Open Government and the World Wide Web

The opening ceremony of WWW2010 will include a plenary panel offering perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic on the move to make data more open and accessible on the Web (data.gov and data.gov.uk). The panel features inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee; Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero; Professor James Hendler of RPI, who will moderate the discussion; UNC professor and Director of iBiblio.org, Paul Jones; Andrew McLaughlin, Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Executive Office of the President; and University of Southampton Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Director of the Web Science Trust and Web Foundation.

Keynote Speakers

Vint Cerf

Vint Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for the company. Widely known as a “Father of the Internet,” Vint is the co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the Internet. In 1997, President Clinton recognized their work with the U.S. National Medal of Technology. In 2005, Vint and Bob received the highest civilian honor bestowed in the U.S., the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It recognizes the fact that their work on the software code used to transmit data across the Internet has put them “at the forefront of a digital revolution that has transformed global commerce, communication, and entertainment.” Vint has received numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA and more than a dozen honorary degrees.

danah boyd

danah boyd is with Microsoft Research New England and a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Dr. boyd’s research “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics” focuses on how American youth use networked publics for sociable purposes. She examines the role that social network sites like MySpace and Facebook play in everyday teen interactions and social relations. Her interests reside in how mediated environments alter the structural conditions in which teens operate, forcing them to manage complex dynamics like interacting before invisible audiences, managing context collisions, and negotiating the convergence of public and private life. The MacArthur Foundation funded the research as part of a broader grant on digital youth and informal learning. At the Berkman Center, danah co-directs the Internet Safety Technical Task Force to work with companies and non-profits to identify technical solutions for keeping children safe online.

Carl Malamud

Carl Malamud is founder and director of Public.Resource.Org a nonprofit corporation that has placed over 90 million pages of U.S. government documents on the Internet, including a large number of judicial opinions, public safety codes, and other materials that were never publicly available before. Public.Resource.Org has also been responsible for removing information that contains Social Security numbers and other protected private information from the Internet, and running a series of audits that have resulted changes in both the U.S. Congress and the federal judiciary. Public.Resource.Org also runs FedFlix, a program that digitizes government videotapes and then puts them on-line as a public domain stock footage library. Previously, Carl was CTO at the Center for American Progress, and the founder of the Internet Multicasting Service, which ran the first radio station on the Internet, put the U.S. SEC and Patent databases on-line, and created the Internet 1996 World Exposition.

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