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.

Friday at MIT CSAIL, Lada Adamic gave a talk on "To friend and to trust: eliciting truthful and useful ratings online". Lada is an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information & Center for the Study of Complex Systems. I met her in 2009 at the SIGWEB Hypertext conference, and we did a small collaboration (together with her student Jiang Yang) when I was a software engineer at KGB. It was great to hear Lada again; she always brings fascinating examples, unexpected insights and humour into what are serious in-depth quantitative research projects.

A bill that was introduced into the House last month, called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), aims to penalize or eliminate websites that have pirated content, and the repercussions for Internet users could be far-reaching. It's currently being heard by the House Judiciary Committee.

Good ideas aren't enough. They need champions and constant vigilance, or Congress will take them from you.

Many problems arise when your country's legislature is consistently more responsive to their donors than their constituents. One of these problems is that simple good ideas can't just be left alone to bask in their goodness.

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While you view our video below, read Ethan's rundown of our superb event, Mapping Media Ecosystems. It featured Hal Roberts, of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; Erhardt Graeff, founding member of the Web Ecology Project; and Gilad Lotan, VP of Research and Development for SocialFlow:

I asked them to share some of the recent work they’ve been doing, understanding the structure of the US and Russian blogosphere, analyzing the influence networks in Twitter during the early Arab Spring events and understanding the social and political dynamics of hashtags. They didn’t disappoint, and I suspect our video of the session will be one of the more popular pieces of media we put together this fall.

Events This Week

• "Mapping Media Ecosytems". Civic Media Session, Wednesday 5pm w/ Hal Roberts, Erhardt Graeff, Gilad Lotan cot.ag/uad5Sz
• Mitch Resnick joins us Thursday for free lunch (RSVP). "Launching Projects into the World": cot.ag/uwCU4G
• Join Nathan Matias, Matt Stempek, and Daniel Schultz at the Civic Media London Social Thu 3 Nov @ 6:00pm bit.ly/uUzVK6

Civic Videos and Podcasts

• Video: Civic Media Session: "Civic Maps" cot.ag/vwolZi
• Video: Ethan Zuckerman on "Networks Understanding Networks" cot.ag/tCdCFc
• Video: Benjamen Walker talks "Too Much Information" at our Civic Media Lunch: bit.ly/vKJvyv (Great example of "civic fiction" as a genre…)
• Podcast: "Surveillance and Citizenship" cot.ag/saThfE
• Molly Sauter interviewed by BBC4 about Anonymous and hacktivism cot.ag/vwfnHR (~13:50)

Center for Civic Media director Ethan Zuckerman during the Media Lab's fall meeting:

It's 2011. This is a year -- depending on how this year ends up -- that is going to be remembered perhaps as we remember 1989, 1968, perhaps 1848 as one of these years where the world as we know it changes fairly radically.

However, as Ethan showed in great detail using visualizations of automated news coverage analysis, these revolutions may well be events that much of the world missed...