Berkman Event: Whose choice? ICTs for “development” and the lives people value

ICT4D debates by Dorothea Kleine, Lecturer at the UNESCO Chair/Centre in ICT4D, Royal Holloway, University of London

Tuesday, February 15, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

Recognising that ICTs are powerful tools shaping people’s everyday lives, practitioners, policy-makers and academics in the ICT for development (ICT4D) field engage with these technologies in the name of “development”. Yet understandings of development differ and too often remain implicit and removed from participatory processes involving the intended users. Techno-euphoria and the focus on universal access distracts from the very individual choices people should have to integrate technologies in their everyday practices (or not). Working with Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach and its view of development as freedom, this open conversation will discuss the diverse and potentially conflicting ideologies embedded in state ICT policies and technical artefacts and the intended and unintended consequences. It will explore potential technological and process innovations which could lead to more participatory decision-making on policy and technology design – an area where all countries can be classified as “developing”.

Berkman Webcast: The Internet, Young Adults and Political Participation around the 2008 Presidential Elections

Something that developing countries can learn from best practices, especially in light of Uganda's elections which is close to my hear now?

Tuesday, February 22, 12:30 pmBerkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

How are online and offline political activities linked? Using data collected soon after the 2008 presidential elections on a diverse group of young adults from Obama's home city of Chicago, this presentation will look at the relationship of online and offline political engagement. Thanks to detailed information about political participation, political capital and Internet uses in addition to people's demographic and socioeconomic background, we are able to consider the relative importance of numerous factors in who was more or less likely to vote and engage in other types of political action.

The Potential of Mobile Justice

A brief overview of why technology might help in justice, by Kate Krontiris (reproduced from the Huffington Post), where she identified the following three arguments for matching technology to justice.

• First, there are technologies that can help a developing country leapfrog from no access to justice to some access to justice.
• Second, these new technologies are not hard to use, are becoming ubiquitous in even the most remote corners of the globe, and are cheaper than ever to implement.
• Finally, tech interventions focused toward one issue often have significant secondary benefits. 

Article follows

Call for Papers - University of Amsterdam 7th Annual Competition & Regulation Meeting: Competition Policy for Emerging Economies: When and How?

ACLE Conference - Call for Papers

The Amsterdam Center for Law &Economics at the University of Amsterdam organizes its 7th annual Competition & Regulation meeting on the topic: Competition Policy for Emerging Economies: When and How?

May 20, 2011
University of Amsterdam

The objective of this meeting is to bring together renowned specialists in emerging competition law enforcement and its interrelationship to economic development in conference to debate. We also welcome practitioners with a keen interest in this specialty subject, including (new) agency officials, government officials interested in competition policy as a development aid tool, competition lawyers and consultants and scholars working on these research topics.

Berkman Event 25 Jan 2011: Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human

Tuesday, January 25, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

Ethan Zuckerman, Hal Roberts, and Jillian C. York will discuss the recently released Berkman Center report on "Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites.

About the DDoS Paper
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is an increasingly common Internet phenomenon capable of silencing Internet speech, usually for a brief interval but occasionally for longer. In this paper, we explore the specific phenomenon of DDoS attacks on independent media and human rights organizations, seeking to understand the nature and frequency of these attacks, their efficacy, and the responses available to sites under attack. Our report offers advice to independent media and human rights sites likely to be targeted by DDoS but comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that there is no easy solution to these attacks for many of these sites, particularly for attacks that exhaust network bandwidth.