Sitting in an ouzo bar late at night in Athens last Friday, I got asked by a colleague out-of-the-blue what my "vision" was. Never an easy question to answer whether enebriated or not (I wasn’t.) I think I replied something along the lines of, "Hey, how about that Acropolis!" Sitting on the subway this morning,…
Category: Information Society
Random Coolness: Your image as 1,024 fans or dancers
I was reading Torley’s always odd blog, which referred me to a cool Japanese site called www.madin.jp where you can transform any simple graphic into 1,024 very tiny people either dancing or holding up signs like at a ballgame. Or as Babelfish translates it: The device where the cheerful 1024 people of the systemic tights…
Save State of Play IV!
Just got a message from some of the organizers of the conference "State of Play IV" scheduled for January 7-9, 2007 in Singapore that they are in dire need of additional sponsors for the event. Organized by Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, New York Law School, Trinity University, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore,…
The Internet Governance Forum 2006 : A Tentative Success
As I write this I am flying back to New York from Athens where I attended the first ever Internet Governance Forum. It’s been a tremendous experience that I feel very fortunate to have been able to be a part of. What follows is a quick flyover of how the whole deal went down and…
My talk on “Intellectuals in the IGF”
David Allen of Collab CPR asked me to be on a panel on "Intellectuals in the IGF" in Athens, which I just finished speaking at. My role was to address some of the more practical possibilities of engaging academics more cohesively into the Internet Governance Forum, based on my experiences with the SSRC program on…
Machinima Fest Preview TONIGHT (8PM EST) in Laguna Beach theater!
Woo hoo! It’s tonight here! See you alls there!
Remote participation at the IGF: so remote that no one knows about it
The Internet Governance Forum has done an admirable job setting up in very short order a number of means for remote participation at the meetings, which conclude tomorrow. These include webcasting, a discussion forum, live text chat, email, SMS, blog aggregation, and even submissions via video! All admirable and welcome to see. The question being:…
Chinese rep: “we don’t have software blocking Internet sites.”
Yesterday, during the "openness" session at the Internet Governance Forum, there was a fascinating interchange among the panelists, the audience, and finally a member of the Chinese government delegation on the question of Chinese censorship of the Internet. The controversy kicked off with a representative of Rapporteurs Sans Frontieres, a group legendary for their media-stealing…
Dramatic example of network (in)security at IGF
There was a real world demonstration of the difficulties and dangers of network security at the session on security this afternoon. Someone, hopefully from the IGF secretariat, had set up a wifi network called "free_wifi_net" accessible in the conference plenary hall. The moderator noted in his introductory remarks that if you connected to this network,…
My talk on e-democracy and the IGF
I prepared a statement for the panel on "Internet Governance for Participation," which I just finished speaking at. Time was running short, so I gave the abridged version of this session. Here’s the complete presentation, which is entitled “Top-down, Middle Layer and Bottom-up e-Democracy”…