Difference between revisions of "Society and technology"

Revision as of 20:25, 24 April 2006

The society and technology interest group (soctech) is an informal interest group that we are starting up among UW-CSE students to promote awareness of various social computing issues, in both CSE and the UW. We plan to collaborate with other departments, with possible aims including the production of cross-departmental courses, lecture series, or white papers.

We're just getting started; we have a mailing list, soctech@cs. Here's the public list info page.

Current activities

• soctech seminar: Weekly seminar/reading group held in CSE; open to all students
• technology-society speaker series: an interdisciplinary speaker series on technology and society

Less active at the moment:

• society and technology briefings: to help bridge cross-disciplinary communication barriers, we plan to prepare a series of briefings.
• soctech brainstorming: use this page to jot down specific questions or issues that you'd like more information about, etc.
• soctech meeting notes

People and organizations

This is a non-exhaustive list of people and intra-UW institutions with which we're working.

• Center for Internet Studies
  • Caroline Benner
• UW Computer Science and Engineering
  • soctech@cs interest group:
    • Keunwoo Lee
    • Charlie Reis
    • Tapan Parikh
    • Valentin Razmov
    • Kate Deibel
    • Janet Davis
    • Travis Kriplean
    • Donald J Patterson aka Don
    • (Note to CSE'ers: add your name here if you're interested...)
• UW School of Law
  • Intellectual Property Program
    • Robert W. Gomulkiewicz
  • Shidler Center for Law, Commerce, and Technology
    • Jane Kaufman Winn
  • Technology and Law club:
    • Larry F. Rozsnyai
    • Ben Dugan

Relevant courses

UW courses

• CSEP-590: Some quarters of the UW-CSE Professional Masters Program special topics courses are on society and technology topics. The lectures are recorded and available online, and are a great resource (we should use selected lectures to supplement the preparatory readings for seminars).
  • 2005 Autumn: Homeland Security/Cyber Security (wiki, online lectures)
  • 2004 Autumn: Information Technology and Public Policy (wiki, online lectures)
• List of UW courses on society and technology

Outside courses

• Princeton Wireless course
• Princeton course catalog: includes course taught by Brian Kernighan on "Computers in our world"
• Stanford course: "Digital Dilemmas"
• Syllabus of Rice's Anthropology 315 course (PDF)
• Yale course list; includes some courses on society and technology
• Northwestern course on Internet and Society
• McGill course blog on Technology and the Environment

Resources

• soctech:Topics
• soctech:Articles

Software

• NGO in a box: bundled open-source software for running NGOs

People

Scholars

• David J. Farber, prof. of computer science and public policy at Carnegie Mellon
• Paul Agre, prof. of information studies at UCLA
• Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford
• Yochai Benkler, professor of law at Yale, director of Engleberg Center for Information Law and Policy at NYU
• Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law at Harvard and co-founder of the Berkman Center
• Hal Varian, professor in the schools of Information Management and Systems, school of Business, and Dept. of Economics at UC Berkeley

Research centers and groups outside UW

• Berkman Center @ Harvard Law
• Yale Information Society Project
• Yale Center for Internet Studies
• McGill Univ. Center for Intellectual Property Policy
• Duke Center for Study of the Public Domain
• Duke Intellectual Property program
• Engelberg Center for Innovation Law and Policy (NYU)
• Computer Security Group at University of Cambridge UK
• George Mason University Center for Technology and Law
• Dept. of Technoculture Studies at UC Davis
• Project Electronic Labor Markets at Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitat Frankfurt Am Main
• U. Wisconsin, Milwaukee Digital Arts & Culture program (blog)
• Technology and Social Behavior at Northwestern University
• Digital Games Research Association

Organizations

• Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility
  • CPSR Seattle
• Cybertelecom: "An educational nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness of and promoting participation in federal initiatives that impact the Internet."
  • cybertelecom-l: Cybertelecom's mailing list; this page also contains pointers to many other lists at the intersection of technology, communications, and law.

Conferences

• ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy
• Telecommunications Policy Research Conference: an independent conference
• State of Play: conference on online games and the law, archived by New York Law School.
• Command Lines: conference on online governance, hosted by UWM

Government

• National Coordination Office for Information Technology Research and Development: dept. that makes recommendations to executive branch about IT research; includes the PITAC, of which Ed Lazowska's a member.

Funding agencies and programs

• NSF Cyber Trust program

Mailing lists

• Interesting People (IP): public policy list moderated by CS/public policy professor Dave Farber
• Politech: libertarian-oriented list moderated by Declan McCullough
• EFFector: newsletter of the EFF
• Red Rock Eater: Phil Agre's mailing list

Sources

• Phil Agre's bibliography of books on social aspects of computing
• patents.com: introductory material on IP

Websites

Projects

• SoftwarePluralism project: a balanced resource for users, lawyers, and businesspeople to make informed decisions about software development models.

Blogs

• USACM Public Policy blog
• IP-Watch
• Becker-Posner Blog by legal scholars Gary Becker and Richard Posner
• LawMeme: Yale Law School's law and technology weblog