The final day of our three-day swing through the UK, the second annual
Global Voices conference, was invigorating.  The team of 75+ who
assembled — bloggers and editors from around the world, actor Richard
Dreyfuss, academics like us, the executives from Reuters and
foundations like MacArthur and Soros who are supporting it — comprise
an amazing crew. 

What I found most interesting was the change in tone from last
year.  At the first GV conference a December ago, the idea seemed
intriguing but a bit far out, unfinished.  Today, with 300,000
unique visitors per month and a BOB award as the world’s best
journalistic blog, GV is already an institution.  Its existence
seems obvious, necessary, sensible.  The issues are no longer “how
could we get this off the ground?” and more about the tricky things
that come with success, about growth, about sustainability. 
Amazing what difference a year makes.

Here’s Ethan’s post; here’s what the Guardian’s Jane Perrone said about it; and Rebecca, from the vantage point before the conference.  The live-blog notes are amazingly extensive.

Today we’re 50 miles south of Oxford, in London, near Paddington, for a
small-group session on Internet, filtering, blogging, and human
rights.  It’s amazing group that brings some of the global voices
crowd — gathered here for GV II tomorrow — together with human rights
activists and technologists from the OpenNet Initiative. 
The idea is for those of us who study Internet filtering and
surveillance to learn more from those who do human rights work in the
field and a chance to share some of our research, as well as the
learnings of the GB crowd, with some people who might be able to learn
from it.  We’re especially grateful for the support and funding
from the MacArthur Foundation for this work and to our partners at
Human Rights Watch for their leadership on the HR front.

Today starts a three-day swing through the UK by those of us at the
Berkman Center who work on issues related to Internet &
democracy. 

* Today, we’re with our partners at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII)
with about 25 scholars and activists who work on e-Participation. 
The events officially kicked off with a public session at Said Business
School here at Oxford, when Prof. Stephen Coleman delivered an address
on “E-Participation and Power: the Copper Wire and the
Electricity.”  Zephyr Teachout represented us at the Berkman
Center as a respondent; Alex Allen, Permanent Secretary of the
Department of Constitutional Affairs in the UK, also responded.

* Tomorrow, in London, along with Human Rights Watch, we are hosting a session on Internet filtering and human rights. 

* On Saturday, we’re at the Reuters HQ in London’s Canary Wharf for
Global Voices II, the second summit for the extraordinary group of
people who have come together to create what I think is the best world
news blog out there.

These events are meant to be part of the ongoing conversation around
Internet & democracy.  Our last major effort in this regard
was the Internet & Society 2004 conference, “Votes, Bits, and
Bytes,” on which these efforts in the UK are meant to follow
up.  We are very grateful to eBay for its ongoing support of this
series, and to Omidyar Network, the MacArthur Foundation, and Reuters
for their support for the next three days.

Right now, Stephen Ward is setting the stage with a review of the scholarship on e-Participation to date.

In a non-Berkman project, I’ve been working with an exceptional team of people to create something I think is cool: Top 10 Sources,
which we are releasing today. 

One of the unexpected parts of
developing this site was Dan Bricklin’s work in writing up a piece on “The Genre of Podcasting” — an unexpected bonus, and timely, as the history of podcasting is a raging debate at the moment. 

One of the things I’m proudest of related to the Berkman Center is that one of the first, if not the first, series of podcasts grew out of the work here of then-fellows Dave Winer and Christopher Lydon.  This is a story that needs to be told right, wherever it might be redacted.  We should work on it.

The General Counsel of Microsoft, Brad Smith, is here in Ames Courtroom
at Harvard Law School tonight.  He offers a wide range of
insights, geared fittingly to the many students here thinking about how
their careers will unfold over the next half-century, about the future
of the Internet, software, and innovation.  Three jump out in
particular:

* INNOVATION: After praising the historic role of the patent system in
the United States, he called for patent reform to improve the quality
of the USPTO review of prospective patents and restriction of abuses of
the patent litigation system.  He notes that MSFT spends $100+ on
defending against patent lawsuits.

* CONSUMER CONFIDENCE:  He’s called for fundamental privacy
legislation.  He’d like to see a national law that ensures
transparency for consumers as to information collected about them,
allows for access to that information, and puts consumers in control of
what’s done with it.  (These things tie up with the work that
we’ve been doing with the Identity Metasystems project, led by John
Clippinger and part and parcel of the Identity Gang.  Mr. Smith
also calls for security standards for consumer data.  A fine
lawyer himself, he cites MacPherson v. Buick,
a 1916 case which established product liability in the automobile
industry as part of the trajectory toward consumer confidence in their
industry.

* INDUSTRY COLLABORATION: He notes that the industry has come to a
stage in its development where collaboration is essential across
firms.  The history of the railroad provides a nice illustration,
he argues.  Individuals need to be able to communicate in a much
more seamless way.  Interoperability has become essential to the
computing industry, and to Microsoft in particular.  “Change we
have,” he says.  Coop-etition, is the new watchword.  Firms
should still differentiate themselves, but should also find ways to
collaborate.  He’s got the chops to make this statement, as the
man who has negotiated an end to many of the anti-trust hassles the
company has faced and corresponding protocol-related collaboration
schemes.  He sees a bridge that will be built between the open
source and proprietary software development communities — both of
which, he says, are here to say.

I’m eager to ask him what he thinks of the great news announced by his colleague Ray Ozzie.

We’ve got the great fortune of Microsoft’s General Counsel, Brad Smith,
visiting with us today.  Tonight, (Monday, November 28, 2005), Mr.
Smith is offering a public lecture
from 5:00 – 6:30 p.m. in Ames Courtroom on the Harvard Law School
campus.  “Lecture” is the wrong word for it — he’s eager to have
an open session to discuss the future of the Internet, software, and
all good things with students, faculty, fellows, and staff alike. 
We’re delighted to be co-sponsoring this event with our friends from
the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology.  It is rare to have
such terrific access to one of the top technology lawyers in the
world.  Please join us tonight and bring your questions.

Scripting News’ Dave Winer and Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie have today co-announced what promises to be a huge innovation in the RSS and OPML space, called SSE.   Here is Ray Ozzie’s introduction to the announcement.  In his blog-post, he describes a calendaring problem that certainly resonates.  The spec is here. 

To my lawyer’s mind, best of all, they’ve used a Creative Commons license under which to release the SSE spec, just as with the RSS 2.0 spec itself, (formerly held in copyright by Userland).  Bravo, Microsoft, and Dave, no doubt their guiding light in getting there.

A generally good, clear piece
by Fortune senior writer Marc Gunther tackling the important question
of the ethics of companies and
their involvement in the world’s most repressive regimes from an
informational policy standpoint.  There are many subtleties
between the types of involvement of the companies named in the article,
though.  We need a reliable framework through which to assess and
discuss the nature and extent of US technology firms in the censorship
practices of other states around the world.

I’m sitting between Jack Balkin and Mark McKenna, and across from
Jonathan Zittrain’s face on a television screen, at a
beautifully-organized conference at the Washington University School of
Law in St. Louis.  The topic is the First Amendment and the
Rehnquist Court.  JZ is giving a cool variant of his generativity
story. 

If you haven’t seen it, check out the new draft of JZ’s paper on SSRN; it is a must
read and will be appearing in 2006 in the Harvard Law Review.  To me, just as we refer to Lessig’s Code, and Benkler’s
layers model and peer production riff, and Balkin’s democratic culture
pieces, we will look to JZ’s generativity model in cyberlaw as a
critically important next step in the scholarship.

Tom Nachbar of Virginia is responding to our presentations with an
argument about how “end-to-end is deceptively free.”  If e2e is
really about choice, he says, we should be more concerned about the
“how” of where decision-making related to information policy (Balkin’s
term) than about the specific decisions (or the codification of any
specific policy, even e2e itself).  It’s more a matter of process,
he contends, than it is of substantive policy.