Person:

Gasser, Urs

Reflecting on the 25th anniversaries of the invention of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the adoption of the Convention on Rights of the Child by the US General Assembly, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and UNICEF co-hosted in April 2014 — in collaboration with PEW Internet, EU Kids Online, the Internet Society (ISOC), Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), and YouthPolicy.org — a first of its kind international symposium on children, youth, and digital media to map and explore the global state of relevant research and practice, share and discuss insights and ideas from the developing and industrialized world, and encourage collaboration between participants across regions and continents.

With a particular focus on voices and issues from the Global South, the symposium addressed topics such as inequitable access, risks to safety and privacy, skills and digital literacy, and spaces for participation, and civic engagement and innovation. The event also marked the launch of Digitally Connected — an initiative that brings together academics, practitioners, young people, activists, philanthropists, government officials, and representatives of technology companies from around the world who, together, are addressing the challenges and opportunities children and youth encounter in the digital environment. More information about the network (as well as the launch symposium) is available.

This book is one contribution by this growing, global network of collaborators and consists of two parts. The first part brings together a series of reflection pieces in form of short essays written by friends and colleagues who attended the Digitally Connected symposium at Harvard University. The second part consists of a collection of stories, art, and digital media by youth about their experiences online. These creative pieces were submitted through an open call, which consisted of 10 prompts youth could reflect upon.

The contributions in this book reflect the diversity of ideas and perspectives that form the core and spirit of Digitally Connected. Some of the reflection pieces are closely connected to issues discussed at the symposium, others reflect more generally on personal observations and/or opinions, or highlight and discuss insights and learnings from specific studies or concrete projects. By making these reflection pieces and the youth work available to the expanding Digitally Connected network as well as the public at large, we hope to continue and further stimulate the global conversation about both the challenges and opportunities children and youth encounter in the digital environment.

The article examines the role of the Internet in facilitating voting in Switzerland. It notes that Internet voting was first implemented in 2003 as a pilot project for the municipal referendum of the Anièeres commune in Geneva. Observers attribute the success of Internet voting in Geneva to several factors including easier authentication through a centralized electronic registry, the establishment of a legal framework that allowed collaboration with the municipality, and the proven track-record of remote voting practice among its citizens.

We live in a quicksilver technological environment where one innovation in information and communication technology (ICT) follows the other. From a user’s perspective, the speed of innovation in the Internet age becomes particularly visible when looking at ever-changing hardware devices that enable instant access to information, knowledge, and entertainment, or when navigating the rapidly evolving social media space where new platforms and powerful services emerge periodically, like Instagram, Pinterest, and Quora.

Many of today’s trends and developments in the ICT space are powered by a less visible and arguably more evolutionary innovation at the lower layers of the ICT infrastructure: cloud computing. It describes a multi-faceted technological phenomenon in which important aspects of computing (such as information processing, communication, networking, data acquisition, storage, and analysis) move from local systems to more efficient, outsourced systems where third parties provide aggregated computational resources and services on an as-needed basis from remote locations. Cloud computing is arguably responsible, at least in part, for the speed at which new social platforms are being developed and brought to market.

This paper starts with a brief introduction to and framing of cloud computing as both a technological innovation and innovation-enabling technology – in short: cloud innovation. It then focuses on one particular aspect of the emerging cloud computing ecosystem by describing and discussing the legal and regulatory responses to cloud technology. It ends with general observations regarding the design of interfaces between cloud innovation as an example of an innovative and innovation-enabling technology and the legal and regulatory system.

The paper builds upon and aims to synthesize previous contributions by the author and his collaborators on cloud law and policy issues on the one hand and pattern recognition in ICT regulation on the other hand. Against this backdrop, the paper seeks not only to distill and share insights about the interplay between cloud computing technology and the legal and regulatory system, but also contribute to a broader understanding of and emerging analytical framework for technology regulation in digitally networked environments.

This publication includes a series of short essays that offer interesting, alternative, exciting, sobering, unusual, out-of-the box perspectives, observations, or reflections at the intersection of news, digital media, and youth - broadly defined.

The contributions in this publication reflect the diversity of ideas and perspectives that form the core and spirit of the Berkman community. Some of the essays are closely connected to specific research and publications conducted by the Youth and Media team (www.youthandmedia.org) at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, others reflect more generally on personal observations and/or opinions, or highlight and discuss insights and learnings from other studies or concrete projects.

This paper synthesizes a set of twelve case studies of real-world governance structures. Together with the underlying case studies, it is the result of a globally coordinated, independent academic research pilot project by the Global Network of Interdisciplinary Internet & Society Research Centers (NoC). Facilitated by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, this study examines existing multistakeholder governance groups with the goal of informing the evolution of — and current debate around — the future evolution of the Internet governance ecosystem in light of the NETmundial Principles and Roadmap, discussions at the Internet Governance Forum, and the NETmundial Initiative, as well as other forums, panels, and committees.

Internet governance is an increasingly complex concept that operates at multiple levels and in different dimensions, making it necessary to have a better understanding of both how multistakeholder governance groups operate and how they best achieve their goals. With this need in mind, at a point where the future of Internet governance is being re-envisioned, this project aims to deepen our understanding of the formation, operation, and critical success factors of governance groups (and even challenge conventional thinking) by studying a geographically diverse set of local, national, and international governance models, components, and mechanisms from within and outside of the sphere of Internet governance, with a focus on lessons learned.

The research effort is grounded in a diversity of global perspectives and collaborative research techniques. Adhering to objective and independent academic standards, it aspires to be useful, actionable, and timely for policymakers and stakeholders. More broadly, the Network of Centers seeks to contribute to a more generalized vision and longer-term strategy for academia regarding its roles in research, facilitation and convening, and education in and communication about the Internet age.

On September 24-25, 2013, the Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data project at Harvard University held a workshop titled "Integrating Approaches to Privacy across the Research Data Lifecycle." Over forty leading experts in computer science, statistics, law, policy, and social science research convened to discuss the state of the art in data privacy research. The resulting conversations centered on the emerging tools and approaches from the participants’ various disciplines and how they should be integrated in the context of real-world use cases that involve the management of confidential research data.

Researchers are increasingly obtaining data from social networking websites, publicly-placed sensors, government records and other public sources. Much of this information appears public, at least to first impressions, and it is capable of being used in research for a wide variety of purposes with seemingly minimal legal restrictions. The insights about human behaviors we may gain from research that uses this data are promising. However, members of the research community are questioning the ethics of these practices, and at the heart of the matter are some difficult questions about the boundaries between public and private information. This workshop report, the second in a series, identifies selected questions and explores issues around the meaning of “public” in the context of using data about individuals for research purposes.

Governments from Bogota to Beijing are engaging with emerging cloud computing technologies and its industry in a variety of overlapping contexts. Based on a review of a representative number of advanced cloud computing strategies developed by governments from around the world, including the United States, United Kingdom, the European Union, and Japan, we observed that these governments – mostly implicitly – have taken on several different “roles” with respect to their approaches to cloud computing. In particular, we identify six distinguishable but overlapping roles assumed by governments: users, regulators, coordinators, promoters, researchers, and service providers. In this paper, we describe and discuss each of these roles in detail using examples from our review of cloud strategies, and share high-level observations about the roles as well as the contexts in which they arise. The paper concludes with a set of considerations for policymakers to take into account when developing approaches to the rapidly evolving cloud computing technologies and industry.