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Category Archives: People

Vote Suppression in a Digital Age

Essay by Tova Andrea Wang A version of this piece was published in the Miami Herald on October 19, 2008. It is based on a recently released report: “Deceptive Practices 2.0 Legal and Policy Responses” written by Common Cause, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law and the Century Foundation.* In the last several […]

Is the lack of web link and search engine accountability the elephant in the room of online reputation?

Essay by Chris Dellarocas. Continue the conversation on online reputation with Judith Donath The majority of debate on online reputation and free speech has focused on questions that relate to content authorship and hosting (see for example, this book and related discussion here, here and here). There has been far less discussion about the responsibilities […]

Is reputation obsolete?

Essay by Judith Donath. Continue the conversation on online reputation with Chris Dellarocas. In the past, most conversations were ephemeral: spoken words quickly slipped into the past, resurrected only if a listener later repeated them from memory. Today, many discussions and transactions live on indefinitely. Online conversations are often permanently archived and events in the […]

Why Politics and Institutions (Still) Matter for ICT4D

essay by Aaron Shaw, a reply to Ken Banks Ken Banks’ provocative contribution to the Publius Project, “One Missed Call” boldly urges the ICT for Development (ICT4D) community to look beyond bureaucracy-heavy, top-down solutions to global poverty and inequality. In a similar spirit, my response to Ken’s piece will take the form of a question, […]

One Missed Call?

Refocusing our attention on the social mobile long tail Essay By Ken Banks, Founder, kiwanja.net In “The White Man’s Burden – Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good”, William Easterly’s frustration at large-scale, top-down, bureaucracy-ridden development projects runs to an impressive 384 pages. While Easterly […]

The Right to Privacy. Again.

Essay by Dembitz A response to John Clippinger’s On Technology, Security, Personhood And Privacy: An Appeal Continue the conversation with Beau Brendler, Michael Barrett, and David Clark. Our identities in the online world are as real and as significant as our identities in the physical world. Our friendships are formed through the personal details we […]

How I Learned to Stop Worrying about New Media Literacy and Love the Internet

Essay by Evgeny Morozov A response to Dan Gillmor’s Principles of a New Media Literacy Continue the conversation with Daisy Pignetti. While it offers a useful general perspective on the future of media literacy, Dan Gillmor’s essay doesn’t fully answer some of the most fundamental questions about the relationship between education, media, and democracy. Let […]

Cybercrime – and what we will have to do if we want to get it under control

Essay By Michael Barrett with companion pieces by Beau Brendler and David Clark. Continue the security conversation with John Clippinger and Dembitz. As I write this, in the spring of 2008, we have recently passed a milestone – on April 22nd, 1993, Mosaic 1.0 was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) . […]

The Good Governance Mix

Essay by Charlie Leadbeater, a response to Tacit Governance by David Weinberger. One of the outstanding features of David Weinberger’s writing about the web is his unwillingness to fall into the trap of making all or nothing, simple dichotomies. More than anyone writing about the web he understands and enjoys its miscellaneous messiness. So I […]

Opening Access in a Networked Science

Essay by Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, a response to The Opening of Science and Scholarship by Peter Suber Some researchers can’t use their own scholarship anymore because, in order to be published, they assigned all their rights without being aware of the implications of the exclusive terms of their initial agreements with their publishers. They […]