Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
Center for International Security and Cooperation
Center on Food Security and the Environment
Stanford Health Policy
The Europe Center
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
Rural Education Action Program
Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education
Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies
Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies
Center for Innovation in Global Health
Stanford Center at Peking University
@LiberationtechFebruary 3rd, 2011
Subramanian on information access under poor connectivity
CDDRL NewsLakshminarayanan Subramanian, Assistant Professor in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU, delivered the February 3 Liberation Technology seminar on the topic of Information Access Under Poor Connectivity. Subramanian discussed the challenges facing many people in the developing world who are unable to access information where bandwidth connectivity is very low, making download time much longer and the web more unusable. 
Video available
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January 27th, 2011
Jennifer Bussell on reforming Indian Public Services in the digital era
CDDRL NewsJennifer Bussell, Assistant Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, delivered the January 27 Liberation Technology seminar on the topic of Corrupt States: Reforming Indian Public Services in the Digital Era. The theme of Jennifer’s discussion focused on the reality that public service provision is often flawed in the developing world. Video available 
presentation available
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January 20th, 2011
Vivek Srinivasan on the role of technology in combating corruption
CDDRL NewsVivek Srinivasan, who will be assuming the position of CDDRL Program Manager for the Liberation Technology Program, delivered the January 20 seminar to discuss the use of technology to combat corruption. Previously, Vivek worked in India on anti-corruption and universal education campaigns as a grassroots organizer, using new online tools to monitor the implementation of these laws and regulations. Drawing upon his experience with India’s Right to Information movement, Vivek focused his discussion on how information and communication technology (ICT) tools could be designed and applied to strengthen people's movements to combat corruption. Video available
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January 13th, 2011
Yochai Benkler on 'A Tale of Two Blogospheres'
CDDRL NewsAt the January 13 Liberation Technology Seminar Johai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, presented, A Tale of Two Blogospheres: Discursive Practices on the Left and the Right.. Video available
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January 6th, 2011
Jonathan Zittrain on minds for sale
CDDRL NewsThe first Liberation Technology seminar of the winter quarter on January 6, featured Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Zittrain focused his talk entitled, Minds for Sale, on the variety of online platforms that harness the wisdom of crowds today, and closed with a discussion of the implications of these platforms. Read more »
December 16th, 2010
Can information technology transform authoritarian regimes?
CDDRL in the newsSMS messaging, blogging, Twitter, and other new media platforms are tools frequently employed by citizens in authoritarian regimes to share information, voice alternative opinions, and circumvent censorship. Scholars and activists have described them as "liberation technologies," for their potential to advance freedom in the face of oppression. During periods of election-related political unrest in Iran, Kenya, and Moldova, these tools have been used to challenge electoral fraud, mobilize protest, and fill the gap in credible, independent information. 
3 papers, conference agenda available
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December 10th, 2010
Nathan Eagle on mobile phone usage in the developing world
CDDRL NewsNathan Eagle, Founder and CEO of txteagle spoke at the weekly Liberation Technology Seminar Series on Dececember 2, 2010 about mobile phone usage in the developing world. Read more »
December 7th, 2010
Barbara Simons on internet voting
CDDRL in the newsBarbara Simons — a computer science theorist with a long history of involvement in policy relating to voting technologies — emphasized the immense limitations that characterize Internet voting technologies and that have compromised online elections to date in an October 21, 2010 Liberation Technologies seminar . presentation available
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Designing Liberation Technologies
CDDRL, PGJ, Program on Liberation Technology in the newsMobile phones are one of the most rapidly adopted new technologies in history, with usage in all parts of the world rising quickly—and soaring in developing nations. In 2000, there were 16 million mobile subscriptions in Africa; in 2008, there were 376 million. No longer limited to one-to-one communication, mobile phones are mini-computers that provide access to the Internet and a wide array of services from banking to shopping.
November 18th, 2010
Mark Lemley: digital technologies' effects on the content industry
CDDRL, PGJ, Program on Liberation Technology in the newsAs new digital technologies arise, leading the music, movie, print journalism and other content industries to complain that they “cannot compete with free,” Mark Lemley, Director of the Center for Law, Science and Technology at SLS, poses the following overarching question: is the sky really falling on the content industries? As Lemley makes clear through a series of examples, representatives from these industries have echoed this same claim countless times throughout recent history, and yet have never been fully accurate. Even so, both the courts and the legislature have taken action in response to content industries’ claims in some cases. Read more »
November 11th, 2010
Matt Harrison on mobile technology and the evolution of the nation-state
CDDRL, PGJ, Program on Liberation Technology in the newsMatt Harrison, from the Prometheus Institute, began his talk with a discussion of the theoretical underpinnings behind the work of The Prometheus Institute. The work of the Institute is oriented by two central premises: first, that technology facilitates evolution, and second, that policy needs evolution. In this case, evolution is taken to mean adaptive self-organization, where the basic evolutionary mechanism is a progression through three steps: differentiation, selection and amplification. Harrison suggests that policy is not evolving rapidly enough because of legal and technical barriers--like opacity, perpetuity and monopoly--that impede progress, and that new technologies offer tools for improving self-organization and hastening evolution. Read more »
November 4th, 2010
Joshua Goldstein on making Gov 2.0 work in Kibera
CDDRL, PGJ, Program on Liberation Technology in the newsThe term Government 2.0 is often used to describe examples in which the tools, lessons, and ethos of the tech community are applied to help government and other organizations tackle big problems. By Josh Goldstein’s account, Government 2.0 has an especially large potential for impact in Africa, a fact that can be seen through examination of case examples at the local level. In an effort to better understand and communicate the link between technology and actual tangible impacts on people’s lives, Goldstein focused his talk on an organization called Map Kibera that represents an example of Government 2.0 that is playing out in Kibera, one of Africa’s largest slums. Video available
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October 7th, 2010
Daniel Colascione and Evgeny Morozov discuss lessons from the 'Haystack Affair'
CDDRL, PGJ, Program on Liberation Technology in the newsProfessor Joshua Cohen introduced this week’s session with an overview of the event that has been dubbed the Haystack Affair. At the time of the Iran election in June 2009, various projects emerged as attempts to improve the flow of information among activists. One of the projects that emerged at this time was Haystack, a circumvention tool that aimed to make it difficult for the government to trace what members of Iran’s Green Movement were saying. Around August 2010, there was a flurry of discussion and critiques of Haystack on Stanford’s Liberation Technology listserv. By mid-September, the Censorship Research Video available
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September 30th, 2010
Chris Spence: enabling moments of opportunity in closed societies using technology
CDDRL, PGJ, Program on Liberation Technology in the newsChris Spence, Chief Technology Officer of the National Democratic Institute, shared the National Democratic Institute's approach to the question of how technology can best be used for creating and advancing democracy in closed societies. There have been many recent developments in this space, including the publication of Blogs and Bullets (a report on new media in contentious politics), the closing of Haystack, and the occurrence of Google's Internet at Liberty conference in Budapest. However, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) has been working in this area for several years, and today works in more than 70 countries across the world. Video available paper, presentation available
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September 23rd, 2010
Josh Cohen: mobile development meets design thinking
CDDRL, PGJ, Program on Liberation Technology in the newsJoshua Cohen, Professor of Political Science, Philosophy and Law at Stanford University, began the first session of this quarter's Seminar on Liberation Technologies by posing a big question: are information and communication technologies able to advance human well-being for development? After all, Mobile ICT has potential to be a good thing for development for a multitude of reasons. First, as Solow's model of growth has shown, technological innovation tends to be good for growth. Second, economic growth is closely related to development. Third, mobile phone usage is rapidly growing and indigenous in much of the world, which means that new technologies do not need to be "parachuted" in to scenarios where they are not matched to local needs. Finally, there is high mobile penetration today, even in low-income settings. Video available
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July 9th, 2010
d.school class sees Stanford students develop ICT solutions to healthcare challenges in Kenya
CDDRL NewsThis Spring quarter, while our seminar series took a break, Program co principals Terry Winograd and Joshua Cohen taught a new course at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school): Designing Liberation Technologies. Read more »
June 18th, 2010
Patrick Meier and Evgeny Morozov to join the Program as Visiting Scholars
CDDRL NewsWe are pleased to be able to announce that the Program on Liberation Technology will have two new visiting scholars from September 2010 - Patrick Meier and Evgeny Morozov. Read more »
June 14th, 2010
Program on Liberation Technology
AnnouncementLying at the intersection of social science, computer science, and engineering, the Program on Liberation Technology seeks to understand how information technology can be used to defend human rights, improve governance, empower the poor, promote economic development, and pursue a variety of other social goods.
The Program will examine technical, legal, political, and social obstacles to the wider and more effective use of these technologies, and how these obstacles can be overcome. And it will try to evaluate which technologies and applications are having greatest success, how those successes can be replicated, and how less successful technologies and applications can be improved to deliver real economic, social, and political benefit. 
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March 29th, 2010
Liberation Technology Seminar Series to continue in Fall 2010
CDDRL AnnouncementThe Liberation Technology Seminar Series will take a break during Spring Quarter 2010 in order to present a class taught by co-sponsors of the program, Joshua Cohen, Professor of Political Science, Philosophy and Law and Terry Winograd, Professor of Computer Science. Read more »
March 11th, 2010
Bill Thies on leveraging technologies for citizen journalism, education, and healthcare in India
CDDRL NewsIn a March 11 Liberation technologies seminar, Bill Thies described his group's work to develop projects that utilize those technologies that are already present and familiar in poor Indian communities. 
Audio & Video transcripts available
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March 4th, 2010
Rebecca MacKinnon on the relationship between internet freedom and democratization in China
CDDRL NewsRebecca MacKinnon is Visiting Fellow at Princeton's Center for Information Technology.
Rebecca's presentation explored two key arguments: first, that China should challenge our assumptions about the inherent relationship between the internet and democratization; and second that existing democracies are currently legislating in ways that may jeopardize the empowering potential of the internet. Audio & Video transcripts available
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February 25th, 2010
Kentaro Toyama: ten myths about technology and development
CDDRL NewsKentaro Toyama is a visiting scholar at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. Until 2009, he was assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. Kentaro identified a number of myths that surround the field of ICT4D and argued that these can confuse our thinking about the proper role for technology in addressing development problems. Audio & Video transcripts available
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February 17th, 2010
Firoze Manji on challenges using new media to support social justice movements in Africa
CDDRL NewsFiroze Manji is founding Executive Director of Fahamu - Networks for Social Justice, a pan African organization with offices in Kenya, Senegal, South Africa and the UK.
Fahamu exists to support the development and growth of a powerful social justice movement in Africa. There are three core areas of activity: 
presentation available
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February 11th, 2010
Eric Brewer on the role for technology in developing regions
CDDRL NewsEric Brewer is Professor of Computer Science at the University of California Berkeley where he leads the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) research group.
Dr. Brewer spoke about the role for technology in effective development strategies at the base of the pyramid. Audio & Video transcripts available
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February 4th, 2010
Barbara van Schewick on the FCC's 'open internet' proceeding and implications for political speech
CDDRL NewsBarbara van Schewick, Assistant Professor at the Stanford Law School, introduced the current debate about net neutrality and explored the implications for diversity and freedom of expression online.
Network providers were at one time ‘application blind' - they were unable to see what was contained in the data packets that allow information to be transmitted online. Now that this is no longer the case, a debate has emerged about the role for regulation in controlling the ability of network providers to block or interfere with applications. What was drawn up as a voluntary policy statement is now being considered and revised by the FCC's Open Internet Proceeding. Audio & Video transcripts available
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