 Hello people! Hi! This is the Berkman Center, and you're the folks who reached out to us and applied to be interns with us this summer. This is Nancy. She's the one you wrote your cover letters to, and I'm Becca. I'm Becca Tabaskia, I'm the community coordinator, and I am really thrilled to try this experience with you all, and with the folks who are on the table who are all Berkman people in some form or another. I'm joined by Jonathan Zittrain, by Kendra Albert, by Rebecca Haycock, by Dan Jones, who is running this. Nancy is going under the table. I'm her Asher, Jerome Hergo, and Andy Sellers. We are thrilled, we're excited to roll with this and all the questions that you've asked us on the question tool. Before we kick into it, I wanted to again reiterate just our amazement at how cool and broad and diverse you all are. Our applicant pool was outrageous. This has been a really wild experiment and experience for us, and we are just really honored and excited to jump into this. So today we'll be going in two parts. One, we're going to hit a bit of the substance of what was asked to us in the question tool, and Kendra will help run that and pluck questions out and put them before us and before Jay-Z. And then we're all going to speak a little bit on the career and schooling pieces of the questions that were asked to us from our perspectives and where we've all come from and how we might help you all to develop yourselves as well and how you all help us to develop ourselves. So together I'm going to throw to Kendra who's going to start this off. Sure. I think that it's best to start with sort of one of the most uploaded questions. So when we get at Berkman sort of a lot, which is how do you feel about SOPA, PIPA, SISPA, ACTA? Sorry, that one doesn't have a P in it. I get confused. This question specifically mentions Bill C-30 in Canada. But Jay-Z, how do you feel about all of this legislation related to the internet and what do you think? The most immediate answer is mildly dispeptic. I can unpack that. But first we're sort of in a mid-20th century mode of we're here at kind of at the broadcast studio of an AM radio station and wondering if there's like anybody out there. So I know you are and you can show us that you are by either going to Twitter, you may have heard of this, it's a new service. Go to Twitter and tweet something with the hashtag of BerkTurn2012, all one word. If you do that, we'll know that you're out there. And hello already to Sigal who has been patiently waiting for this to begin. And further, there is the live question tool about which you should have received an email since you probably don't read email. It being late 20th century. You can also just direct your browser to cyber.law.harvard.edu slash questions and then pick summer 2012 applicants off the menu. And those are your ways of communicating back to us as we get this show on the road. So we'll be looking for tweets and looking for your participation in the question tool by which you can vote up some of the many questions already there or participate in a comment thread around any of them as well. All right, all of that to be said, my dyspepsia over SOPA has not eased. There are times when I guess it's kind of like about somebody's not just a bad person, they just do bad things. So some of these bills are not bad bills, they just do bad things. And I would put something like SISPA in that category. That's one of the cybersecurity bills that has been floating around, not yet passed by both chambers of the U.S. Congress. And there is a recognition that cybersecurity is poor. As an academic, I immediately try to start slicing up the pie so we know what we're talking about when we talk about cybersecurity. Examples would be protecting your own Mac or your own laptop versus protecting a dam so that some there do well can't enter a signal at a far away laptop to say open the dam, flood the towns. Those are so-called SCADA systems for reasons that are beyond the scope of this exercise. And there's also the sense of information exploitation that nothing gets ruined for you but you end up having a bunch of your stuff stolen, your credit card numbers, your secret diary entries, or all of the plans for the next Ford Taurus are in the hands of an overseas competitor and we'll only know it when things that look suspiciously Taurus-like come on the market for thousands of dollars less. Some would say free trade, others corporate espionage. So anyway, the status on all of those fronts to varying degrees is poor. The role of the federal government is a great question because so much of security and the network over which problems happen is privatized. There's not nearly as many government interventions. This is illustrated to me by the aphorism of like there's nowhere to send the marines. Even if you have them locked and loaded, CF the movie Aliens, although Aliens is probably dated by now on the other hand, Burke-Turn applicants are the type that will have seen it. You know, you feel good with that marine platoon even though it didn't work out so well for them in the movie Aliens. I should give spoiler alerts but anyway, we digress. So there's not that many places to send the marines which make what these bills can do either limited or they'll have to be far more sophisticated and subtle and let's just add a few more fighter jets to cyberspace. And in particular as probably many of you know, there are a lot of concerns about the language of SISPA that in the name, the good name of encouraging information sharing so when there's a problem the people affected can know about it, the language may be so broad as to make it that people can share information about other people, companies can share information about other people but otherwise be protected by law, they can share it too readily with law enforcement or others. Something like SOPA had more fundamental problems. I would refer you there just, I did a minute and a half on the Colbert report not that long ago debating SOPA and because the preparation for that minute and a half was like a day and a half and involved a complete phalanx of smart people getting ready, we blogged about it. So if you go to jz.org or for those of you in the Commonwealth Nations, jz.org, you'll be able to see a lengthier disquisition about SOPA. I should stop talking about SOPA and SISPA right now and see if any of our blandishments to people to sound off have found their way into our mechanisms. To me it looks like they have. I guess I'll just pick another question from the question tool. I'm going to mispronounce everyone's name, so I apologize for that. But engine bozdag, last month Sergei Brin claimed that the biggest threat to the internet... You even mispronounced Sergei's name. I warned you. Biggest threat to internet freedom was government censorship followed by the rise of non-generative walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple. Do you have anything to say on that subject? I refer you to Sergei Brin's lengthier Google Plus post in which he refers you back to my book. So it's now a complete self-sealing epistemically closed system where Sergei refers to me and I refer you to Sergei. Yeah, that was the subject of my 2008 book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, a title that I had to fight for because people at Yale University Press have no sense of playfulness or irony, no offense, because obviously they're going to be offended. And they wanted it to be The Future of the Internet and how to save it, and that seemed far too earnest to me. Anyway, that book was very worried about the ways in which the information environment we are recreating varies greatly from the one we had had from 1977 to 2007 dated from the introduction of the Apple II personal computer where basically citizens and others get great equipment. They have their PCs, they have disk drives, they have processors, they have screens, yay, and they can do whatever they want with them. It's a product. It's a product that's infinitely malleable depending on what software they run. It's weird to even have to say this because it's just such a feature of our reality. It's like there's air. We breathe it. The problem is that starting around 2005 we started to see more and more what I call information appliances, things that act like PCs and that they can run code from different places, but where the code that runs has to make it pass to Gatekeeper. In the first instance, the Gatekeeper is the maker of that device. And it's like, that is not how Windows worked. It wasn't like Bill Gates got to say what would and wouldn't run on every version of Windows once you had bought Windows from him. It was none of his business. And as we know now, 2012, that is exactly how it works with IOS and even to some extent with Android since there's an Android marketplace and they say what goes in and out of the marketplace. And the book was actually worried that there are reasons that are very good to want that form of Gatekeeping because there's a lot of bad stuff out there. And the very things that make it worthwhile and desirable means that people will adopt it and then it will end up being put to uses that none of us are particularly anticipating. So in some ways that book was an opportunity to try to shake people by the lapels and be like, no, this is going to turn out poorly even though at the moment it's really cool. And it was written actually before there was even an app store. I was thinking about things that were really totally locked down. The app store has been a wonderful complication and I've written further on it in my blog to say, well, it's kind of more like a PC now because it can run outside code, but it's still kind of like an appliance because that outside code has to get approved. And one other quick point, there is this equivalence to me between devices we have where the code and therefore also often the content can be gate kept in real time by a vendor and anything that is a Web 2.0 online service. You run something on Facebook, it's always contingent. Like if Facebook decides they don't like Zynga anymore, buh-bye Zynga. And I confess I wouldn't be crying any tears except for the symbolism of first they came from the Zynga and I said nothing because it sucked. Then they came for Superpoke and I said nothing because it sucked. Actually they could just get rid of Facebook and it would be. Anyway, I digress. So we should look for other questions or we have other people in the room see if we want to invite them to say something. Should we just do a surprise introduction by someone other than I? So there are a couple of questions from Twitter too but we can do that first if you want. Other than me? Other than I? Other than I, I think. I know not. Sorry, Ava, you were saying. There are a few questions from Twitter but we can go around. Well, let's get a Twitter question real quick. So one of the Twitter questions was process oriented. One was for JSE. I think related to the CISPA and SOPA and PEPA question, Siegel had asked what kind of cyber regulation would you recommend among regulations? It's my job to criticize things, not to propose constructive solutions. But I would propose having the government play the role of biggest customer ever and in some ways they already do. The government is scrambling desperately to secure its own computers and there are a lot of them on .gov, .mil roughly speaking. If the government can get stuff in good shape on those networks there may well be stuff we can learn from it but it saves us from the specter of the government ordering us to do one thing or another. So that's one approach that would let the government be up to something that doesn't immediately turn to a regulatory thing. I also am interested in ways of vetting code or dangerous bits that represent forms of government, governance that are distributed. Back in the old days for spam there was something called Vipal's razor where if other people were reporting a message you were just receiving a spam, because the point of spam is it's in bulk so it's hitting a lot of people at the same time, it would detect that and help to know that it was spam but it's not just like there's one person being like, you're spam, you're not because then that person has quite a lot of power. So there are ways of maybe doing some distributed, I call this mutual aid forms of protection and the Berkman Center has at least two and maybe about 10 projects that are grounded in mutual aid as a model. I would include our Herdikt project in that category, H-E-R-D-I-C-T which crowdsources the reporting of blockages and denial of service attacks in real time around the world and I would include our brand new mirror as you link project designed to help websites assist one another automatically when they come under attack rather than just expecting the Marines to come in and shoot all the aliens. I mean that with reference to the movie, not as a statement of immigration policy. What was the other question for which? So we've got a process about intern applicants question and then also an info overload question. So which one do we? I think process overload. I'll hand it to Becca probably for that and then maybe we'll go around the table and just do some quick more substantive introductions of people who are here. So the process question was what's your primary standard for choosing a Berk turn and any international applicants admitted this year? Maybe the international applicant. So standard process. There is no standard. It changes every year. Our basic process this year was to go through each cluster, each group based on what you all had chosen as your first choice and reviewed by a team that manages those projects. So a lot of the people in this room had a hand in that and it was a lot of matching of particular skills and interests that you guys have indicated you're coming from and what you've suggested you want to be doing and trying to see how that mapped with really where we were going and what we needed for a particular set of projects. And it's really a difficult process because it cuts both ways in that we can very much and very much are. We are very much inspired by the things that you tell us in your cover letters and where you're coming from and everything that you share. And that helps us to shape what we're doing at any point in time and it really does change the course of our projects and the direction of the center. That is unquestionable. The other piece that's harder to frame and to lay out is that we do have specific skill sets or specific needs for certain projects. And so it's a fine line that we walk in evaluating that and so our process is reviewing them. We read every single application multiple times with multiple people and we have to narrow down and look at what seems to be the best fit what will give us a diverse group of candidates or participants each summer. So that becomes really important for us to take that into account. We do have a lot of international applicants and dozens and dozens of dozens of countries were represented in our pool applicants and this summer we have six different countries that are going to be represented in our class. Elise, do you have something to say to that? No, I was just going to take away your mic because apparently it's belt and suspenders. Apparently the table mics are working just fine. I don't really believe that, but hey, let's find out. I screech some. But so our process is really review, a rigorous review for which it's really hard to kind of give direction to say this is what you should be or this is where you should be coming from what you should have brought to the table because it's never a formula. It's not something that we can say, this is what we're looking for. It's really quite a balance and we want to use events like these and other events that we have to help identify issues of common interest and things where we collectively can get things done and atop that I want to note, it should be given and I hope that we communicate that not everything is done here at the Berkman Center and selections done by us. There are tons of other organizations, there are tons of other great causes, there are tons of other issues and while we most welcome your participation in these events and piping into Herdick and contributing there to tuning into our other events to coming to our events when you're in town or participating in them from afar that we really do hope that you do work elsewhere and have this be really a collective effort of all of us together in getting things done and that's a bit about our selection process. I don't know if that, you all took part in that some form or another. Is that a fair read? There's a new question with regards to the application process and the question is, are there any specific skill sets that you have found are more rare that we should focus on developing coding, design? You know, it's hard to answer that from an institutional perspective project by project thing. Some projects like the Digital Media Lab project require that you have certain, you know, skills as law students and can offer that up. Other projects like the Youth and Media Lab or the Meta Lab require or can make use of coders and people who work on visualizations and people who have more artistic flair in certain ways in addition to other kinds of research. But the teams are really varied and we get to this in the second part where we talk about careers a little bit because everybody around this table, we all work here but we all come from very different backgrounds and have different skills. So I can't say we give preference to one or another. It's really case by case. So should we introduce a little more around the table? Sure. I'll start. Andy Sellers, I'm a Berkman fellow. I'm also the staff attorney at the Digital Media Lab project. I don't know if we want to talk about sort of career stuff but I started focusing on internet issues when I was a music major at Northeastern University here in Boston or actually there in Boston, it's over the river. I started studying music licensing because I was in college around the time of sort of nature blowing up and things like that. Got interested in open licensing and Creative Commons which attracted me to the Berkman Center back when Creative Commons was housed here. And then I went to law school at George Washington University. I interned here during summers. I also spent some time working at the Library of Congress in the office of the General Counsel. And now I do mainly online free speech and intellectual property stuff for the CMLP. So I'm Joe Mergueu. I'm a fellow here at the Berkman Center and a PhD candidate in economics at Sciences Po in Paris. I basically am interested in the internet as a field of research and also as a tool. So my main interest since I graduated is in culture, norms of cooperation, so how culture evolves, how communities build norms to solve some collective action issues that they may face. And the way I got interested in the internet is that I pretty much viewed it as a huge social science database about human interactions and community building. If you think about Wikipedia, open source software research, pretty much along the lines that Yochai Benkler describes. So yeah, a field of research first about social interactions and I think that each and every time people interact with the internet, they leave a lot of data behind them that we can analyze and I think that's a revolution in our capacity to analyze social relations on the internet and also as a tool because I do experimental economics so I devise social experiments that I like to run over the internet at a large scale and that's a lot of fun. So you can already see that the point of entry as far as research is concerned are very different from and these ones and so that's what's exciting at Bergman, in my view. Can I jump in real quick with that? There is a question here and I think you can speak to this and I think you could as well. Rebecca, Katie asks, what tools do you feel are best for quantitative and qualitative measures of social media effect on political communication slash activism? I am so excited. I really feel exactly. But did you do something? People are falling all over each other here to be like, I have no idea. I know not necessarily. Thanks, Nate. On the question 8. I'm throwing everyone under the bus here. Nobody's safe. No, but how you do your studies and I know you've done some qualitative work or quantitative work. Sure. So I am Rebecca Haycock from Project Coordinator here. I work on the OpenNet Initiative and the blog and common projects on the Digital Public Library of America and the blog and common product is perhaps the most relevant. We've been doing a lot of survey research with bloggers that we basically scrape the web for blog addresses and then randomly email a bunch of people and say, hey, you should participate in this project. So the thing we're trying to get at in that case is not so much how social media affects political communication but as a supplement to the work we do for the OpenNet Initiative where we can definitively measure what's being censored, we also want to know how bloggers approach censorship and self-censorship online. So the questions we've been asking are about the things that they will not put on their blogs or the way they feel, you know, how closely they feel the government pays attention to what they do and we're hoping to publish our first bigger report on the English-language blogosphere versus the Russian-language blogosphere soon but we haven't quite completed our analysis so I can't quite tell you what we've come up with yet but hopefully something interesting. So as far as I'm concerned, as I said, I mainly run experiments so my work has focused on constructing an online tool for running social experiments online so game theoretic experiments that I run with Wikipedia contributors and open source software developers. So I just get people in online communities to participate in like cooperation experiment, public goods experiment, eliciting social preferences like altruism and trust. And I don't think there is one good methodology whatsoever to kind of study, like do social studies over the internet. The most interesting thing in my view is to try to couple different methodologies. So trying to elicit like the behavior of people on the internet and then one thing that you can do is also collect information about what those people do over the internet and try to connect to, explain how people self-select into particular roles into Wikipedia or into open source software development platforms such as SourceFort or GitHub. So really mixing methodologies I think is the most interesting thing that we can do over the internet. Thank you. Sorry, my interjection. So my name is Amer. I'll keep this brief. I work on the center's core team with Becca and on various institutional projects. There have been a couple of questions in the Twitter feed just about specific ways to learn more about different projects and organizations and things and so I'll just mention a few specific ways in which you can keep up to date with Berkman. One of them is a promo for the newsletter that I send out every week which is a weekly events email which many of our events such as this one are webcasts live to the world and we keep an eye on all the different feedback mechanisms that people can participate in via Twitter and IRC. So you can sign up for that just by clicking on the Get Involved tab of the website and scrolling down and adding your email address to all those lists. I would also recommend getting on the Berkman buzz list which Rebecca Heacock here helps to edit and curate which is a great way to get a sense of the pulse of conversation going on at the center. Becca obviously mentioned a few other pieces but we are pretty active with our Facebook and Twitter feeds. We have a huge number of fellows faculty and staff that blog and so I'll tweet out that Lincoln also posted in the IRC but there's lots of different mechanisms I've mentioned the smallest types of them and I've talked for too long now so I'm going to go to you. Armors all over the Berkman Center. Spamming everybody. So my name is Sandra Cortese. I'm a fellow here at the Berkman Center. I work for the Youth and Media Project. The Youth and Media Project or better said the Youth and Media Lab is an experiment that we are running here at the Berkman Center where we're trying to look at how young people from 12 to 25 very broadly how they use the Internet and what we are trying to do is involve young people actually into doing research with us as well as curricula development, tool development so it's a I would say very innovative approach on how to do research about young people by involving them and leveraging their ideas and their creativity and putting this into our work. So at the moment I would say we have kind of two or three topics that we are focusing on. One is on information quality where we look at how young people search for information, how they evaluate information and what's the role of content creation and sharing information. That's kind of one area and on the other side we have this collaboration with the Born This Way Foundation where we look at topics around meanness, cruelty, braveness, kindness and try to apply those concepts that we have at the Media Lab for those topics. So looking forward to hearing much more from all of you. Hopefully you will maybe apply again next year and if you have questions feel free to send me an email or post them here on Twitter. Should I go again? Not only if you wish to. You've done your thing. I'll give a little more context for what I do. So I mentioned that the OpenNet initiative exists to study internet censorship and actually this is one of Jonathan's many babies so if you have things to add. There are so many ways to continue with that comment. One of the many It's really a soap opera here called All My Children. So there's a lot of ONIs to sort of in a very structured and academic way measure internet censorship around the world. So we have a list of websites that we suspect might be filtered both globally, not in the sense that they are filtered globally but globally they are candidates for filtering and also individually, country by country, websites of political parties or dissident bloggers that we expect might be filtered and we routinely test these things in each country. We have volunteers around the world who run these lists through software that our partners have built and we can then sort of put that information together so that we know about the legal and political context in the country and come up with a measurement for sort of the extent to which they're filtering different kinds of content and how transparent they're being about that filtering. So that's one of the things that I do here is I work on that project. Blogging comment I mentioned also is a sort of a subsidiary project or not subsidiary but a commentary project but we're giving a little more context and we're trying to figure out what bloggers actually feel about the way the government is treating their world online and also just what makes them tick in different places what they're blogging about what's interesting, what the big topics are in different regional bloggers and language bloggers and then the other thing I work on is the digital public library of America which is a relatively new project it's a little over a year old and our goal is to make information freely accessible online so the kinds of things you find in libraries and museums and archives and also new sort of born digital content we'd like to bring together a bunch of different projects that are trying to make this happen like Google Books and Hotty Trust and different universities all into one big effort to provide a resource that's the entire world really but at First Americans and people interested in American content can be. And there's something that all of the projects Rebecca just talked about having common which is it's this idea that you can just start something you can just try it out and it's pretty amazing that that's the case I mean that goes a little bit back to my stuff on generativity I mean an example that's so common now is to be hackneyed is that you have a student at Northeastern University like some fine Tuesday morning around the year 2000 just like alright let's just try this out we could set up a little file sharing thing and it's just computers copying stuff to other computers this is not rocket science and then you have Napster and we're like a week later everyone is using Napster and it wasn't anything in particular as we've seen the music industry could do to just put the genie back in the bottle in part because they couldn't write to Microsoft or to Apple at the time like ban those from your app stores it's like there's no app store you just go click on it and that's just one small example of a very disruptive thing I mean the open net project that Rebecca was talking about is one that started because we had heard rumor that there was filtering going on in China it's like well there are 1.3 billion people there like we could ask them how is it that this is a secret it's like it's totally known by millions of people but not by us and it was funny I think somebody got like a grant from a foundation not among our team to go over to Beijing like fly to Beijing go to an internet cafe with a list of like 30 websites type them in and fly home and be like okay here's what I found and we decided to do that without the carbon footprint so our first take on that was to just place international long distance calls from my Harvard office to a dial up modem in Beijing as if we were staying in a hotel there and needed internet access because back in the day that's how you got it and we just started asking for one website after another we paid 200,000 questions with that connection and it worked beautifully we actually then produced it's still online on our site and still ridiculously frequently cited despite the fact that the open net initiative has since completely superseded all of that research we finally had the first comprehensive list of sites blocked in China it was just like you know from breakfast to dinner you could get that done it did lead to some problems here and that about six weeks later the dean of the school got the bill the telephone bill it was like enough of this and also we wanted to see what to what extent pornography was blocked so we ran a script that I think did a Google search for free adult sex something like that and then took the top thousand links and then tried to access each of them automatically and I guess to the network administration it looked like an extremely pornography hungry but dissatisfied consumer going from one site to another faster than the human eye could even take it in which was my defense so anyway we do all sorts of research of that sort here and the digital public library of America would count the same thing I mean for the August title that it has it's like alright let's get some people together and start to talk about what it would be like and you know the same thing you can say for creative commons creative commons started at the Berkman center as a conversation about you know we ought to have a place for people who want to share their stuff to put it it was actually going to be a library and then they're like you know that's going to be big and what if somebody put something in that they say they're giving away but in fact they ripped off from somewhere that'd be bad to like lose our endowment over that and we ended up with the idea of creative commons as a licensing scheme and the database wouldn't be a library run by Harvard it would be the internet and the index to this database would be a search engine and the tags that are creative common tags would be the ways to say don't just show me pictures of the Statue of Liberty show me those pictures that are creative commons licensed and that's just to me another example of our mode being grounded in research which means we don't we have structural uncertainty that of a scientist we're ready to be proven wrong we have some what we call when we're being fancy pants normative commitments so we do have some ideas that like it would be nice if people weren't shot summarily like just to give you a normative commitment that is hard to disagree with and then there are others that have to do with transparency of communications and if a government is going to restrict it it ought to be clear about why and there ought to be a process to challenge and all sorts of stuff like that and we put them together not just into papers but into institutions software practices experiments meant to see how well the internet can adapt to capture some of these principles and desires and I'd put actually the global network initiative among them global network initiative in large part started at the Berkman Center as an attempt to see if companies that were selling services and equipment that could be used in ways that might violate our normative commitments might be able to voluntarily take some responsibility for minimizing that and figuring out when that's happening anyway, I've talked a lot we should see what other questions or ideas there are two quick people, three quick people quick updates available for the crappy computer we're going to restart later this looks to be Windows 2000 anyway, sorry I guess I'm next I'm Kendra Albert, I'm a research associate here at the Berkman Center and I'm also a former Berk turn of the class of Berk turn 2011 so I'm really excited to welcome all of our Berk turns of the summer and was really really thrilled to see all of the applicants who applied this year my background is a little untraditional I have an undergraduate degree with two majors one was in lighting design which I regret to say I've had nothing to do with the lighting at Berkman since I've gotten here except that she walks into every room looks up and then shakes her head it's true and also I majored in history and did a lot of work on law and technology and law and science but you're not a lawyer but I'm not a lawyer so what profession do I have to study law to yeah Kendra are you going to go to law school no pressure decide quickly but I work on a number of projects not answering not answering a number of projects but most specifically H2O which is online textbook development project that aims at making textbooks open remixable to everyone and that's one of the projects we'll be working on over the summer and one of the projects I hope you can expect big things from in the future and I also do a lot of other research on whatever happens to be on Professor Zitran's plate on that particular day like this like this Myle who's your morale joined us we've been going around answering some of the questions that people have posted to us via twitter or bergturns2012 and on our question tool but have been just quickly going around saying a little bit about ourselves what we've studied how we got to where we are so I am from Spain my background I did a degree on economics and then a degree on anthropology then I was for many years working in the NGOs sector and organizing social movements and then I came back to research in the European University Institute where I did the PhD on political science and it's about the governance of digital commons so I work very much in the frame of Yochai Benkler and I am this year fellow here at the Berman Center and it has been fantastic and then quickly Dan, I don't know if you scream from back there I don't think anybody can see Dan but Dan Jones who is our digital media producer you've got headphones on we're just keeping him a little bit tethered but scream at the mics say hi to folks you can't see me but I'm way back here and my name is Dan Jones I produce the digital media for the center and basically anytime you see a webcast or something like this or a produced piece of media or our podcasts have a little hand in that and we have some fun opportunities possibly coming up in the summer for you guys to help take part in producing media which we might get to talk about so that's the crew in the room do you want to pick up some more questions? more questions Kendra? sure this one is a little bit brick and related and a little bit personal development related people on Twitter have been asking as a grad student do you think it's better to start my own thing or participate in an existing project which is a pretty big question so yeah I think the answer to that is yes there's in a lot of the sciences and even in the social sciences there's a lab model where once you get into graduate school or join a lab your supervisor kind of is the person that if she is happy you're happy and if she's not you're not and in that sense you are likely to already be brought into an existing project now is that Darwinian or Lamarckian evolution I mean you picked that program in part because you probably liked the kind of work that was going on there and the point is to apprentice you to that kind of work so in that sense working on an existing project not only just as a meta issue, burnishing the skills of cooperation, group work all the stuff that you know you're going to want to be doing later if you do anything in life including academia it will also be a way to get your skills up not just by going to a class and learning about stuff but trying to work on stuff and being told by somebody who has a stake in the outcome him or herself oh that doesn't quite cut it here's the way to do it I can at least speak there's a number of documents that I've worked on with Kendra where we respectively cover it in red ink and in part I got to say I look at it a little more closely if my name is one of the names on it and so in that sense working on an existing project really makes the stakes appropriately affect the incentives on the other hand you also want an opportunity to spread your own wings and again this is a space for which if you have almost any skill certainly including coding skills if you can get something up and running and try it out proof of concept sort of thing you'll learn a lot by being able to just do it instead of imagining the committee and the group of people I think it should be this way I think it should be that way just go out and try it and when you own your own project you can and that is a really worthy experience too and I think a graduate student particularly a Ph.D. student today would do well to have experience in both modes and the economist has actually glommed on to this sooner than everybody else where your thesis is not just one big old book it's a series of papers that makes it much more manageable that helps with the pacing and it lets you try your hand at different modes and maybe even different levels of group work in law it's a little different because we're a trade school first in an academic institution kind of second from a degree granting perspective and I saw some of you had asked how much you need a law degree I really don't know the answer to that I mean one variable that probably ought to be there prominently in the equation is I don't know or mom and dad wealthy and willing to help you out that's kind of the Mitt Romney answer if you can come out of law school free that's very different than coming out of law school with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt that you have to pay off because especially if what you want to do is policy work or academia having that debt can be a significant factor now a place like Harvard does have some forms of loan forgiveness and other ways of making it so that if you want to do public interest work you can very well be other ways to acquire some of what you would learn if part of what you want to study is the regulation of the internet without actually having to go through three years of law school if you do want to be a policy person though I look in Washington and in Silicon Valley many many of those people have JD's and there is some kind of weird status thing about it that when a lawyer says no it just has more resonance than when the rest of us say no it's not a lawyer but lawyers are people too I think it's important to note that I think you and I are the only two lawyers or only two JD's in the room that there is a lot of stuff that goes on at Berkman that does not require a legal education it's good to know just because law informs policy which informs behavior and we are a university center we are part of the law school because we just haven't uprooted ourselves but we are a university wide center and if you look among our fellows and among our interns they are not people who are straight shot through law school Can I jump on that? I actually know very little about law so as I said I'm an economist but as far as research is concerned what I'd like to say why I ended up here and not at any other econ department in the world is really the approach to research that you were mentioning was willing to build something of your own and trying it out on the field even if it's risky, even if it might not work and try to generate with that knowledge that you can use empirically to enrich the world and do something with it it's not only about like meta knowledge it has to be useful to someone somebody try it out apply even if it does not work that's really why I'm here I think it's the question that people should ask themselves and it's worth adding to that too that kind of try it out mentality is very present in internet startups and other concerns there's a great article in I guess this month's Wired it's so funny to talk about this month's Wired as if it comes out once a month but I think this month's Wired has a piece that's interesting which is the phenomenon by which Azinga will just randomly alter elements on a web page and this piece actually talks about how the Obama campaign was doing it and they found that by just changing the phrasing of something or a picture from one picture to another donations were up 30% I mean like it could have been decisive in the election and the thought is if you have business already doing that kind of rapid implementation like all practice and no theory it's crazy not to have academia and .org also thinking through those tools and how to deploy them for the purposes not of just making more money but of understanding the dynamics of how communities work and how they get built and to the extent that there are projects we want to expose people to how to best expose them to it I mean we should be doing A.B.Tessian to demon the sheep instead of a regular sheep or a cow instead of a sheep as the mascot so yeah every hundredth visitor to Herdick should get a different animal I'll pile atop that a little bit to say that there are so many disciplines in this room where a group it's not just the lawyers versus the non-lawyers but we also have social scientists and economists and people who have studied media and radio and political science and it's across the board we've got educators we have people who are studying business and this is both at the staff level at the interns level at the fellows level and beyond at Berkman and I'll note that a lot of the people who are very much grounded in their discipline and who work hard and master a particular space but a lot of people while they're rooted at what space are open-minded are curious expose themselves to other things whether that's through their lives at the Berkman Center or independently while they were in school or as they go through their studies and then in addition to just the other disciplines to take it outside of the academic kind of context a lot of people straddle the practiced and activist roles too and that's not just building in the context of academia or trying something out for a paper creating action one of the things that we do at Berkman Center we're a place where we want scholarship with impact and we want to exist outside of the bounds of academia and a lot of the people who end up here and a lot of the people with whom we work at other NGOs, in businesses in government also kind of straddle those roles as well is that a fair kind of point to Maya please I want to add that the point of view of research in interaction online and online collaboration online communities the Berkman Center is the reference point of sociological and political science research even if it's not like on the aspect of if it's lawyer oriented in the sense of independently of that question this place is the main place of research on this online collaboration in terms of sociological and political science approach and it's very interesting we have here a cooperation group and it has been very fruitful in terms of exchange of empirical research that we are developing because there is a lot of people here fellows and also researchers in the working for the Berkman that do empirical analysis and from the point of view of researching on network policy around internet is very interesting from the point of view of new forms of organization that are emerging on the internet I could not think of a richer place to be than here what would you recommend to somebody who isn't here how could they do that where they are what would you recommend somebody to do to create for themselves an enriching community or what can be replicated what can be built elsewhere what I think is that on this area of research you also see that there are new practices of diffusion of research in the sense of you have the possibility to interact with a community of researchers through mailing lists or through twitter or through other sites of exchange there is a tendency that people who research online phenomenons tend to publish in an open access way and also to spread in different stages of the research like making blogs about it and then like with the discussion in the whole process not only at the very end when the paper is done and it's very interesting to see also how like if I will have in front of me someone who is starting a PhD I will tell them don't do it alone like try to inject in collaboration and collective thinking as much as you can and the internet is going to be a great resource for that and and yeah I mean if you're there are so many people that are so interested in studying the internet and understanding how it works in shaping its development that you can leverage the existing networks that you have so for example when I lived in Washington DC when I was in law school I found a group of people that held an event just called Copy Night and basically they gather at a bar once a month and to verb and noun they just wonk whatever was interesting about them about copyright they just talk about and it was a mix of people that worked in policy and people who worked that were students like me and they're just Washington DC had this community there are similar groups that do that sort of stuff in Boston around particular ideologies I'm sure that if you live in a major metropolitan area there's probably a group of people that would be either doing that now or be very interested in joining you if you decided to start something like that the internet affects everyone and so everyone's concerned about its development so you can really when they're immediately in front of you in your home town you probably could start something and find people to support you and I think that speaks to one of the questions that just came up on Twitter which is how do you keep on top of interdisciplinary dynamic fields such as internet technology and society I think part of that is having a group of peers whether they're real life or online who you can just sort of email things to and sort of have a dialogue about what their most recent issues with so that when you see something you have a context for it because so much of internet related research and theory is just being able to put things in a proper contextual light and sort of understand where they fit into what's come up for and I think that's like because you don't necessarily need to know the specifics of every bill that goes into congress but if you can sort of say hey this is where it belongs in a general field that allows you to actually feel actually be comfortable with the research without necessarily spending every single moment of your day reading blogs which you certainly could most internet research topics I know I've tried too many one more question maybe one more which one shall we take is there anything that you would find that dynamic we do see a lot of questions and I just want to preemptively say this is obviously a completely new format to us we're doing our best to kind of reach out and connect and share what we can so I don't even know how much the questions are totally independent of one another but I just want to acknowledge the imbalance between supply and demand yeah go ahead alright so there was one more question that was at the bottom of the question tool which is and relates to some of what we've been discussing already which is what kinds of classes would you recommend I seek out at my university to give me a broad understanding of internet studies well that's a good question I mean the usual places they hide are in media and communications departments and it's interesting because the syllabus will betray a lot there are people who've been teaching it for so long and their syllabus hasn't changed a whole lot and so part of it will be helpful to see just what's the date on what's the most recent date of something in the syllabus and if the answer is 1996 then it may not be as much about the internet as you would think it doesn't mean it's a class you shouldn't take but it's not going to be one about the internet so there are usual suspects in our corner of the world that both define part of what we stand for and how we approach the world but also define the boundaries that we really seek to cross a lot intellectually we don't want to be epistemically closed but whether it's in media studies or in law or in computer science or in political science or economics if you see the likes of Clay Scherke of Yochai Benkler of Larry Lessig of you well maybe of me that will certainly give you a flavor for some of the things we think about day in and day out around here and I could ask those from other disciplines around the table to basically say who to keep an eye out for because part of it too is there's no reason you have to take a class about it you could be just sort of doing your own reading list of top ten works and I find I have yet to really take a class in quantum physics and really devour each new book by Brian Green or Lisa Randall and I often write in the margins as if I'm talking to them and then I talk to them actually I cornered Brian Green at dinner once and I was like okay if I go to the edge of the universe what will I see how do we know there's not a Burger King right on the other side he was like we don't but anyway there are a couple cool books that could probably get you started and Lessig's Code 2.0 would probably be at the very top of the list as something that really introduces you to a way of thinking about this environment that far endures past the particular examples he uses in the book I don't know if there are others around the table just want to give any recommendations of stuff too I would like to give one recommendation maybe less about books but since I see that many international students join this webcast Berkman does collaborate with many research centers on international level this is actually how I got excited about Berkman and got to know about Berkman and started to work for a Swiss research center that collaborates with Berkman so investigate or ask us what kind of research centers there may be closer to you that you could also collaborate start a project and learn more about what we do and all the research centers too since there are many of us that study the internet and topics around it so that's the Swiss recommendation but back to books Code is essential I think I'm a big fan of Yochai's Wealth of Networks though every time I read it I feel like I don't understand everything and then that's true usually since you're not going to plug your own book I'll plug it for you I think that the future of the internet is an essential read when sort of thinking about what are the threats I say as I hold a closed wall place in my hand and it's free and there's a lot of authors that come through the center I love reading David Weinberger's thinking because it's a totally different field than I normally am so I love seeing how he looks at some of the same issues from a different perspective but yeah those are some of the ones that immediately pop to mind and some of them are free some of them are cc licensed so you can download them and share them which is pretty awesome as well and maybe if you're interested on projects about more user media related I can definitely recommend you to read Born Digital the book that John Palfrey and the Worskasa wrote together and we also just recently published a report on information quality which you can find online for free as well so rather than citing books I'd like to simply try to mention a way of thinking about things that I think is relevant to the internet because there are so much research issues that you can tackle either researching the internet directly or using it as a tool and if you want to make an innovative use of the internet which is what we mainly try to do here I would engage everybody in trying to always think and operate between disciplines be strong in your field and then try to open up we spend a great deal of time here explaining to each other different perspectives on things and this is really what enriches or research projects and like distinguishes in my view Bergman from many many many academic departments otherwise so that's pretty much the state of mind that I would encourage also following this reflection I would say that think that you are unique and in the sense of think about the originality of the combination of different traditions of thinking or the different readings that your interest built in the sense of don't think too much about how you fit into law or how you fit into a particular center or how you fit into something but think about what interests me, what I really want to do and even if there is nothing like you there is a lot of value around it and there are different strategies of trying to build a career like there is the strategy of following exactly what others have done exactly how things are like established but there is also a strategy of innovation and it's very much valuable but the tricky thing is to believe in yourself and don't be afraid of being unique and in this sense I would very much encourage it because I think this could be applied like in any historical moment but particularly now each time we are more becoming like individual network in which the combination that we are is the main value that we have I love that I love that I think that that's a perfect way to kind of wrap this up to that in everybody being themselves and finding that continue to be it and please continue to be you with the Berkman Center and with each other you can use the question tool to answer each other's questions and continue the conversation there you can use Twitter to continue to connect there are any number of ways we're on Friendster find us on MySpace yeah I sent a note that many of you received that had all kinds of different listservs that you can join and jump on and to use them to contribute to them and we can deliver you more materials by Cosmo yeah we will deliver more materials thank you so much thank you everybody in here and we will see you on the internet Berkman out