Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society is aiming to go beyond the academic study of online life.
"The new model is not just reading what other people have written and then writing ourselves," says Jonathan Zittrain, executive director of the center. "We're going to be building sites and software."
Next week, the Berkman Center will announce a new co-branded effort with the New York-based webzine FEED to promote the center's second annual online conference, held from 26-29 May, by opening the gates of discourse at the event to the Net at large.
The panelists at the conference will represent a broad spectrum of heavy hitters from the worlds of business, law, education, and public policy, including Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems; Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies; Walt Disney "Imagineer" Danny Hillis; Larry Irving of the US Department of Commerce; Stacy Horn, the founder of Echo; Merrill Brown of MSNBC; and John Gilmore of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
FEED founder Steven Johnson will edit and introduce a series of essays written for the new site, which launches in the next couple of days and will be accessible from links at FEED and the Berkman Center's pages. Contributors will include Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community; Denise Caruso, technology reporter for The New York Times; open-source software pioneer Eric Raymond, and others. A new essay will be featured on the site each week through the end of July.
The idea is to build a standing resource for those interested in the future of the Net, rather than a throwaway promotional site. The essays will be embedded in FEED's conferencing software, The Loop, allowing readers to participate in dialogues with conference participants and other online readers.
The emphasis of the site's content, says Johnson, will be examining the online world from the perspective of "residents," rather than "pioneers."
"We had the first great wave of visionaries and boosterism, which was exciting and energizing," Johnson observes. "But now we've lived here for a while, and we have a lot of empirical evidence about how it works."
Essay topics will include privacy and trust online, ecommerce and the laws of increasing returns, the virtues of open-source software, and launching and maintaining online communities. Johnson hopes the site will become a "standard reference point" on these issues, pointing out that certain FEED dialogues from the past -- notably "Prohibition and Its Discontents," a roundtable on drug policy from December 1995 -- still pull in enough hits each week to rank in the site's top 30.
Jonathan Zittrain says the Center chose FEED to develop content for the site because the publication has "done an excellent job of cultivating a stable of writers ... who are some of the best minds chewing over cyberproblems on the Net."
FEED also has credibility among the two groups targeted for the conference, says Zittrain: "The edgy cybercrowd, including the academics, and the business crowd, who are still trying to master the meat and potatoes of the medium." Getting those two groups -- who "rarely talk to one another" -- to work on issues together is one of the ambitions of this year's conference, Zittrain says.
To broaden participation at the conference beyond Valley and Alley execs and academics, fees have been waived for representatives of various nonprofit groups, such as participants from Oxfam America, the University of Botswana, the Women in Trades and Technology Network, the Civil Services Academy in Pakistan, and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development.
Building the conference site is an experiment in irrigating a new revenue stream for FEED by marketing its writing and editing savvy, and expertise in building online communities, to clients who are a natural fit with FEED's own vision.
"There are a million Web design shops," Johnson says. "We're offering good old-fashioned editorial sensibility."
