 So it's my great pleasure to introduce to you Urs Gasser. Urs is someone who has been with the Berkman Center for a long time now. We're extremely lucky that he's our executive director. He was a professor at the University of St. Gallen, and an expert in what we think of as information law. He also comes from a tradition of studying this matter from a methodology that's actually somewhat distinct from the way that we study information and the way we study internet and technology. So we're incredibly lucky that he is both our executive director and a great expert on this. This is his core topic of information quality. He's going to run us through a very brief presentation, and then I will turn it over to Ethan Zacherman, our close colleague from the MIT Center for Civic Media. Professor Gasser, thank you. Thank you so much. Good afternoon. Welcome back. As John mentioned, this is somehow a dream come true for me. The topic of information quality has been one of my pet topics, one of my pet topics for many years. I'm really excited that we are all coming together here today. I would like to thank first our colleagues and friends at the Ford Foundation for making this possible, but then of course also our colleagues and friends, in particular Ethan over at MIT. I'm thrilled that over the next few years we will for sure strengthen our collaboration, and I think this is a terrific start. So thank you, Ethan, to you and your team. And then finally, of course, also thanks to the Berkman team for pulling this together after especially last week's event with Lady Gaga, which was kind of quite a challenge for us. And a big thank especially to Susan, who did a great job moderating the morning session. Thank you, Susan, for that. So what I would like to do over the next few minutes is really to do two things. First of all, to highlight some of my key findings from this morning. I'm sure you have many others to add, so this is kind of just one interpretation of what I've heard. And to try to map these insights on this kind of emerging theory of information quality, which as John mentioned, is more of a European framework or approach to the topic here. I'd like to cluster my thoughts and structure them into four categories. One is what I would call foundational issues. Second, a few words and observations regarding methods. Third, a few areas of application that we touched upon this morning and maybe also highlighting one or two that we haven't talked so much about, but that I think are increasingly important. And then finally, also as a segue to the following sessions, a few words about potential points of intervention. But before I do that, just a very quick question or provocation. Why do we have this conversation right now about truthiness, about truth in the digital network environment? I remember distinctly when I arrived here roughly 10 years ago, information quality was not a very popular topic here. Actually, no one was really interested in it. So again, I'm really glad to see so many colleagues here today at the law school coming together. And it's really a question. Why do we talk about that today? The question of truth online. I offer three possible explanations. One is that we feel collectively that it's time to re-adjust our navigation systems as we are confronted with a new technology, but also of course with new players, old intermediaries disappearing and new intermediaries entering the information ecosystem. We've covered a lot of that ground this morning. A second possible explanation why we have the conversation about quality of our information ecosystem. Now from that particular angle, angle may be the understanding of power of misinformation. As it was noted this morning, we even started wars based on misinformation recently. And finally, and that's perhaps more European provocation, it's not so clear to me whether the diverse ecosystem that we have today, the diverse information environment that we live in, produces always good outcomes necessarily and automatically. So whether this vision and idea of just creating enough speakers and enough information sources and then the marketplace of ideas through this kind of invisible mechanism will lead to the truth and to the good outcomes that this trust may be eroded in today's environment. So these are, I think, three offerings from my personal perspective. But now more switching to a summary of the mapping mode. First, we got a reminder from our colleague from the Kennedy School this morning that we should be more specific about the language used, about definitions. I've heard a couple of things this morning that were extremely helpful in clarifying my own thinking. We had different notions of information actually that were used, sometimes information as bits and bytes. The raw data that we are concerned about, the quality of the raw data, but then of course also about information as message and effect, some of the things Jochai was talking about. We also covered, I think, different types and addressed the nuances between different types of information. We talked about factual information but of course also opinions and beliefs. So I truly believe also from a theoretical perspective it's very important to distinguish these nuances. One other thing I want to highlight here is really what I like so much about this morning's conversation is that we have been rethinking in many ways the information model and the information flow model. So the question how we are exposed to information or actually how we find information be it through search engines, be it through browsing plays very much a role, of course, in this conversation. So it's no longer that we just are exposed to information that someone has selected for us and to see search as part of the process, information process that has a relevance with regard to truth and quality and truthiness as one quality criteria I think is important. Also the recreation and reuse part that we interact with information with digital content and that this again shapes our skills and ability to make quality judgment. So I really like this enriched model of information flow that is very different from the conversations we had even 15 years ago with focus on newspapers. So I truly think this reflects the shift from a analog to a truly digital model this kind of more nuanced understanding of how we interact with information. Just another quick observation point from this morning. Truthiness or truth has been two of the quality criteria we mentioned a lot. Others mentioned, for instance, correctness of information information that is not misleading and I think indeed there are a broad range of information quality criteria that we could also look at in the context of our conversation today. One colleague of mine did a mapping and came up with 70 different quality criteria. Some of them again more on the subjective side where your previous knowledge for instance plays a big role or some of the subjective factors we talked today and some of them more on the objective side either way also the acknowledgement this morning that context matters so much when we talk about these quality criteria be it truthiness or be it correctness of information. The second outcome certainly of this morning's session what are key factors of influence and I just listed a few here. Of course the new actors that are shaping our information experiences online we have put a lot of emphasis on that. Not so much actually and I'm a little bit surprised by that we didn't talk so much about social networking sites but maybe we'll come back to that later this afternoon social search engines have been certainly mentioned. Economic factors have been addressed arguably one could make the case that in the attention economy the incentives for misinformation may actually grow. We also talked quite a bit about the technological factors the logic of distribution as well as aggregation network effects affect the current information ecosystem in a way that is directly irrelevant with respect to the notion of quality. Then in the later part of the morning of course the discussion of the importance of the human psychological factors some of them even hardwired the role of emotion the role of the amygdala in our brain right but some of them of course also through learned behavior and socialization cultural biases and other aspects were helpfully highlighted this morning and perhaps we can think about the brainstorm about tools and design choices that shake things up a little bit especially where it's more learned behavior rather than hardwired biology. Charlie made a great point on the importance of the legal system how the legal environment shapes actually the notion of truth and other quality criteria in a very direct way but there are also indirect ways in which law shapes are in full quality environment. One thing I want to add or highlight is the data quality act you didn't mention that this morning but that's a piece of legislation that applies to federal agencies and tries to regulate the quality of information and data these agencies put out there and if you go back to this idea of open data and open government you see the relevance of that that's just kind of as a footnote an interesting way in which law can actually be helpful sometimes although Herbert Burkett, my friend summarized it at a different conference that information quality is the topic best to be avoided by law. A few words on methods what is really different than actually the stuff in Italic is what I think has changed in the digital environment is we have different methods and tools and techniques available to understand the phenomenon we're discussing today Jochai with his team did a great presentation how we can track the flow of information over time how we can map and analyze relationships of course the truthy tool that we had is a similar idea I think that was not possible to the same extent or at the same scale at least in the paper world but of course also as we learned this morning and when they all started with that provocation the tools and techniques of manipulation have also changed and of misinformation and finally and I'll return to that on the last slide of course also the methods of intervention what we can do about it we had several great ideas and starting points for sure addressed this morning very briefly only areas of application where truth matters and still matters of course there are many areas we could look into and given the contextuality of the information phenomenon I argue it's really important to not only have these kind of horizontal conversations as we have it today but get sector specific and look into different areas of course today we have a certain emphasis on news and political information we have also addressed the question of science and policy making and the importance of maintaining quality in those debates trade and commerce are another important area we talked a little bit Kathleen addressed the advertisement issue one that I would add is personal information personal well-being as including health information that is a key area where arguably these quality considerations are extremely important again last week we had here this conference on cyberbullying and other forms of problematic behavior online and there again you see the relevance of the same type of question about the quality of personal information finally intervention points finally in terms of the summary it's almost following the elastic framework for modes of regulation with of course technological means and tomorrow is the hackathon we'll certainly experiment with that can we create filters, aggregation tools how helpful can visualization techniques be to address some of the challenges to sort through the truthiness problem what are navigation aids for cyberspace but then also another key area we highlighted this morning the role of human beings the role of actually people doing fact-checking the potential and power of large-scale cooperation peer review mentioned by Jochagen but also the role of education and training of journalists more people, young people more broadly and Denise wrote the great piece on the blog leading up to this conference on this topic of course there may be also a emerging market for truth NGOs are playing a big role in that supported through foundations of course new types of information brokers emerge because obviously accurate information has a high value there is a broad range of instruments and also opportunities to think creatively about the use of market forces and incentives available we identified some of them and of course also finally being at a law school some legal topics these and legal strategies despite Herbert Burkert's words of warning truth in advertisement regulations seems to be kind of one possible contribution privacy laws also looking at recent White House roadmap with potential right to correct information if it's not correct personal information these are possible tools and instruments in the toolbox last slide challenges ahead from now from a research perspective first this morning confirmed my at least working hypothesis that we have a relatively good understanding already and insights into various bits and pieces that are highly relevant so take for instance what we know about the psychology of information processing or what we know about network analysis what we know about how for instance information travels in social networking sites but bringing these things together and develop some sort of holistic view and work towards a more comprehensive understanding and understand also the interplay among the factors including trade off seems to be a research challenge second challenge I would encourage all of us to think both strategically as well as pragmatically about where can we make a difference where can we improve the current ecosystem and what are strategies that we can apply longer term I would argue both one and two require the creation of spaces for experimentation and learning and also spaces where activists and researchers can meet and think together and in that sense I believe today's conference has been a great starting point so thank you for being here