October 9, 2024

Come Join Us Next Spring

It’s been an exciting summer here at the Center for Information Technology Policy. On Friday, we’ll be moving into a brand new building. We’ll be roughly doubling our level of campus activity—lectures, symposia and other events—from last year. You’ll also see some changes to our online activities, including a new, expanded Freedom to Tinker that will be hosted by the Center and will feature an expanded roster of contributors.

One of our key goals is to recruit visiting scholars who can enrich, and benefit from, our community. We’ve already lined up several visitors for the coming year, and will welcome them soon. But we also have space for several more. With the generous support of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, we are able to offer limited support for visitors to join us on a semester basis in spring 2009. The announcement, available here, reads as follows:

CITP Seeks Visiting Faculty, Fellows or Postdocs for Spring 2009 Semester

The Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University is seeking visiting faculty, fellows, or postdocs for the Spring 2009 semester.

About CITP

Digital technologies and public life are constantly reshaping each other—from net neutrality and broadband adoption, to copyright and file sharing, to electronic voting and beyond.

Realizing digital technology’s promise requires a constant sharing of ideas, competencies and norms among the technical, social, economic and political domains.

The Center for Information Technology Policy is Princeton University’s effort to meet this challenge. Its new home, opening in September 2008, is a state of the art facility designed from the ground up for openness and collaboration. Located at the intellectual and physical crossroads of Princeton’s engineering and social science communities, the Center’s research, teaching and public programs are building the intellectual and human capital that our technological future demands.

To see what this mission can mean in practice, take a look at our website, at http://citp.princeton.edu.

One-Term Visiting Positions in Spring 2009

The Center has secured limited resources from a range of sources to support visitors this coming spring. Visitors will conduct research, engage in public programs, and may teach a seminar during their appointment. They’ll play an important role at a pivotal time in the development of this new center. Visitors will be appointed to a visiting faculty or visiting fellow position, or a postdoctoral role, depending on qualifications.

We are happy to hear from anyone who works at the intersection of digital technology and public life. In addition to our existing strengths in computer science and sociology, we are particularly interested in identifying engineers, economists, lawyers, civil servants and policy analysts whose research interests are complementary to our existing activities. Levels of support and official status will depend on the background and circumstances of each appointee. Terms of appointment will be from February 1 until either July 1 or September 1 of 2009.

If you are interested, please email a letter of interest, stating background, intended research, and salary requirements, to David Robinson, Associate Director of the Center, at . Please include a copy of your CV.

Deadline: October 15, 2008.

Beyond this particular recruiting effort, there are other ways to get involved—interested students can apply for graduate study in the 2009-2010 school year, and we continue to seek out suitable candidates for externally-funded fellowships. More information about those options is here.

Live Webcast: Future of News, May 14-15

We’re going to do a live webcast of our workshop on “The Future of News“, which will be held tomorrow and Thursday (May 14-15) in Princeton. Attending the workshop (free registration) gives you access to the speakers and other attendees over lunch and between sessions, but if that isn’t practical, the webcast is available.

Here are the links you need:

Sessions are scheduled for 10:45-noon and 1:30-5:00 on Wed., May 14; and 9:30-12:30 and 1:30-3:15 on Thur., May 15.

Future of News Workshop, May 14-15 in Princeton

We’ve got a great lineup of speakers for our upcoming “Future of News” workshop. It’s May 14-15 in Princeton. It’s free, and if you register we’ll feed you lunch.

Agenda

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

9:30 – 10:45 Registration
10:45 – 11:00 Welcoming Remarks
11:00 – 12:00 Keynote talk by Paul Starr
12:00 – 1:30 Lunch, Convocation Room
1:30 – 3:00 Panel 1: The People Formerly Known as the Audience
3:00 – 3:30 Break
3:30 – 5:00 Panel 2: Economics of News
5:00 – 6:00 Reception

Thursday, May 15, 2008

8:15 – 9:30 Continental Breakfast
9:30 – 10:30 Featured talk by David Robinson
10:30 – 11:00 Break
11:00 – 12:30 Panel 3: Data Mining, Interactivity and Visualization
12:30 – 1:30 Lunch, Convocation Room
1:30 – 3:00 Panel 4: The Medium’s New Message
3:00 – 3:15 Closing Remarks

Panels

Panel 1: The People Formerly Known as the Audience:

How effectively can users collectively create and filter the stream of news information? How much of journalism can or will be “devolved” from professionals to networks of amateurs? What new challenges do these collective modes of news production create? Could informal flows of information in online social networks challenge the idea of “news” as we know it?

Panel 2: Economics of News:

How will technology-driven changes in advertising markets reshape the news media landscape? Can traditional, high-cost methods of newsgathering support themselves through other means? To what extent will action-guiding business intelligence and other “private journalism”, designed to create information asymmetries among news consumers, supplant or merge with globally accessible news?

  • Gordon Crovitz, former publisher, The Wall Street Journal
  • Mark Davis, Vice President for Strategy, San Diego Union Tribune
  • Eric Alterman, Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

Panel 3: Data Mining, Visualization, and Interactivity:

To what extent will new tools for visualizing and artfully presenting large data sets reduce the need for human intermediaries between facts and news consumers? How can news be presented via simulation and interactive tools? What new kinds of questions can professional journalists ask and answer using digital technologies?

Panel 4: The Medium’s New Message:

What are the effects of changing news consumption on political behavior? What does a public life populated by social media “producers” look like? How will people cope with the new information glut?

  • Clay Shirky, Adjunct Professor at NYU and author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
  • Markus Prior, Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
  • JD Lasica, writer and consultant, co-founder and editorial director of Ourmedia.com, president of the Social Media Group.

Panelists’ bios.

For more information, including (free) registration, see the main workshop page.

May 14-15: Future of News workshop

We’re excited to announce a workshop on “The Future of News“, to be held May 14 and 15 in Princeton. It’s sponsored by the Center for InfoTech Policy at Princeton.

Confirmed speakers include Kevin Anderson, David Blei, Steve Borriss, Dan Gillmor, Matthew Hurst, Markus Prior, David Robinson, Clay Shirky, Paul Starr, and more to come.

The Internet—whose greatest promise is its ability to distribute and manipulate information—is transforming the news media. What’s on offer, how it gets made, and how end users relate to it are all in flux. New tools and services allow people to be better informed and more instantly up to date than ever before, opening the door to an enhanced public life. But the same factors that make these developments possible are also undermining the institutional rationale and economic viability of traditional news outlets, leaving profound uncertainty about how the possibilities will play out.

Our tentative topics for panels are:

  • Data mining, visualization, and interactivity: To what extent will new tools for visualizing and artfully presenting large data sets reduce the need for human intermediaries between facts and news consumers? How can news be presented via simulation and interactive tools? What new kinds of questions can professional journalists ask and answer using digital technologies?
  • Economics of news: How will technology-driven changes in advertising markets reshape the news media landscape? Can traditional, high-cost methods of newsgathering support themselves through other means? To what extent will action-guiding business intelligence and other “private journalism”, designed to create information asymmetries among news consumers, supplant or merge with globally accessible news?
  • The people formerly known as the audience: How effectively can users collectively create and filter the stream of news information? How much of journalism can or will be “devolved” from professionals to networks of amateurs? What new challenges do these collective modes of news production create? Could informal flows of information in online social networks challenge the idea of “news” as we know it?
  • The medium’s new message: What are the effects of changing news consumption on political behavior? What does a public life populated by social media “producers” look like? How will people cope with the new information glut?

Registration: Registration, which is free, carries two benefits: We’ll have a nametag waiting for you when you arrive, and — this is the important part — we’ll feed you lunch on both days. To register, please contact CITP’s program assistant, Laura Cummings-Abdo, at . Include your name, affiliation and email address.

Online Symposium: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music

Today we’re kicking off an online symposium on voluntary collective licensing of music, over at the Center for InfoTech Policy site.

The symposium is motivated by recent movement in the music industry toward the possibility of licensing large music catalogs to consumers for a fixed monthly fee. For example, Warner Music, one of the major record companies, just hired Jim Griffin to explore such a system, in which Internet Service Providers would pay a per-user fee to record companies in exchange for allowing the ISPs’ customers to access music freely online. The industry had previously opposed collective licenses, making them politically non-viable, but the policy logjam may be about to break, making this a perfect time to discuss the pros and cons of various policy options.

It’s an issue that evokes strong feelings – just look at the comments on David’s recent post.

We have a strong group of panelists:

  • Matt Earp is a graduate student in the i-school at UC Berkeley, studying the design and implementation of voluntary collective licensing systems.
  • Ari Feldman is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Princeton, studying computer security and information policy.
  • Ed Felten is a Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton.
  • Jon Healey is an editorial writer at the Los Angeles Times and writes the paper’s Bit Player blog, which focuses on how technology is changing the entertainment industry’s business models.
  • Samantha Murphy is an independent singer/songwriter and Founder of SMtvMusic.com.
  • David Robinson is Associate Director of the Center for InfoTech Policy at Princeton.
  • Fred von Lohmann is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property matters.
  • Harlan Yu is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Princeton, working at the intersection of computer science and public policy.

Check it out!