Soctech:Meeting of 2004-07-22

Society and technology meeting w/ Caroline Benner of Center for Internet Studies

CIS mandate: to foster interdisciplinary collaboration; to identify UW "areas of strength" and cater to them

Challenges

• Vocabulary gap

Proposed activities

(this is just a very raw initial list)

• preparation of white papers to brief people?
• UW open source conference
• lectures/debates from outside speakers

Misc notes

• Caroline has surveyed other universities; nobody's doing a good job
• Challenge: "technology and society" actually encompasses a wide variety of interests; lots of people will be interested in their particular corner. It is difficult to get people together.
• Courses at other depts.:
  • Brian Kernighan teaches a course at Princeton "Computers in our World"
  • Vincent Poor: Princeton course on wireless technology, with invited talks with professors from various departments
  • Digital Dilemmas @ Stanford
  • MIT, Harvard starting open source classes
• Sarah Baase textbook