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 […]

Every 500 years or so, European civilization and now world civilization, has been rocked by fundamental shifts in its value regime, in which the rules of the game for acquiring wealth and livelihoods have dramatically changed. Following Benkler’s seminal Wealth of Networks, which first identifies peer production, the P2P Foundation has collated a vast amount […]

While 94% of parents raising school-age children below the U.S. median household income have an Internet connection, more than half are “under-connected,” in that their Internet connection is too slow, has been interrupted in the past year due to non-payment, and/or they share their Internet-connected devices with too many people. In this talk, Vikki Katz […]

What is it like to use the Internet in fits and starts? How do communities with limited access to the global Internet use digital tools? Beyond sensational media narratives about Havana’s WiFi hotspots and the paquete semanal, there is a complex landscape of Internet access, digital media use and open source software development in Cuba. […]

The social nature of today’s Internet is creating new public health and policy challenges. For example, the US in 2014 experienced the largest measles outbreak in nearly a generation, which led to the passing of the nation’s most conservative vaccine legislation, eliminating the personal belief exemption in California. Research has identified online misinformation about vaccines […]

Following the 2014 Google Spain decision rendered by the European Court of Justice of the European Union, search engines – and, first among them, Google – are tasked with the delisting of search results leading to outdated or inaccurate information about European citizens. This ‘right to be delisted’ has since then revealed itself as a […]

Carl Williams joins us to speak about the current Black Liberation movement. What and who it is, how it started, and how Twitter, Facebook (yes, Facebook) and other social media played a part. About Carl Carl joined the ACLU of Massachusetts as staff attorney in September 2013. He was previously a criminal defense attorney with […]

The U.S. still lags behind much of the developed world in terms of the speed and density of its internet infrastructure. In the 21st Century this disparity in access to high speed internet could stand as a critical challenge to competitiveness in many areas, from industry and commerce, to healthcare and education, to civic life […]

With Internet censorship and mass surveillance on the rise globally, understanding regulatory “chilling effects” — the idea that laws, regulations, or state surveillance can deter people from exercising their freedoms or engaging in entirely legal activities — has thus today, in our Post-Snowden world, taken on greater urgency and public importance. In this talk, Jon […]

In this talk, Alan Weinberger — founder of The ASCII Group, Inc. and Harvard Law School alum — addresses the development of the information technology marketplace over the past three decades and the continued importance of small IT companies. Also in ogg for download More on this event here

What ties together cheerleader outfits, monkey selfies, the Batmobile, a chicken sandwich, Yoga, and Yoda? In this talk, Professor Peter S. Menell — Koret Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law and a Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology — provides an exhilarating copyright year in review. Also in ogg […]

The relationship between burglary and architecture is far from abstract. While it is easy to focus merely on questions of how burglars use or abuse the built environment — looking for opportunities of illicit entrance — burglary, in fact, requires architecture. It is an explicitly spatial crime, one that cannot exist without a threshold to […]

In October 2015, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) struck down the U.S./EU Safe Harbor agreement that enabled data to be freely transferred from Europe to the United States. In February 2016, the EU/U.S. Privacy Shield was proposed as a replacement. These developments demonstrate some of the ways the European Union’s far-reaching Right to be […]

In 2013, the ACLU of Massachusetts set out to get a snapshot of student privacy policies in diverse communities statewide. Almost across the board, schools told students they had “no expectation of privacy” on school networks, using school email, or on school devices. The Supreme Court has said students don’t shed their constitutional rights at […]