Do we need a Magna Carta for the Internet? Who should create it, and what might it contain?

Rebecca McKinnon spoke at the Center for Civic Media today about her new book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (TED Talk). For many years, Rebecca was the face of CNN in Beijing and Tokyo. Then she co-founded Global Voices with our director Ethan Zuckerman. More recently, she has been thinking about what it means to be a netizen, and what might be our responsibilities and rights.

In our ongoing quest to trace the outline of the phrase "civic media," we began the Center for Civic Media's 2012 lunch series with Paul Wright, Editor and Cofounder of Prison Legal News, and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center, the non-profit umbrella which publishes PLN.

If you follow news about prisoner rights, court rulings and other news about prison issues, join us for this week's Civic Lunch...

Free Civic Lunch This Week

• RSVP for our [free] lunch this week with Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News

And more civic media news this week...

"Nutrition Labels for News"

• Matt Stempeck: “Do nutrition labels even work?” A key question before testing nutrition labels for news content

Solitude on the Web

• Nathan Matias asks, Can the Internet be a place for deep personal reflection?

SOPA/PIPA

Back in November, Associate Professor of Civic Media and Center principal investigator Sasha Costanza-Chock spoke with NPR's Brook Gladstone about what comes next for the Occupy movement (image and link courtesy of shass.mit.edu and NPR's On the Media:

Download!

I was supposed to speak on a panel about SOPA this evening with the Northeast chapters of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. It was to serve as an educational discussion for local members, but at the national level, both unions have already officially endorsed SOPA. I spent the weekend preparing remarks, but the panel has been postponed, or possibly canceled, on account of AFTRA and SAG failing to provide representatives to discuss the bill. I can only hope this is an indication that they’re reconsidering their public support of one of the least American bills to gain serious traction in Congress, as a number of other companies have done in the face of public backlash.

We sat down for a Thursday Civic lunch with Biko Baker, Executive Director of the League of Young Voters.

Like any good organizer, Biko begins with his Story of Self. He grew up in Milwaukee, WI, with a father who was a machinist and construction worker, and a mother who worked at the grocery store. He was a jock, and didn't grow into being an academic until his sophomore year at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He did his graduate work at UCLA in History, and labor. He became a researcher for the SEIU, but was also into hip hop, and got started as a party promoter on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, working with many of hip hop's biggest West Coast names, like Snoop Dogg and Xzibit. He and his fellow promoters were essentially organizing online, developing massive email and text lists and relationships without realizing this practice had a name. Biko also wrote for The Source, one of hip hop's top magazines.

(Download the full video or watch below.)

People in the web startup scene celebrate failure with as much gusto as some of us celebrate $2 waffle iron sales. The concepts of failing fast and failing often are already core elements of the lean startup philosophy (to the point of inspiring a contrarian stance).

As I wrote last year,

Twitter itself was an offshoot of a failed podcast service called Odeo. Facebook takes pride in their fails as proof that the company is confronting real challenges. Jimmy Wales gave a TEDx Tampa presentation on his three rather massive failures prior to starting Wikipedia.