Digest #24
There is a lot going on, so here is another digest. It starts with some feedback from the recent open consultations for the upcoming IGF. Then it includes links to some studies, including the recently released Berkman report on broadband policy and then to some interesting opinions about the role of content piracy in technology adoption and about the link between net neutrality and job creation. And of course, as usual, some fun stuff :)
On discourse and shaping of the information society
by Dima on February 15, 2010
in governance, interesting, internet governance, policy, research, society
There was a very interesting talk at the Berkman Center back in January. Julie Cohen, a law professor from Georgetown University, talked about her upcoming book “The Networked Self: Copyright, Privacy, and the Production of Networked Space.”
What I found particularly interesting about this talk is her attempt to introduce sociological literature into a predominantly legal debate. Her point of departure is the gap between the rhetoric of law and policy aimed at shaping the information society and the realities on the ground. For example, she points at the language of economic liberties as fueling the information society governance debate, but at the same time there are laws and regulations that significantly restrict those liberties being that through strong copyright or weak individual privacy protections. She also highlights that while the policy discourse is usually abstract, the individual’s interpretation of the law and his or her interaction with information and technology is very concrete and situated in a particular physical reality. Although she focuses on the policy debate in the US, I think her framework can be helpful in thinking about discourse and policymaking elsewhere.
Reaching across the disciplinary isle is not a trivial task and during Cohen’s talk at Berkman it was interesting to see how, during the Q&A, the lawyers in the room took her presentation to different directions from where I think it would go has she been giving her talk in a Communication or an STS departments. Yet, I think she did a very good job linking the abstract thinking of sociologists about the concrete actions of people to the concrete thinking of the legal scholars about the abstract concepts of the law. I view it is a part of a very important interdisciplinary dialogue we should have in the field and on purely selfish grounds it helps me to think about communicating the relevance of my dissertation research to the more “hard core” policy debate.
You are invited to watch the talk as well as to read its coverage on Ethan Zuckerman’s, David Weinberger’s, and John Palfrey’s blogs. In addition, I found a recent paper written by Julie Cohen, which provides an outline of her book (in case you don’t have the time to watch the video).
Enjoy!
Opportunities with approaching deadlines
by Dima on February 3, 2010
in opportunity
Just a couple of updates that can interest readers of this blog:
- Diplo Foundation Internet Governance Capacity Building Prorgam (deadline: Feb. 12)
- Berkman Center Summer Internship (deadline: March 5)
I was lucky enough to experience both of those opportunities and I am warmly recommend them.
More details and links for each of those opportunities can be found below.
Cretive Commons Monitor
I think if you are reading this blog, you must be familiar with Creative Commons (CC). But have you ever wondered how widely spread this license actually is? Well, there are people who are thinking about it and even started looking into the issue. Giorgos Cheliotis is one of them. He is currently a visiting scholar at Berkman and earlier this week he gave a talk about the CC Monitor project.
The project has been out there for three years, but the website is rather new and is still considered under development as the team is figuring out the best way to capture and analyze the use of CC licenses around the world. They have built an online (wiki-based) platform/repository which presents the raw data and some visualizations for others to use and think about. This is what global distribution of CC licenses looks like.
There are overall estimated 170,268,161 CC licenses in the world, but the map refers to a subset of them. It includes only the ported (i.e. jurisdiction specific) licenses – those that could be linked to a specific geographic location. Apparently, there are about 50 countries in the world that have strong CC communities who worked on translating and adopting the general licenses to the local jurisdiction.
The darker areas of the map correspond to the higher number of CC licenses in the country. Here is for example what Europe looks like once we zoom in:
If you go to the website, you can see the actual number once you hover over the map with your mouse. The way they collect these data is through counting back-links (or in-links) to specific CC deed pages (like this one). Of course it is not perfect, but it is more than what we had before and it is there for everyone to use. The idea behind the site is to build a “live data wiki”, which brings its own challenges such as the data being updated constantly, but not the analysis and the explanations.
On the wiki you can find data about the individual countries and also what they call “freedom scores”. These scores refers to the degree of openness of the licenses used in each place. As you may know, there are different types of licenses one can give to his or her work. This blog, for example, is licensed under by-nc-sa license, which would not score very high on the freedom scale (and I also need to fix things, so it would actually show here). Overall, this is what the world looks like in terms of openness of the CC licenses:
As before, the darker areas represent higher scores. You may want to take a look at this table comparing the scores of different countries side by side.
If you have the time, I suggest you watch the talk (I wish it was possible to embed videos from Berkman website :). Giorgos goes further into a case study, asking whether people utilize the CC licenses and actually work with the open content. I know that I learned a lot about CC that I did not know about before.
