In their new book, “The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance,” Stephen Goldsmith, the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government at Harvard Kennedy School HKS, and Susan Crawford, the John A. Reilly Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property at Harvard Law School HLS, offer a road map for managers who want to move beyond the traditional silos of urban government. By embracing the latest tools, like fiber connectivity and predictive data analytics, they posit, the city hall of the future could radically reshape how local government serves its citizens, improving both civic life and trust.

via Disrupting city hall | Harvard Gazette.

The study, authored by researcher Bruce Etling at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is one of the first serious explorations of Russian, Ukrainian and English language social media content regarding the turmoil there over the last eleven months.

“Our general reading of newspapers and traditional media about the protests was that Russian speakers tended to disapprove [of the protests] and Ukrainian and English speakers tended to approve, and that would then just bleed into social media,” Etling said. “We wanted to see if that was what really happened.”

via Harvard Study Shows Russian-speaking Ukrainians Backing Kyiv.

“The real risk here is the second-order effects,” Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said. “The Court may have established a perfectly reasonable test in this case. But then what happens if the Brazilians come along and say, ‘We want only search results that are consistent with our laws’? It becomes a contest about who can exert the most muscle on Google.” Search companies might decide to tailor their search results in order to offend the fewest countries, limiting all searches according to the rules of the most restrictive country. As Zittrain put it, “Then the convoy will move only as fast as the slowest ship.”

via Google and the Right to Be Forgotten.

If we have kill switches on consumer products, why don’t we have them on military weaponry? Jonathan Zittrain is the Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and he argues we should have a way to disable dangerous weapons at a distance.

Military kill switches | Spark with Nora Young | CBC Radio.

Internet scholars and activists gathered at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard on Tuesday to discuss the right to choose how identity is presented online. The discussion was led by aestetix, an activist for pseudonymity on the Web.

via Online identity matters: Facebook, Ello, and the right to pseudonyms | BetaBoston.

“The platforms that host that content can’t readily police all of it the way that a newspaper can carefully select what should go in as a letter to the editor,” says Harvard University Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain, who is also co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Some pre-screening of content is still done. YouTube prevents some video from being posted through a copyright-screening tool that was created after Google took over.

via Stolen photos of stars find ‘safe harbor’ online – San Jose Mercury News.

MIT Researcher Wants to Master the Art of Online Partying.
He’s pooling ideas from people around the country about the best ways to have a good time—even when you’re not in the same room.

But Willow Brugh, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, who advised the organizers of the M.I.T. event, said that while public-interest hackathons are often very good at publicizing technical and social problems and generating novel ideas for solving them, hackathon success is no guarantee of commercial success.

via Hacking the Breast Pump – The New Yorker.

Berkman’s Judith Donath and Zeynep Tufekci on “What does it mean when the culture of nerds and techies becomes mainstream?”

Be Careful of the Consumer Side of Geek Culture – NYTimes.com.

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society held a kickoff event for its Digital Problem Solving Initiative, a year-long program that brings together students and mentors from across the University to solve campus-wide issues through technology, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Gutman Library on Thursday.

via Berkman Center Kicks Off Digital Problem Solving Initiative | News | The Harvard Crimson.