Berkman Buzz: May 18, 2012

While many moments of our conversation were energizing, the most compelling aspects derived from the group’s shared desire to imagine crowdwork and distributed online collaboration as potentially something more than the specter of alienated, de-humanized piece-work that it is frequently depicted to be.

To spur our efforts, we used a provocative thought experiment: what it would take for crowdwork to facilitate fulfilling, creative, and sustainable livelihoods for us or our (hypothetical or real) children?

Traditional workplaces spend a fair amount of effort mentoring and training their workforce as a way to increase the quality of their work and their job satisfaction. Does mentoring crowd workers also increase the quality of their work? How can one mentor the crowd workforce? These were the question we tried to tackle this weekend at the Crowd Camp Workshop at CHI.

Academics: Passionate about Digital Media & Disruptive Publics? Workshop CFP: http://bit.ly/KYZhYr (Global Voices Summit in Kenya)
—danah boyd (@zephoria)

Yochai Benkler, co-director, Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, addresses the Guardian Activate Summit with a talk titled 'the networked public sphere' which maps the public discourse of the SOPA/PIPA debate online.

Swedish website The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world’s largest BitTorrent site, has been in the news over the years for everything from copyright lawsuits and a raid by Swedish authorities, to tangles with powerful organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America. In February 2012, TPB was found guilty of sharing copyrighted material on a massive scale in a case brought by the British Phonographic Industry. Despite these setbacks and perhaps because of the attention, the peer-to-peer network has garnered millions of users (3.7 million in the UK alone) who use it to download and distribute copyrighted content (including music, films and television shows, games, and publications).

For gamers of a certain age, the blocky pixels of the 8-bit Nintendo era bring back fond memories.

In our own time, educators are fascinated by the learning potential of games: the way they engage us, challenge us, and test us. They teach, in compelling ways, all kinds of lessons, both pro- and anti-social. Some of the most powerful lessons of games are the rewards of exploration, persistence, patience, and determination.

Viacom Joins Forces with Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation as its Lead Media Partner http://shar.es/2MTB4 @btwfoundation @BerkmanCenter
—John Palfrey (@jpalfrey)

The recent Encuentro de Blogueros Cubanos en Revolución [Meeting of Cuban Bloggers in Revolution] [es] brought together a group of “official” bloggers—chiefly journalists and communications professionals who are employed by the state and maintain their blogs as part of their work. These bloggers acknowledge explicitly that they write “within,” or in support of, the Cuban revolution. In contrast, many better-known Cuban bloggers, such as Yoani Sánchez and Laritza Diversent, make no such claim, calling for free speech and broader Internet access but seeking to avoid being categorized as dissidents or counterrevolutionaries.