1950 University Ave, Suite 200
Berkeley, California 94704

(Free and open to the public - and followed at 4pm with a Social Jam that includes refreshments - and beer. It would be helpful if you mark attending/watching above).

Designing Civic Software

ABSTRACT:
We are witnessing the emergence of decentralized groups without formal organizations emerging to solve complex social problems and take action in the world together. In groups people can accomplish what they cannot do alone. New visual and social technologies are making it possible for people not only to create community but also to wield power and create rules to govern their own affairs. This presentation will focus on technology and the opportunity for collective action, particularly on the emerging frameworks -- both technological and legal -- for "collective visualization" which will profoundly reshape the ability of people to make decisions, own and dispose of assets, organize, protest, deliberate, dissent and resolve disputes together. By looking at several examples, including the design of "Peer to Patent" and the Visual Company (http://dotank.nyls.edu ). We will discuss the process of digital institution design that melds legal code and software code to address how institutions respond to the growth of networks. In so doing, we will not only address how technology is used in our democracy but how it might change what we ultimately come to define as democracy.

BIOGRAPHY:
Beth Noveck is a professor of law and director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and a visiting professor at the Department of Communication, Stanford. She also runs the Democracy Design Workshop, an interdisciplinary "do tank" dedicated to deepening democratic practice through technology design. Prof. Noveck teaches in the areas of e-government and e-democracy, intellectual property, innovation, and constitutional law. Her research and design work lie at the intersection of technology and civil liberties and are aimed at building digital democratic institutions through the application of both legal code and software code. She is the designer of online civic projects, including Community Patent Review: "Peer to Patent", Unchat, Cairns and Democracy Island (see http://dotank.nyls.edu ) and is the author and editor of numerous books and articles, including the book series Ex Machina: Law, Technology and Society (NYU Press). She is the founder of the annual conference “The State of Play: Law & Virtual Worlds,” cosponsored by New York Law School, Harvard, and Yale Law School. Formerly a telecommunications and information technology lawyer practicing in New York City, Professor Noveck graduated from Harvard University and earned a J.D. from Yale Law School. After studying as a Rotary Foundation graduate fellow at Oxford University, she earned a doctorate at the University of Innsbruck with the support of a Fulbright. She (and her students) blog at http://cairns.typepad.com

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Yahoo! Research Berkeley's Brain Jam is an "almost weekly" speaker series on topics related to media, social media, mobile media, media annotation, and the leftist media. Well, maybe not the last one. To join our mailing list, please visit:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/yrb-bj/

Official Website: http://whyrb.com

Added by berkeleybohemian on February 6, 2007