Session 1 Agenda

Session 1: Beginning Inquiries

Thursday, March 18, 2021

8am-10am EDT

Zoom Link:


This session serves a few different purposes. As an introductory session, we want to spend a bit of time getting to know one another through some activities and light conversation. From there, we will move into the big picture and consider what the Research Sprint will entail and your roles within that. In the final part of the session, we will explore the question of “what does digital self-determination mean?” through three very different lenses by our Session Speakers.


By the end of the session, participants should know a bit more about other participants and the facilitators, understand the flow of the sprint itself, and consider different avenues of exploring the sprint’s central concept.

Agenda

8am: Welcome Comments

Introductory Activities

  • Several Rounds of What’s Your Preference? (Polling)

  • Things In Common (Breakout Group)

  • Who’s Your (Regional) Neighbor? (Breakout Group)

8:30am: About the Sprint

  • Big Picture

  • Useful Details

9:00am: 5 Minute Break

9:05am: A Sense of What’s To Come: Ideas & Inquiries

  1. Roger Dubach (5 minutes)

  2. Malavika Jayaram (5 minutes)

  3. Jenny Korn (5 minutes)

  4. Open Discussion

9:55am: Wrap up and next steps

Speaker Bios

Roger Dubach

Roger Dubach, born in 1974, studied Law at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and Philosophy at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). In 2003, he joined the diplomatic service of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and was appointed as a Diplomatic Advisor to the Director of the Federal Office for Energy in 2006. In this and his next function as Energy Counsellor at the Swiss Mission to the EU in Brussels, he acted as Technical Director of the energy negotiations between Switzerland and the EU. In 2013, he was appointed as a Personal Advisor to the Federal Councillor Doris Leuthard, and later as Deputy Director of the Task Force for the Swiss OSCE Chairmanship. Between 2016 and 2018, he served as Diplomatic Advisor on G7 and G20 issues in the Cabinet of the OECD Secretary-General in Paris, and was appointed by the Federal Council in August 2018 as an Ambassador and Deputy Director of the Directorate of International Law.


Malavika Jayaram

Malavika is the inaugural Executive Director of Digital Asia Hub, a Hong Kong-based independent research think-tank incubated by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where she is also a Faculty Associate. A technology lawyer for over 15 years, she practised law at Allen & Overy, London, and was Vice President and Technology Counsel at Citigroup. She was featured in the International Who’s Who of Internet e-Commerce & Data Protection Lawyers, and voted one of India’s leading lawyers. She taught India’s first course on Information Technology & Law in 1997, and has taught as adjunct faculty at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law in Chicago. She is on the Advisory Boards of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and Mozilla’s Tech Policy Fellowship, and on the Executive Committee of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. Malavika is an Associate Fellow with Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs), as part of its Asia-Pacific Programme. She is also a member of the High-level Expert Advisory Group to the OECD project, “Going Digital: Making the Transformation Work for Growth and Well-being."


Jenny Korn

Founding Director of Princeton Diversity Discussions + Research Affiliate and the Founding Coordinator of the Race+Tech+Media Working Group at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Jenny Korn is a feminist activist of color for social justice, a ciswoman scholar of race and gender in mass media, digital life, and artificial intelligence, and a member of Mensa, the high intelligence quotient (IQ) society. Korn is a Research Affiliate and the Founding Coordinator of the Race+Tech+Media Working Group at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She is the Founding Director of Princeton Diversity Discussions, a free, public, ongoing series of in-person and virtual group gatherings to share personal opinions and lived experiences focused on race, racism, and racial justice that she founded seven years ago and now meets weekly across over twenty sites in the United States. The author of numerous publications, Korn has won awards from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research; the Association for Information Science and Technology; the Philosophy of Communication Division and the African American Communication and Culture Division of the National Communication Association; the Minorities and Communication Division and the Communication Theory and Methodology Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication; and the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender. She has given over one hundred talks as invited keynote presentations, university guest lectures, interactive community education, and refereed conference presentations. As a public scholar, Korn has been quoted in interviews with NPR, CNN, SXSW, Bustle, Colorlines, Fox News, Forbes, Mashable, Reader’s Digest, U.S. News & World Report, Washington Post, and more. Drawing on critical race and intersectional feminist theories, Korn explores how Internet spaces and artificial intelligences influence, and are influenced, by assemblages of race and gender and how online producers-consumers have constructed inventive digital representations and computer-mediated communications of identity.


Lance Eaton

Lance Eaton is the Educational Programs Manager at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He has spent the last decade at the intersection of technology and education as an instructional designer in higher education. Previously, he was Associate Director of Learning Design at Brandeis University and Coordinator of Instructional Design at North Shore Community College. He earned his Bachelors Degree in History from Salem State University and has earned Masters Degrees in American Studies (UMASS Boston), Public Administration (Suffolk University), and Instructional Designer (UMASS Boston). He is currently working on his dissertation on academic piracy as part of a Ph.D. in Higher Education at UMASS Boston. He has also taught part-time at various institutions in Massachusetts for the past 15 years on a range of topics from history and literature to comics, horror, and educational technology. When he's not deeply engrossed in thinking about education, equity, and technology, he can be listening to audiobooks, reading comics (or regular books for that matter), gardening, or going for runs or bicycle rides somewhere in the Greater Boston area.

Assignment

Context

We asked you for your initial thoughts on digital self-determination and to create a video upon acceptance into the program. They were all well received and interesting to watch--in fact, we’ll be coming back to some of those videos in Session 2. But we would like you to revisit your video in light of the three speakers for Session 1 and in particular, the questions that they asked (Note: they will be listed below after the session) and the discussion that followed.


With that in mind, we want you to think about how you might update, enhance, or adjust your answer with one or more of these speaker’s ideas in mind--particularly, for new approaches to digital self-determination that you might not have considered or encountered previously.


Goal: To create an artifact that deepens the discussion of digital self-determination based upon Session 1.


Format: This artifact can be written, audio recording, video, or some other multimedia concept (card game, branching scenarios, collage, Prezi, etc).


We encourage you to be as creative as you want with this but we also encourage that if you are making things, particularly visuals or integrating video/audio content from elsewhere that you make sure you have the legal permission to do so. Along those lines, we encourage the use of Creative Common licensed materials or even materials from places like the Internet Archive. Additionally, we ask that you do not use logos of Digital Asia Hub or Berkman Klein Center in the creation of your artifacts.


Length/Duration: This is a bit tricky with different formats. For instance, we could say that if you are writing, to keep it to 300-500 words, yet that might be wildly over the mark if you are writing a poem or under the mark if you wrote out a script, but just perfect if you’re writing some reflections.


So we don’t have an ideal length but we do have an ideal audience. Think about how you would construct this response to someone that is new or interested in this subject. As we have said, these assignments are being pooled together into a final syllabus on Digital Self-Determination, so consider, what might be a reasonably small but deep engagement with one or more of the questions provided by the speakers and the vantage points that your work could provide to such an audience.


We also want to emphasize that you should not spend more than 3-5 hours in creating this artifact.


Complete and submitted by Tuesday, March 23, by 12pm EDT/Boston Time


Please submit your artifact using this form: https://forms.gle/EsCanYoVyys6Zx3dA


The form will require that you include a link to your assignment that is somewhere online (on a website, in a cloud-drive, etc). Please make sure if using a cloud-storage, the link settings are set to allow for people to access the document.


Assignment FAQ


Q: I’m having trouble with this assignment, what should I do?

If you are having trouble understanding what the assignment is asking of you, please reach out to Lance Eaton (Leaton@law.harvard.edu). If you are having trouble brainstorming or coming up with an idea. Consider using the Slack workplace to chat with others and learn what they are doing or to test out ideas for feedback.


Q: Can I work with someone else on this assignment?

Yes! If you want to pair up with one other person, we encourage that.