This year, the Berkman Center is celebrating its tenth anniversary. We’re spending the year, in part, reflecting on what we’ve learned in our first decade, where things stand now in our field, and where we ought to focus for our second decade. We’ll have a series of special events throughout the year, as well as a gala event from May 14 – 16, 2008. We hope very much to see lots of friends, old and new, over the course of the year.

We’ve also undertaken an effort this year to raise endowment-style funds for the Center to support our next ten years of operations. We’ve been very generously supported over the years, by the Berkman family and many others. Our mode has been not to have a permanent endowment, and we are not changing course in this regard, but rather we seek to raise funds on an entrepreneurial basis as we go along. We’re taking this tenth anniversary celebration as a time to achieve a bit more stability in our funding structure by raising funds to cover our core costs for our second decade.

We could not be happier that the MacArthur Foundation has decided to give us a $4 million award, our largest ever gift outside of the ongoing generosity of the Berkman family. This award from the MacArthur Foundation is the anchor to what we intend to make a successful effort to ensure that we have the resources to do our work even better in our second decade than we have in our first. I’m confident that the importance of the issues of Internet and society only grow more important and central to the lives of people around the world with each passing year.

The MacArthur Foundation has been exceptionally helpful to us on many levels as we go about our public-spirited work. The foundation’s president, Jonathan Fanton, the vice-president Elspeth Revere, and program officer John Bracken have contributed to our work in so many substantive and philanthropic ways. We’re extremely grateful.