably the most valuable and most personal kinds of connected information about a person. They encompass elements of anonymous, pseudonymous, and verified identity and they interact with both regulated institutions and licensed professionals. Gropper’s research centers on self-sovereign technology for management of personal information both in control of the individual and as hosted or curated by others. The HIE of One project is a free software reference implementation and currently the only standards-based patient-centered record. The work implements a self-sovereign UMA Authorization Server and is adding blockchain identity as self-sovereign technology to enable licensed practitioners to authenticate and, for example, write a compliant prescription directly into the patient’s self-sovereign health record. The public interest threads through many aspects of this work. Detailed health records are valuable sources for medical research, social justice, machine learning, big data, as well as directly related to 5-20% of the activity in terms of GDP. Identity and related aspects of this work, including security, are of global importance including refugees and societies with weak government and private institutions. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/digitalhealth/2017/01/Gropper