[OPE-L] Beth Noveck, New York Law School, Designing Digital Democratic Institutions

[Ian Wright <wrighti@xxxxxxx>]

Perhaps of interest. Despite the institutional source, I think work
like this is relevant to the application of technology to the
organisation of democratic firms and workers collectives, in
particular the formalisation and automatic management of institutional
rules.

> *************************************************************
> Stanford Seminar on People, Computers, and Design (CS547)
>                  http://hci.stanford.edu/seminar
> Gates B01 (HP Classroom) and SITN, 12:30-2:00pm PDT (UTC 19:30)
> Video: http://scpd.stanford.edu/scpd/students/courseList.asp CS547
> *************************************************************
> Friday, May 5, 2006
>
> Beth Noveck, New York Law School
>     bnoveck@xxxxxxxx
>
> TITLE: Designing Digital Democratic Institutions: Legal Code Meets
> Software Code
>
> ABSTRACT:
> We are witnessing the phenomenon of decentralized groups emerging
> without formal organizations to solve complex social problems and
> take action in the world together. In groups people can accomplish
> what they cannot do alone. New visual and social technologies are
> making it possible for people not only to create community but also
> to wield power and create rules to govern their own affairs. This
> presentation will focus on the ways technology design enables more
> effective forms of collective action, focusing particularly on the
> emerging tools for "collective visualization" which will profoundly
> reshape the ability of people to make decisions, own and dispose of
> assets, organize, protest, deliberate, dissent and resolve disputes
> together. By looking at several examples, including the design of
> "Peer to Patent" and the Cairns projects (http://dotank.nyls.edu),
> this presentation will address the discipline of digital
> institution design that melds legal code and software code to
> develop legal and political institutions embedded in technology. We
> will talk across disciplines about what it means to design for
> collaborative communities. In so doing, we will discuss not only
> how technology is used in our democracy but how technology, and the
> interface, in particular, changes what we mean by democracy today.
>
> **********************************************************
>
> Beth Noveck is associate professor of law and director of the
> Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School.
> She also runs the Democracy Design Workshop, an interdisciplinary
> "do tank" dedicated to deepening democratic practice through
> technology design. Prof. Noveck teaches in the areas of e-
> government and e-democracy, intellectual property, innovation, and
> constitutional law. She is a founding fellow of the Yale Law School
> Information Society Project. Her research and design work lie at
> the intersection of technology and civil liberties and is aimed at
> building digital democratic institutions through the application of
> both legal code and software code. She is the designer of online
> civic projects, including "Peer to Patent", Unchat, Cairns, the
> Gallery and Democracy Island (see http://dotank.nyls.edu) and is
> the author and editor of numerous books and articles, including the
> book series Ex Machina: Law, Technology and Society (NYU Press).
> She is the founder of the annual conference "The State of Play: Law
> & Virtual Worlds," cosponsored by New York Law School, Harvard, and
> Yale Law School. Formerly a telecommunications and information
> technology lawyer practicing in New York City, Professor Noveck
> graduated from Harvard University and earned a J.D. from Yale Law
> School. After studying as a Rotary Foundation graduate fellow at
> Oxford University, she earned a doctorate at the University of
> Innsbruck with the support of a Fulbright. She blogs at http://
> cairns.typepad.com