A2J for Livelihood: Paid Crowdsourcing: Solution for Un(der)employment or Digital Sweatshop?

By Christina Gossmann

The outsourcing of in-house business operations has existed long before the advent of globalization in the 19^th century, but the more recent offshore outsourcing stories are the ones we remember today: cultural imperialism in Indian call centers, garment sweatshop still prevalent all over the world and suicide after suicide at Foxconn in Shenzhen. But within today’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry, knowledge, legal and particularly information technology-based business outsourcing have taken center stage. Not surprisingly, high and growing technology penetration rates in the Global South have not gone unnoticed among socially minded enterprises and the international development sector—which brings us to the ICT4D version of BPO: Impact Sourcing or “microwork.”

ICTs for the Sharing Economy

By Timothy Meyers

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Vietnam is among the 25 countries in the world with the greatest number of road fatalities per capita. A recent WHO report states the country has over 24 road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants per year, resulting from dense and long-lasting traffic patterns dominated by motorbikes. The rise in motorbikes has also brought a significant rise in air pollution. A 2012 study released during the World Economic Forum in Davos listed Vietnam among the top 10 countries with the worst air quality, and Hanoi as the most polluted city in Southeast Asia.

ICTs in Education and the Bottom Of Pyramid

By Ruchita Rathi

Education is the fundamental human right and there is a widespread consensus that it is the single most important investment that can lead to a greater social and financial mobility for an individual. Yet, globally there are a staggering 61 million primary-aged children out of school[1] . Progress in reducing this number has stalled for the first time since 2002 because of decreasing aids, according to UNESCO Institute for Statistics and Education for All Global Monitoring Report [2]

Top 5 Legal IT technologies for 2010 and 2011 in Review

This list from Jason Plant’s Blog (who is an IT expert who works in a law firm, who will post the 2012 list tomorrow) :

My 2010 list was as follows:

• Mobile Applications

• Search

• Office 2010/Windows 7

• Instant Messaging

• Speech Recognition

And then in 2011 was:

• Glue Tech

• Microsoft Lync

• YouTube

• Mobile Applications

• Office 2010 and Windows 7

And I love what he said about the pace of legal tech, which underscores the overall pace of change, adaptability and innovation in the industry:

"...it’s clear that things don’t move at a fast pace across the whole of Legal."

Legal Opinion delivered via Poetry

I read about this recent piece of brilliant poetry aka legal opinion on Martin Gramatikov's Access to Justice blog, and just had to share. This is an awesome twist to innovation in justice- using not new technology like cell phones or the internet (which we often blog about on this site), but old fashioned poetry. Admittedly, this judgement so much easier to read and understand than a typical legal document. Gives some food for thought about the dissemination of legal knowledge for legal empowerment- maybe we can have legal information in poetry via SMS!

(reproduced partially from the legal opinion of Commonwealth v. Goodson here):

In January, 2001, appellant’s car was in a collision.
His insurer totaled the aging New Yorker, then made a just division
of the value of the insurance claim, sending $6,289 to the lender;
the balance of $135, to appellant they made tender.

About the MetaLex Document Server for legal information

via Legal Informatics Blog by legalinformatics

Dr. Rinke Hoekstra of the University of Amsterdam's Leibniz Center for Law has posted The MetaLex Document Server, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School. In this post, Dr. Hoekstra describes the technology of the MetaLex Document Server, a new service that provides free public access to Read more of this post.

The Fail Faire DC 2011 Impact: A Renaissance of Failure in ICT4D

via ICTWorks by Wayan Vota on 10/24/11

Two weeks ago, ICTworks led the organization of Fail Faire DC, an amazing celebration of failure as a mark of leadership, innovation, and risk-taking in pushing the boundaries of what is possible in scaling ideas from pilots to global programs.

Our goal was to continue the Fail Faire movement started by Mobile Active, and make failure more acceptable in the international development community. So far, the impact of Fail Faire DC 2011 is greater than we anticipated. Yes, the event itself was amazing, and others agree, but more importantly, it spawned a greater conversation around failure and the need to fail if we are to expand our profession.

Here is a quick tour of the Fail Faire DC impact to date:

Conference on ICT4D Failures, with World Bank attending!

After last year's Fail Faire that I posted about, where the World Bank, among others, shared lessons learned about what has worked and what not in ICT4D, there is another one this year: Fail Faire DC 2011 - a celebration of failure on 13th October.

American Bar Association eLawyering Website

It's more than just a web presence- read the fundamentals of providing legal services over the internet, as well as innovative best practices (with a US-slant of course): 

From the American Bar Association eLawyering website:

"How can I practice law over the Internet?" This web site will help you find answers to that question.

eLawyering is doing legal work - not just marketing - over the Web. Pioneering practitioners have found dramatic new ways to communicate and collaborate with clients and other lawyers, produce documents, settle disputes, interact with courts, and manage legal knowledge. ELawyering encompasses all the ways in which lawyers can do their work using the Web and associated technologies. Think of lawyering as a "verb" - interview, investigate, counsel, draft, advocate, analyze, negotiate, manage, .. - and there are corresponding Internet-based tools and technologies.

There are exciting initiatives underway now that deserve attention by all lawyers - present and future. While admittedly just a subset of the vast legal technology world, eLawyering and its lawyer-less analogs present fundamental challenges for our profession. There are great dangers, but also great opportunities for attorneys in the coming decade. To be successful in the coming era, lawyers will need to know how to practice over the Web, manage client relationships in cyberspace, and ethically offer "unbundled" services.

Berkman Center Series 11 July 2011: Cultivating New voices, Approaches, and Audiences for national - and international - reporting in an era of global interconnectedness and shrinking news budgets

The Berkman Center will host a conversation about the challenges of reporting international stories to US and Global audiences. In an age of shrinking news budgets, American newspapers and broadcasters are producing less original reporting of international stories. And while gripping events like the Arab Spring capture the attention of the public, many important international stories fail to garner widespread attention. The challenges for international reporting are both ones of supply (who reports the news from around the world?) and demand (who pays attention?).

This conversation was inspired by Berkman Fellow Persephone Miel, whose work focused on how compelling narrative and context for international stories could make unfamiliar international news more accessible to American and global audiences. Her efforts to support and promote talented local, non-US journalists whose work has the potential for global impact, but who need to overcome significant obstacles to succeed, are continued through a fellowship established in her honor by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, in partnership with Internews. Journalists Fatima Tlisova (Voice of America) and Pulitzer Prize winner Dele Olojede will join Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman Center/Global Voices), Colin Maclay (Berkman Center), Ivan Sigal (Global Voices), Jon Sawyer (Pulizter Center) and the Miel family for a discussion and reflection on these questions, and on Persephone's work and the journalistic values she championed. URL: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/6927

Berkman webcast: Academic Uses of Social Media: Exploring 21st Century Communications Webcast Event

Tuesday, May 312:00-2:15pm
Webcast Event; the live webcast of this event will be available at the following URL: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcastat 12pm on 5/3
Co-sponsored by the Office of Faculty Development & Diversity at Harvard and the Harvard Office of News and Public Affairs

Social media — from blogs to wikis to tweets — have become academic media, new means by which scholars communicate, collaborate, and teach. Hear from a distinguished faculty panel, moderated by John Palfrey, about how they are adopting and adapting to new communication and networking tools, following a keynote by social media thought leader danah boyd.

Berkman Event: Building a More Diverse and Inclusive Legal Profession: A Call to Action Brad Smith, General Counsel of Microsoft

A new methodology for legal service delivery?

Thursday, April 15, 5:30 pm
Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School (Map)Free and Open to the Public
RSVP Required via the form below
Co-sponsored by the Harvard Law Program on the Legal Profession

The diversity of the legal profession continues to lag the diversity of the American population. Despite rising awareness of the issue over the last decade and even a number of well-intentioned efforts, progress has been slow. In this speech, Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith will make the case for more rapid progress, outline the types of practical steps that are needed at law firms and companies, and speak to new initiatives across the legal profession to make the next decade more successful.

About Brad

Berkman Event- Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Self-Branding in Web 2.0

Tuesday, March 29, 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.

In the mid-2000s, journalists and businesspeople heralded “Web 2.0” technologies such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook as signs of a new participatory era that would democratize journalism, entertainment, and politics. By the decade’s end, this idealism had been replaced by a gold-rush mentality focusing on status and promotion. While the rhetoric of Web 2.0 as democratic and revolutionary persists, I will contend that a primary use of social media is to boost user status and popularity, maintaining hierarchy rather than diminishing it. This talk focuses on three status-seeking techniques that emerged with social media: micro-celebrity, self-branding, and life-streaming. I examine interactions between social media and social life in the San Francisco “tech scene” to show that Web 2.0 has become a key aspect of social hierarchy in technologically mediated communities.

Berkman Event: An Optimization-Based Framework for Automated Market-Making

I am thinking of ways that this might be used for the delivery of legal services:

CRCS Lunch Seminar
Date: Monday, March 21, 2011
Time: 11:30am – 1:-00pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

While computers have automated the operation of most financial markets, the underlying mechanism was designed for people to operate it. It is simple, not necessarily efficient, and has room for improvement. This work is an endeavor to design efficient automated market-making mechanisms that take into consideration of the logical relationships of securities.

We propose a general framework for the design of securities markets over combinatorial or infinite state spaces. The framework enables the design of computationally efficient markets tailored to an arbitrary, yet relatively small, space of securities with bounded payoff. We prove that any market satisfying a set of intuitive conditions must price securities via a convex cost function, which is constructed via conjugate duality. Rather than dealing with an exponentially large or infinite outcome space directly, our framework only requires optimization over a convex hull. By reducing the problem of automated market-making to convex optimization, where many efficient algorithms exist, we arrive at a range of new polynomial-time pricing mechanisms for various problems. We demonstrate the advantages of this framework with the design of some particular markets. We also show that by relaxing the convex hull we can gain computational tractability without compromising the market institution’s bounded budget.

This talk is based on joint work with Jacob Abernethy and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan.

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.

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.

Berkman Event 9 Nov 2011: Chair Lecture: The Path of Legal Information

Chair Lecture: The Path of Legal Information

John Palfrey, Henry N. Ess Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School & Berkman Center Faculty Co-Director

Tuesday, November 9th, 5:00PM
Harvard Law School
Space is limited; RSVP *Required* to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu)

On the occasion of his appointment as the Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law, John Palfrey will give a lecture entitled, “The Path of Legal Information.”

Abstract
I propose a path toward a new legal information environment that is predominantly digital in nature. This new era grows out of a long history of growth and change in the publishing of legal information over more than nine hundred years years, from the early manuscripts at the roots of English common law in the reign of the Angevin King Henry II; through the early printed treatises of Littleton and Coke in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, (including those in the extraordinary collection of Henry N. Ess III); to the systemic improvements introduced by Blackstone in the late eighteenth century; to the modern period, ushered in by Langdell and West at the end of the nineteenth century. Now, we are embarking upon an equally ambitious venture to remake the legal information environment for the twenty-first century, in the digital era.

berkman Series: Becoming a Networked Nonprofit

Tuesday, October 5, 12:30 pm

Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor

Many nonprofit organizations have dipped their toes into the set-me-free world powered by social media, but too many still have trepidations about turning their organizations inside out to take full advantage of the new tools. The Networked Nonprofit, a new bestselling book by leading bloggers and thinkers, Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, enables organizations to overcome their fears of losing control and evolve to meet the informational and cultural needs of today's donors and volunteers. In their research, Allison and Beth discovered that the organizations that are immersed in social media — whether they are created that way or are becoming so — look and act more like social organizations than traditional organizations. They will discuss the myths and realities that make organizations leery of opening themselves up, and they’ll share specific stories of how other organizations have been successful in doing so. 

Berkman Event: I'm in the Database, but Nobody Knows

Tuesday, September 28, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floorRSVP required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu)

This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.
Co-hosted by Harvard's Center for Research on Computation and Society

A statistical database provides statistical information about a population, while maintaining the privacy of individuals in the database. A popular interpretation of this statement, due to Dalenius, says that "anything learnable about an individual, given access to the database, can be learned without access to the database." In non-technical terms, we will discuss why any such definition is problematic, and suggest an alternate notion of privacy for statistical databases, differential privacy, that arises naturally from an observation about the impossibility argument.

A thriving research effort has produced high-quality differentially private solutions for a wide range of data analysis tasks. We will try to give a feel for the broad spectrum of things that can be done by accessing information through a privacy-preserving programming interface. Finally, we will touch on some privacy problems arising in the context of behavioral targeting that are not addressed by this approach, and pose some questions about mitigation.