blog

Regulating Search Dec 3rd 2005

Search is big business, and search functionality increasingly shapes the information society. Yet how the law treats search is still up for grabs, and with it, the power to dominate the next generation of the online world. How will this potential to wield control affect search engine companies, their advertisers, their users, or the information they index? What will search engines look like in the future, and what is the role of regulators in this emerging market? This symposium will map out the terrain of search engine law & policy.

Regulating Search? is the first academic conference devoted to search engines and the law. The symposium will bring together technologists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, executives, lawyers, computer scientists, and activists to discuss the emerging field of search engine law. It will examine trends in litigation involving search engines, identify the interests that are implicated by the increasing legal control of search, and discuss appropriate public policy responses.

For full details and registration

Moving to Yale

I'm moving from Ithaca to assume a postion as a resident fellow at the Yale Information Society Project
where i'll be working on my 'open world' research.

POSA 1.0

*The Politics of Open Source Adoption*
Read – Contribute – Win!

Over here you can find a real-time history report about the politics of open source software adoption (POSA).

POSA 1.0 was ponsored by The Social Science Research Council that invites anyone to contribute. This version includes contributions from myself as well as
Gabriella Coleman, Kenneth Cukier, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh,
Eugene Kim, Volker Grassmuck, Bildad Kagai, Nicolas Kimolo, and Jennifer
Urban, and is edited by Joe Karaganis (SSRC) and Robert Latham (SSRC).

Our project begins with the observation that accounts of the Free and/or
Open Source Software (F/OSS) movement, to date, have been oriented
mostly by the improbable fact of F/OSS’s existence. At this stage of
F/OSS development and advocacy, we want to ask a different set of
questions—not how open source works as a social and technical project,
or whether open source provides benefits in terms of cost, security,
etc., but rather how open source is becoming embedded in political
arenas and policy debates. For our purposes, understanding the
‘politics of adoption’ means stepping back from the task of explaining
or justifying F/OSS in order to ask how increasingly canonical
explanations and justifications are mobilized in different political
contexts. POSA 1.0 maps many of the different kinds of political and
institutional venues in which F/OSS adoption is at stake. It tries to
understand important institutional actors within those venues, and the
ways in which arguments for and against F/OSS are framed and advanced.
It seeks to clarify the different opportunities and constraints facing
F/OSS adoption in different sectors and parts of the world. It is an
inevitably partial account that--we hope--can be extended and deepened
by other participants in these processes. We invite your help in
preparing POSA 2.0.

To sweeten the pot, two prizes of $250 will be awarded to the best
contributions to POSA 2.0