Beth Simone Noveck served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and founder and director of the White House Open Government Initiative (2009-2011), where she was responsible for developing and coordinating President Obama’s Administration policy on transparency, participation, and collaboration. UK Prime Minister David Cameron recently appointed her Senior Advisor for Open Government. She served on the Obama-Biden Transition Team and was a volunteer advisor to the Obama for America campaign on issues of technology, innovation, and government reform.  A law professor at New York Law School, Dr. Noveck is a leading expert on institutional innovation. She organized the recent Club de Madrid annual meeting, the convening of former Presidents and Prime Ministers. Among other projects, she designed and built the U.S. government’s first expert network.  With a new grant from the Aspen Foundation, she is developing a strategy for assessing costs and benefits of strategies for implementing data transparency. She is also designing a research network on the impact of new technology on democratic institutions for the MacArthur Foundation. A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, she was named one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company magazine, ” Top 25 Game Changers” by Politico and one of the “Top Women in Technology” by Huffington Post.  Her book about building an expert network for the United States Patent Office, Wiki Government (Brookings Institution Press 2009), appeared this year in Arabic and Chinese and in an audio edition and will also be translated into Russian. She is also co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (NYU Press 2006). She will be speaking at TEDGlobal in June and her new book, The Networked State will appear in 2013.

James Hendler is the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science, and the Assistant Dean for Information Technology and Web Science, at Rensselaer.  He is also a faculty affiliate of the Experimental Multimedia Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), serves as a Director of the UK’s charitable Web Science Trust and is a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technology at DeMontfort University in Leicester, UK.  Hendler has authored about 200 technical papers in the areas of Semantic Web, artificial intelligence, agent-based computing and high performance processing. One of the inventors of the “Semantic Web,” Hendler was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, is a member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the British Computer Society and the IEEE. He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002.  He is the Editor-in-Chief emeritus of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. In 2010, Hendler was named one of the 20 most innovative professors in America by Playboy magazine and was selected as an “Internet Web Expert” by the US government.

New York City, too, has been considering legislation for the last two years to create the framework for systematic publication of information on the Internet in formats that the public can reuse. With this data, people can conduct research and analysis to make the city work better and more effectively. They can also develop new tools, such as educational computer programs or handheld applications, to help the public make better choices or just to inform themselves about New York City with the kind of granular information that only city agencies have. Most importantly, open data is means to the end of fostering greater democratic participation and collaboration between the people and their government.

Both the City Council and the Administration are working on new drafts with an eye toward introducing (and passing, we hope!) legislation again. We know from experience that there’s a very big gap to bridge between ambitious principles of full-scale transparency and the practical realities of making data universally available online in real-time in open formats. There are technical, political, legal, and cultural hurdles to overcome.

In the hope of helping New York City’s government and public interest groups with crafting the legislation and translating the law into a practical implementation plan for day-to-day transparency, the Democracy Design Workshop at New York Law School has put together the attached PowerPoint “deck” with some suggestions for how to “do open data” practically and effectively.

We draw on previous legislation implemented by other cities (San Francisco and Portland) as well as language from the federal Open Government Directive and a model open government policy.

The deck is divided into two parts. The first, Open Data Policy, focuses on suggestions for drafting open data legislation. Secondly, Open Data Practice addresses suggestions for crafting an implementation strategy.

In our policy drafting legislation section, we discuss the value proposition, how to define data, the meaning of open formats, how to discuss implementation in the legislation, strategies for setting priorities, deadlines and milestones, enforcement, the use of prizes and challenges, and the budget.

In addition to our suggestions for drafting policy, we have also included tips for implementing the policy in practice, including ideas for releasing data early and often; identifying priorities and then looking for the data that addresses those problems; and creating a public-private SWAT team to advise agencies on their open data strategy.

This deck is a work in progress and we welcome your comments; we owe tremendous gratitude to our friends Andrew Hoppin, Advisor at CivicCommons, as well as to Jay Nath, Manager of Innovation at City and County of San Francisco, and Stefaan Verhulst, Manager of Research at Markle Foundation, for their advice and assistance.

Download the deck here.

Anil Dash, Director of Expert Labs and Thinkup

Anil discusses his work in building software platforms that help policymakers engage with the public on existing social networks. He also talks about what makes a useful question; avoiding overly broad questions or questions that only invite platitudes in response. Anil also advocates for moving citizen consultation and discussions to web communities where experts already gather. Instead of trying to pull people to a government site, let the government get involved on a ‘civilian’ site. To watch the full interview, click here.

Brandon Kessler, CEO of Challenge Post

Brandon explains how challenging the public to solve problems can drive innovation, and describes how Challenge.gov has spurred innovation in the public sector. Brandon also introduces some best practices in creating, promoting, and solving challenges. To watch the full interview, click here.

Joel Spolsky, CEO of Stack Exchange

Joel talks about how to design a question-and-answer web community for next generation citizen consultation. He explains the key components: questions with objective answers, stratified user categories, and avoiding “empty restaurant syndrome.” Joel discusses the creation of self-selecting communities, which are appealing to experts when the experts all share some common knowledge, where users can fill in the gaps in others’ bases of knowledge. To watch the full interview, click here.

The April 8^th workshop co-hosted by the Sunlight Foundation and the ORGPedia Project (a project of the Democracy Design Workshop at New York Law School and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) brought together 30 representatives of government agencies and interest groups that promote corporate accountability. Representatives of the four agencies in attendance (Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Department of Labor (DoL)) shared their reflections first and, after lunch, the dot orgs spoke. Each organization reflected on identifier schemes currently in use as well as opportunities from and challenges to adopting either a single, new, uniform identifier or an open identification ecosystem to facilitate translating between different identifiers.

Existing Identifiers

The EPA’s Office of Information Collection has built an ingestion pipeline to collect (not always very clean) data across 32 federal databases, 57 state databases, and 2.7 million facilities in a Resource Description Framework (RDF) datastore (epa.gov.clients.talis.com). It has no unique identifier at the organizational level (2 million+ entities) but it does have an ID for each facility and physical plant. Many firms operate thousands of facilities. Whereas firms change from Firm to Firm LLC to Firm Inc., physical facilities remain constant and tangible. This concept of linking identifiers to concrete artifacts such as physical facilities or chartering documents was a point of emphasis for the EPA. The EPA has used Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) information in the past via Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) but found it to be unreliable. The proprietary nature of DUNS identifiers also posed logistical problems for EPA.

Mine Safety in the Department of Labor issues a mine ID number and an operator ID number. Mine ID stays constant and linked to the physical facility. For example, people wanted to know the safety record of the Upper Big Branch Mine, which was easy to provide. But the mine also has an owner who, in turn, contracts to an operator who, in turn, has subcontractors all of whom might change hands and this is much harder to track. Of DoL’s constituent agencies, Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is among the most advanced. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has used DUNS in the past, but it proved to be costly and of poor quality. There is considerable variation between agencies in how information is stored – for instance in the location and form associated with audit trail data. Settling on a standard identifier solution across DOL agencies would necessarily impose costs on some but not others, depending on the compatibility of each agency’s legacy identifier systems.

No standard Uniform Resource Indicators (URI) exist for “assets” such as pension or health plans though it would be good to identify and link these to firms, too.

FCC has its own number called FCC Registration Number (FRN). There are 1.3 million issued FRNs, which includes licensees and also the lawyers to whom the licensees delegate authority. Has begun using “common names” for licensees, which implicitly groups together various corporate subentities.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) uses Employer Identification Numbers (EIN) but there’s no “decoder” for these numbers because of privacy legislation. In any case, EINs don’t provide information related to structure and hierarchy.

SEC will soon have 10,000 companies filling in Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). Has a numbering scheme for operating companies (the Central Index Key (CIK)) and a different scheme for investment advisors and for funds. There is currently a non-governmental industry initiative driving the creation of a new International Standards Organization (ISO)-compliant standard numbering system – this is included in both the Office of Financial Research (OFR) Request for Proposal (RFP) and another rulemaking related to hedge funds and counterparties to swaps. SEC/ISO process is going to number the ultimate parent but not track any intermediate parents by means of a centralized registration authority. This scheme will cover 1.8-2.5 million companies that participate in financial markets internationally. It will include a single number, the ultimate parent, information about place of incorporation, and date of organization. Hierarchy information will not be embedded in the ID itself; what is reported will be “very, very limited.” Right now it looks like ISO will go down to the branch level for institutions but not to the trading desk level. Relevant ISO committee is Technical Committee (TC) 68. In total, the standard has 6 attributes and will be publicly searchable, which include place of incorporation and date of submission. “The real problem is hierarchical information.” ISO will not have any authority to compel participants to keep the information correct or up to date.

Subsidy Tracker from Good Jobs First (GJF) is tracking 64,000 company specific entries and tracing across different state subsidy programs who gets what money.  Hierarchy information would be a huge help to this effort. GJF is interested in including open identifier proposals in its model legislation.

The National Institute on Money in State Politics’ FollowTheMoney.org project tracks lobbyists and lobbying expenditure data. Once someone becomes a large donor, they get an ID. FtM.org has been forced to create a sophisticated entity resolution pipeline in order to make up for the lack of common identifiers. Says 95% of this can be automated, but remainder is problematic.

Opportunity

Typically, corporate activity is tracked by statute. In other words, firms have to complete the same, often duplicative paperwork, across different components of the same agency as well as across agencies.

In addition, there’s no way to compare data across regulatory components or agencies. If we really want to understand, for example, a firm’s record, we have to be able to take a systems perspective and examine environmental compliance across air and water and workplace safety compliance across Wage and Hour, OSHA and other components.

When Exxon-Valdez happened, it was a huge burden to figure out how the company had been performing across the agency. Similarly, a third-party operated BP Deepwater Horizon, making it difficult to provide meaningful safety information. But with an open identifier schema it will become possible to track compliance records.

Also if there’s some consistency to the concept of entity, we can overlay census data on spending data and see if government money is being spent where it needs to go.

We can get early warnings of corporate malfeasance.

Government is doing a lot of data cleaning and processing after data is collected, especially as data is being gathered at both the federal and state level. There are data quality problems at every agency. The goal now is to push that to the front end and try to improve the forms so that data, when solicited, is being entered in more usable formats. For example, with fillable forms it is possible to harmonize between “Corp” and “Corporation.”

This will also make it possible to auto-populate fields on subsequent forms and reduce the data collection burden.

Several agencies like FCC and SEC are creating a Chief Data Officer in each bureau and office. They are starting enterprise data dictionaries, which will help with this work, too.

If a legal entity identifier becomes available, it will also become possible to track hierarchical information and understand the relationship among entities, such as counter-parties to swaps or subsidies to entities by sector across multiple states.

Requirements

The group articulated that to achieve the goals of greater corporate accountability, any identifier project(s) will need to:

1. Clearly articulate how the public is going to benefit.
2. Eschew exclusively creating a “big identifier system,” which will be too brittle and simplistic in favor of creating an “identifier ecosystem.”
3. Combine a unique identifier, on the one hand, with the ability to map between schemes on the other.
4. Standardize around the minimum number of fields, i.e. an entity number, while providing extensibility so that agencies can handle the process of tracking specific, niche information relevant only to one regulatory regime.
5. Articulate a data dictionary/vocabulary to make sense of key corporate governance relationships.
6. Make facility a trackable field to enable linking between physical plants and legal entities.
7. Link back to formation documents, as filed and as amended over time.
8. Have a field for common name, i.e. Nextel or Verizon even though they do business under the names of thousands of other entities. Common name isn’t the same as corporate name.
9. Need to support not just identifying particular entities, but identifying hierarchies and changes to those hierarchies.
10. Separate identifier from authentication and login.
11. Need to address:
    1. How do you get people into the system?
    2. Where does it get assigned?
    3. Is it compulsory?
    4. How to pay for it? Are registration fees acceptable? Usage fees?
    5. How will the numbering scheme be paid for?
    6. When tracking relationships, will we track vertical or also horizontal?
    7. How to deal with errors, i.e. Will a single keystroke accidentally return the wrong result?
    8. What level of resolution, both in terms of entity size and time intervals, is minimally acceptable? E.g. should individuals be included in such a system?
    9. How do you keep the system going?
12. Consider microgrants to enable groups to document and communicate their own experiences with running identifier systems.

Some Ideas for Next Steps

Develop an index of ontologies, i.e. a catalogue of existing identifier systems and the fields that they contain.

Develop a data dictionary of corporate governance relationships, i.e. parent-child, facility-owner.

Explore opportunity to create baseline identifier system through the IRS EIN system by means of a rule or statutory change.

In addition, explore the alternative with the National Organization of State Secretaries of State of building in a single field identifier into state level registrations of 18 million entities.

Draft model legislative language for making open corporate data a requirement in legislation.

In connection with relevant partners, design and run pilot projects to test linked data strategies for understanding hierarchies.

In connection with relevant partners, develop a plan for a sustainable open corporate data ecosystem.

Resources

Comments to OFR Request for Information (RFI) on legal entity identification for financial contracts (9.2 MB .PDF file)

International Organization for Standardization, Financial Services Working Group TC 68 (TC 68/SG 1 – Identifiers): ISO site for the technical committee assigned to standardize the field of banking, securities, and other financial services. Contains both published and unpublished ISO standards.

Regulatory Compliance, Presidential Memoranda (January 18, 2011): directs agencies to share enforcement and compliance information across the Government.

EPA Facilities Registry: a prototype of a linked data approach to modeling and publishing  information on facilities.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Enforcement Data: makes the enforcement data collected by DoL’s accessible and searchable, with the intent that the public devises new and creative ways of using the data.

GS1 (UPC): a non-profit organization that administers the Universal Product Code system, providing a globally unique identification number reserved for a single company.

Attendees

Beth Noveck (NYLS)

Tom Lee (Sunlight Foundation)

Daniel Schuman (Sunlight Foundation)

Jim Harper (Cato)

Francis Avila (Dancing Mammoth)

David Roberts (DOL)

Ed Bender (NIMSP)

Matt Reed (SEC)

Kevin Webb (Open Plans)

Jed Miller (Revenue Watch)

Skye Bender-deMoll (CorpWatch)

Greg Elin (FCC)

Steve Young (EPA)

David Smith (EPA)

Shana Harbour (EPA)

Craig Jennings (OMB Watch)

Susi Alger (CRP)

Jihan Andoni (CRP)

Reed Rushing (CAP)

Phil Mattera (GJF)

Jim Hendler (RPI)

• Promote greater accountability and compliance;
• Enhance economic growth and innovation; and
• Enable research on the evolution of companies and organizations.

This ORGPedia project is convening a wide range of experts to inform the design and scope of:

• An open legal identifier system to enable datasets about companies to be compared. Currently, different agencies use different numbering schemes. An open ID will enable taxonomies to “talk” to one another.
• An online platform to mash up and visualize authenticated government datasets already collected about firms and organizations pursuant to statute or regulation.
• An Application Programming Interface (API) and supporting software libraries to make it easy for third parties to incorporate ORGPedia into their own systems.
• A community to encourage public participation in reviewing, annotating and contributing to collected government data whether by companies and organizations or by third parties.

ORGPedia is an experiment in designing an information system that effectively combines authenticated government data with user-contributed information – a hybrid wiki – to enhance public understanding about organizations and firms.

During the March 30^th discussion, participants provided their thoughts on the opportunities, challenges, and strategies for implementation, including ideas for how to prototype and pilot a first phase of the system, from the perspective of government and research communities.

This is the first in a series of five planned workshops. The Sunlight Foundation will host a second meeting on April 8th to focus on issues of corporate accountability and compliance. There will be subsequent meetings focused on the needs of those businesses who consume business intelligence; the technology design; and the international opportunities and implications.

For a longer description of ORGPedia see this backgrounder (HTML, Download PDF).

The following are notes summarizing the discussion from the March 30th Meeting:

Opportunities

There are 18 million registered legal entities in the United States. Having the ability to compare and track data about them would make it possible to:

• Compare datasets about legal entities across regulatory regimes and states
• Track changes in control and ownership

In order to make information more transparent to the public; facilitate information sharing across agencies and states; and streamline regulatory compliance by pre-populating information requests with information about entities.

Imagine if, as with the Encyclopedia of Life, which creates a page for every organism on earth, we had a system with a page for every legal entity on earth.  Imagine if we had an “ISBN number” for every entity. It would enable all kinds of new services and research. This has become possible in the last few years as a result of advances in web technology and policies for opening up access to public data. The challenge is that firms evolve faster than fish and firms can morph into new firms with different names and owners through changes in control.

At root, we must address the fundamental microeconomic problem of identifying the boundaries of the firm. What if Adam Smith’s pin factory had a financing arm? Or an exclusive steel supplier? We now have the technology to represent these relationships and make the transparent.

Benefits to Government:

Having stable, unique identifier system by means of a single number or a data dictionary to translate across numbering schemes (or both – a single entity identifier plus a way to translate other common fields across schemes) would enable comparison of corporate activity across levels of government, states and across agencies.  Right now we don’t know if a company doing business in one state is the same or related to a company doing business in another state. So when malfeasance is committed in one place, we are missing an opportunity to be on the look out before it happens in another state. It would be incredibly valuable to have a way to generate early warning signals.

Having a unique identifier or the ability to pull data from a common and authenticated collection of data about an entity would reduce the transaction costs to entities wishing to comply with requirements across multiple states.

The federal government alone spends $3.5 trillion. Public should be able to slice and dice. In order to make the information about how government spends accessible to people, we need to be able to trace this money even when companies change ownership and name. For example, when Boeing acquires McDonnell Douglas, a search today does not connect these two entities to provide an accurate picture.

Even though we track to the subcontractor level, we have none of the history to connect affiliates and see relationships.

This makes having a unique identifier a priority. If we had the ability to trace changes such as mergers, we could better understand the connection, if any, between government grants/contracts and campaign contributions; we could spot fraud and remove offending companies from the rolls across agencies.

Some discussion about needing a level of private information, especially about the individuals involved, even as we maintain public information at the entity level.

Benefits For Researchers:

Think about scholars working with firm as unit of analysis – engaging in same redundant transaction costs – cries out for public data set.

There are huge transaction costs associated with doing work about firms. Data sets tends to be proprietary, limited in scope and the info is at best outdated and, at worst, just terrible.

Accounting, business strategy, information technology management, finance, political science scholars are all engaging in the same socially wasteful redundant activity of trying to clean and match this data. If we could free up some of the time spent on cleaning data, we would free up researcher capacity.

For example, NYTimes did Pulitzer Prize piece on worker death at a manufacturing firm. It was tremendously labor intensive and next to impossible, to investigate the environmental compliance record of the same entity, though preliminary analysis showed they were turning in the same topic release statements to regulators each year rather than developing new figures.

If we wanted to “mash up” OSHA compliance data with EPA compliance data, we can’t do it today. Researchers have the interest but the incompleteness makes it so hard.

Over 50% of the business outputs in the United States are coming from intangibles. But there is no way to match up firms with IP output because we can’t connect patent registrations to the registrations to the entities that hold IP.  At a time when innovation is becoming more important as a driver of the economy, this work is more important not less.

The field of business history is dying off because of difficulty of doing empirical research.

Technology:

Technologically, this problem is not unlike the naming issues we face today in trying to create websites (or banking codes) to identify entities, ie. sloan.org and we’re now trying to make sense of the secondary pages like the About page, address page etc. which search engines know how to do.

We have the ability to map when a firm is taken over, complex interdependencies, who owns what.

Visualizations will help make this data more usable. We can show where data came from, whether it is authenticated government data, or contributed by the public.

The technology platforms for building this kind of site exists. There are no show stoppers. Some work will be needed at the applied research level to transition technology from research to practice but there are existing models.

The Encyclopedia of Life, funded by Sloan, provides some important organizational lessons learned about running a system of this type and complexity with a mix of authoritative and open information.

Challenges

Adding a signal field to existing identifier systems (ie. a universal identifier) might not be hard. Adding several fields to track changes in control, however, could be costly. However, there are Web technologies that can mitigate most of this cost if properly deployed.

What is the right role of the government? Should the government own such a system or should it be a stand-alone non-profit? What is the right governance structure to ensure legitimacy?

Pilot and Partners

Three areas of focus for potential pilot/prototype came up:

• Mashing up Environment and Labor enforcement databases
• Mashing up SEC’s XBRL data about public companies with state registrations to track and display changes in ownership
• Mashing up patent office applications with state corporate registrations to see who is patenting what

The National Organization of Secretaries of State would be a natural partner for implementing the necessary changes.

Also check out B-Lab, a younger, more entrepreneurial set of companies committed to social benefit who might be willing to test contributing more of their data to be used in a pilot.

Check out: Bottega and Powell, Creating a Linchpin for Financial Data: Toward a Universal Legal Entity Identifier.

Check out: UK Companies House, which does impose an LEI but would benefit from the win/win of gains to companies and transparency of getting companies to share their data through such a platform. There will be a June/July paper on corporate reporting.

Check out the book: The Demography of Corporations

At the Open Government R&D Summit on March 21-22, 2011 at the National Archives of the United States, government officials and academics gathered to:

set the foundation for a robust R&D agenda that ensures the benefits of open government are widely realized, with emphasis on how open government can spur economic growth and improve the lives of everyday Americans.

The goal of the conference was to articulate how best to gauge the effects and effectiveness of open government and encourage the engagement of the research community with the government community — Geeks and Wonks — across various disciplines in identifying the most important questions that must be studied.

To make it easier to connect Geeks and Wonks for this purpose, we are inviting academics seeking projects for themselves or their students and public officials seeking help with assessing impact to “advertise” to one another. If you are a policymaker experimenting with open data, enhanced citizen participation, prizes and challenges, and public-private partnerships or you are a researcher who wants to study these phenomena, this is the place for you!

• Post a project seeking data
• Post a class/clinic seeking projects
• Post a problem/challenge seeking research help

For more information, or to participate, go to GeeksForWonks.org.

Transportation Camp will bring together policymakers, technologists, activists and those interested in the intersection of urban transportation, sustainability, and technology. Come learn about how federal, state and local governments are making data freely available in reusable formats and about ways that decision makers, entrepreneurs, and designers are making use of that data to create tools that improve communities and empower citizens.

Join thinkers and doers for a weekend of learning, debating, connecting, and creating. Details at http://transportationcamp.org.

Register here: http://transportationcampeast.eventbrite.com

Why:

Transportation is a major metropolitan issue, with direct impacts on economic strength, environmental sustainability, and social equity. Recent advances in technology (“web 2.0”, mobile computing, open source software, open data and APIs, and spatial analysis) present an opportunity to improve mobility more immediately and at a lower cost than has ever been possible in the past.

TransportationCamp will raise awareness of this opportunity and build connections between disparate innovators in public administration, transportation operations, information design, and software development.

What:

This is not a traditional conference: in addition to talks and presentations from big names in transportation and technology, TransportationCamp will provide an opportunity for every attendee to be a participant in shaping and leading the event. Be prepared to get involved, meet people, and get busy.

Major themes of discussion will include: open data — best practices and technical challenges, ways to lower the cost of technology for transportation agencies, and creative new approaches to addressing transportation issues.

Session topics and activities will be suggested by attendees and organizers leading up to the event. So far, we’ve collected suggestions for over twenty possible topics, ranging from realtime information to legal issues. Add your ideas here: http://transportationcamp.org/topics/

Keep in touch:

Visit http://transportationcamp.org/topics/ and suggests topics and activities for TransportationCamp.

Follow @TranspoCamp on Twitter and the TranspoCamp Event News blog to get event and community updates.

Watch, follow and reblog opentransportation on Tumblr.

Tag tweets, photos, blog posts, etc. with the event hashtag: #transpo

Thanks!

Innovation is unquestionably important to society. Intellectual property regimes seek to provide incentives for such innovation. Understanding the inter-working of intellectual property regimes and innovation may lead to conclusions that such regimes are not working well, or at all, in encouraging innovation.

When such failures are perceived, active communities form to address the shortcomings. Many communities have formed around issues such as free speech vs copyright; the importance of fair use; alternative licensing regimes such as Creative Commons or free and open source software; patent protection of software and business methods; and patents vs downstream innovation of critical pharmaceuticals.

While these approaches have been exceedingly important in bringing about needed change, many successful groups have devised strategies that balance the extent to which activists work within existing innovation systems in order to achieve their goals, with exploring the necessity of circumventing those systems. At the same time, the increased production of and focus on IP in all industries has catalyzed the emergence of IP obstacles in areas where IP has traditionally not been a consideration, thus creating new areas for activism.

It’s time to reexamine our approaches to improving global welfare by identifying new and existing IP-related challenges to activism, developing strategies for overcoming IP obstacles, and delivering practical solutions to spur social, political, environmental, scientific, technological and legal change.

How?

The Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School is proud to present Innovate / Activate: An Unconference on IP and Activism. The inaugural Innovate / Activate unconference, co-sponsored by Google and the Yale Law School Information Society Project, brought together over 100 activists, academics, professionals, and students from around the world to collectively explore the ways in which IP influences global welfare.

Participants came from a wide range of practice, representing the unique perspectives of organizations from abroad, such as the Center for International Environmental Law in Geneva, the Institute for Science, Innovation, and Ethics in Manchester, and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore; domestic institutions like IBM, the Open Video Alliance, and MIT OpenCourseWare; and student-led endeavors like Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, Students for Free Culture, and the Redactive Poetry Project.

The ideas, conversations, and relationships that arose over the course of the two days have already begun to inspire new action and collaboration. Taking the lessons learned from the unconference, students from New York Law School have created an IP and activism strategy guide, to be published by New Tactics in Human Rights.

An archive of the Innovate / Activate Unconference, including videos of all the presentations, is available at nyls.edu/innovateactivate.