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[ccAfrica] Berkman Center -- Summer Internship Program 2015 - Now Accepting Applications!
- From: Alex Gakuru <gakuru AT gmail.com>
- To: "ccafrica AT lists.ibiblio.org" <ccafrica AT lists.ibiblio.org>, "ccafrica-oer AT lists.ibiblio.org" <ccafrica-oer AT lists.ibiblio.org>
- Cc: Mary Ooko <mooko AT anu.ac.ke>, Caroline Mwaura <carolinewmwaura AT gmail.com>, Meoli Kashorda <mkashorda AT kenet.or.ke>, Joseph Sevilla <Joe AT strathmore.edu>, Judith Pete <judiambu AT gmail.com>, "Tonny K. Omwansa" <tomwansa AT uonbi.ac.ke>, Jimmy Macharia <kmacharia AT usiu.ac.ke>
- Subject: [ccAfrica] Berkman Center -- Summer Internship Program 2015 - Now Accepting Applications!
- Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2015 12:25:18 +0300
A very happy new year wishes to you.
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Summer Internship Program 2015
Each summer the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University swings open the doors of our vibrant yellow house to welcome a group of talented and curious students as full-time interns - Berkterns! - who are passionate about the promise of the Internet. Finding connected and complementary research inquiries among their diverse backgrounds, students represent all levels of study, are being trained in disciplines across the board, and come from universities all over the world to tackle issues related to the core of Berkman’s research agenda, including law, technology, innovation, and knowledge; the relationships between Internet and civic activity; and the intersection of technology, learning, and development. Summer interns jump head first into the swirl of the Berkman universe, where they are deeply and substantively involved in our research projects and efforts.
Becoming invaluable contributors to the Center’s operation and success, interns conduct collaborative and independent research under the guidance of Berkman staff, fellows, and faculty. Specific roles, tasks, and experiences vary depending on Center needs and interns' skills; a select list of expected opportunities for Summer 2015 is below. Typically, the workload of each intern is primarily based under one project or suite of projects, with encouragement and flexibility to get involved in additional projects across the Center.
In addition to joining research teams, summer interns participate in special lectures with Berkman Center faculty and fellows, engage each other through community experiences like weekly interns discussion hours, and attend Center-wide events and gatherings with members of the wider Berkman community. As well, each year interns establish new channels for fun and learning, such as organizing topical debates; establishing reading groups and book clubs; producing podcasts and videos; and hosting potlucks, cook-offs, and BBQs (fortunately for us, people share).
The word "awesome" has been thrown around to describe our internships, but don't take our word for it. Interns Royze Adolfo and Hilda Barasa documented the summer 2012 internship experience here. Former intern Zachary McCune had this to say: "it has been an enchanting summer working at the berkman center for internet & society. everyday, i get to hang out with some of the most brilliant people on the planet. we talk, we write (emails), we blog, we laugh, we play rock band. and when things need to get done, we stay late hyped on free coffee and leftover food. it is a distinct honor to be considered a peer among such excellent people. and i am not just talking about the fellows, staff, and faculty, though they are all outstanding. no, i mean my peers as in my fellow interns, who are almost definitely the ripening next generation of changemakers."
Time Commitment:
Summer internships are full time positions (35 hours/week) for 10 weeks. The Summer 2015 program will run from June 1 through August 7.
Payment:
Interns are paid $11.50 an hour, with the exception of a number of opportunities for law students who are expected to receive some version of summer public interest funding (more about these specific cases at the link for law students below).
Please be forewarned that payment may not be sufficient to cover living expenses in the Boston area. No other benefits are provided, and interns must make their own housing, insurance and transportation arrangements.
Commitment to Diversity:
The work and well-being of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University are strengthened profoundly by the diversity of our network and our differences in background, culture, experience, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, and much more. We actively seek and welcome applications from people of color, women, the LGBTQIA community, and persons with disabilities, as well as applications from researchers and practitioners from across the spectrum of disciplines and methods.
Eligibility:
- Internships are open to students enrolled across the full spectrum of disciplines.
- Internships are open to students at different levels of academic study including those in bachelor’s, master’s, law, and Ph.D programs.
- Summer interns do not need to be U.S. residents or in school in the U.S.; indeed, we encourage international students to apply.
- Summer interns do not need an existing affiliation with Harvard University.
We know what you're thinking. Yes please. I want that. That sounds magical. Did I mention that I have incredible dance moves? Here's what you should do...
Law students: please find application instructions and important additional information here.
Students from disciplines other than law: please find more information and application instructions here.
Required application materials for all include:
- A cover letter describing your skills and interests. When developing your cover letter, you may wish to consider the following questions: What has led you to pursue research with the Berkman Center and the issues we study? What would you like to gain from working with us this summer, and what will you contribute? How do you think the experience might influence your future efforts? Please feel welcome to address these and/or other topics you would like to share with us. Cover letters should be addressed to Nancy.
- A current resume.
- The contact information for two references (professional or
academic).
We look forward to hearing from you!
Questions? Check out our FAQ, and if you have a question not addressed there, email Rebecca Tabasky at rtabasky AT cyber.law.harvard.edu
----
Select Expected Summer 2015 Opportunities:
Academic Innovation
The Berkman Center, in conjunction with the Harvard Law School Library, has a number of projects focused on innovation in academic spaces. Examples of these projects include H2O and Perma.cc. H2O is a Web-based platform for creating, customizing, consuming, and sharing free and open course materials. Perma.cc is a citation archiver designed to prevent link rot in academic scholarship by saving copies of online resources cited in scholarly publications -- providing authors and editors with permanent URLs that will allow readers to access archived copies of the cited material. Summer interns will assist with the management and growth of these projects, working with the Berkman/Library team to conceptualize and realize the future of these technologies. Individual contributions will depend on the skill set of each intern. Find more at https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/ and https://perma.cc/.
Anti-Hate Speech Initiative
“Hate speech” and related phenomena manifest and affect young
people in many different ways. As part of a new initiative, the
Berkman Center, in close collaboration with a Leadership Team
and Advisory Committee, is in the early stages of leveraging its
national and global networks to create a first-of-its-kind
thematic network of experts, educators, practitioners, company
representatives, and others to focus on this issue. The network
will attempt to better understand the different kinds of
youth-oriented hate speech online; develop, map, and evaluate
effective counter strategies; and foster more resilient
communities through partnerships with universities and other
institutions in the U.S. and other countries. Specifically, the
initiative will conduct activities in three analytically
distinct but interacting tracks: Research, Curriculum
Development, and Network Building. Summer interns’
responsibilities will support work in one or more of these
tracks.
Chilling Effects
Chilling Effects is a website, database and research project
studying cease and desist letters concerning online content.
Our goals are to conduct and facilitate research on the
notices, to educate the public about the different kinds of
cease and desist letters--both legitimate and questionable--that
are being sent to Internet publishers, and to provide as much
transparency as possible about the “ecology” of such notices, in
terms of who is sending them and why, and to what effect. All
summer interns working for Chilling Effects will have the
opportunity to work on a range of assignments, including:
writing blog posts, updating news and research resources for
on-site publication; helping with managing and curating the
database, including coding metadata and working with source
partners to facilitate the ingestion and processing of notices;
working on domestic and international collaboration initiatives;
event planning and management; and working on research and
writing projects centered on the database corpus, either
internally or in collaboration with external researchers.
Chilling Effects is especially interested in candidates with
coding skills to help Berkman developers work on and improve the
project's website and database. An ideal candidate for will
have experience with Ruby and/or Ruby On Rails or experience
with other MVC frameworks, postgreSQL, and elasticsearch and/or
Solr. Experience with large data sets, visualization libraries
and/or continuous integration and test suites a plus. Some
thoughts from Chilling Effects summer interns about their
experience can be found
here and
here, and more information about
Chilling Effects is at http://www.chillingeffects.org/.
Cyberlaw Clinic
The Cyberlaw Clinic provides high-quality, pro-bono legal
services to individuals, start-ups, non-profit organizations,
and government entities. Every summer, clinic interns contribute
to a wide range of real-world projects related to the Internet
and technology. Interns may help the Clinic team provide
guidance on open access, digital copyright, and fair use issues;
support advocacy efforts to protect online speech and anonymity;
develop legal resources for citizen journalists and new media
organizations; advise courts on innovative uses of technology to
increase citizens’ access to justice; or draft reference
documents and training materials for educators on children's
privacy and online safety. Interns in the Cyberlaw Clinic can
expect direct hands-on experience working with clients under the
supervision of the Clinic's staff attorneys. More information
about the Cyberlaw Clinic can be found at
http://cyberlawclinic.berkman.harvard.edu.
Cybersecurity
The Cybersecurity Project is engaging in a clean-slate
evaluation of the set of responsibilities related to foreign
intelligence gathering, which has expanded to include the
exploitation of cybersecurity vulnerabilities. In this project,
we aim to identify concrete steps to clarify roles and
boundaries for the intelligence community, the corporate sector,
academics, non-profits, and individuals; to examine how the
cybersecurity risks are conceptualized and assessed by
governments and companies, particularly companies with global
operations; and to rebuild legitimacy and public support for
cross-sectoral cybersecurity policies and practices. More
information about the project can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/cybersecurity.
Digital Problem-Solving Initiative
The Digital
Problem-Solving Initiative (DPSI) is a
University-wide, highly-collaborative project, bringing together
a diverse group of learners (students, faculty, fellows, and
staff) to work on projects to address challenges and
opportunities across the university. DPSI interns will support
the Berkman team in assessing the 2014-2015 program and planning
for the program’s future expansion. Work may include outreach
across the University and schools, event planning, research
briefs, and general creative thinking and brainstorming.
Compelling candidates should be interested in and/or excited
about any of the topics mentioned above, as well as innovation
at universities and within education, design, student
entrepreneurship, and collaboration. This position is an ideal
opportunity for a Harvard undergraduate, with the possibility of
being extended over the 2015-2016 academic year (part-time).
More information can be found at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/dpsi.
Digital Media and Communications Squad
The intern with Berkman’s digital media and communications squad
will have a chance to help imagine, develop, produce, and
promote a number of video and audio production resources aimed
at telling the world about the amazing Internet research and
action coming out of Berkman. This intern will be chiefly
responsible for helping to create the Radio Berkman
audio podcast, but will also play a role in
producing videos like
these. On any given day you could be
interviewing a senior
Berkman researcher or guest, helping to
produce a dynamic
video explainer on Internet censorship, or
digging up astonished cat GIFs to accompany a blog post about
the latest NSA-leak revelations. The intern will also help out
with other digital communications efforts such as creating and
posting content to the Berkman website,
social media channels, and our weekly
email newsletter, as well as thinking through
(and piloting) innovative ways to reach new audiences. This
intern should have experience with and access to audio editing
software (Logic, Soundtrack, Audacity, Soundbooth, or other),
excellent writing skills, enthusiasm and an open mind for
creating and executing fun ideas, and interest in digital
communications and podcasting. Useful but not mandatory:
experience in video production/editing, Photoshop/Illustrator,
animation, social media management, Wordpress/Drupal platforms.
Education, Technology, and Privacy
A summer intern will work on several projects relating to
education, technology, and privacy, particularly the Student
Privacy Initiative and “Coding for
All.” The Berkman Center’s
Student Privacy Initiative explores the opportunities and
challenges that may arise as connected learning becomes more of
a norm in education. As we conduct our research, we are engaging
multiple stakeholders-- from district officials to policymakers
to industry members to teachers, parents, and students--to
develop shared good practices that promote positive educational
outcomes, harness technological and pedagogical innovations, and
protect critical values. In addition to ongoing research tasks
(such as contributing to “This Week in
Student Privacy”), a summer intern might help
draft research briefs, white papers, and website updates, as
well as coordinate with and engage external organizations
working in the K-12 ed tech innovation space. More information
is available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/studentprivacy.
Freedom of _expression_
The Berkman Center's suite of freedom of _expression_-related
projects, including Internet Monitor, Herdict, and others, is
seeking a small team of interns to conduct research on Internet
filtering, monitoring, and control efforts around the globe;
engage in related data gathering efforts using online sources;
contribute to report writing; blog regularly about issues
concerning online freedom of _expression_; and manage various
projects' Twitter and Facebook accounts. In the past, interns
have also supported research on blogospheres and other online
communities around the world, contributed to literature reviews,
and hand coded online content. Foreign language skills,
particularly in Persian, Arabic, Russian, and Chinese, are
useful. More information about some of Berkman’s work on
freedom of _expression_ can be found at the following links: https://thenetmonitor.org
; http://www.herdict.org/web/.
Geek Cave
Interns joining the Geek Cave may extend open source software,
build scalable websites, or manage the mixed desktop network
that keeps the Center moving. Our team works with ruby, perl,
php, bash, jQuery, PostgreSQL, MySQL and a slew of other tools.
We have a small group of talented, devoted, fun, full-time
developers on staff that can help hone your 1337 coding skillz
as well provide fun projects to pair code or geek out on; two
project managers to help you keep your work on track; and
hardware and software support to help deploy your projects on
Berkman infrastructure. More info about the projects that we
work on can be found on our github organization page at http://github.com/berkmancenter.
Global Access in Action
Maximizing the potential of technology to help the global poor
requires fresh thinking. The legal and policy frameworks that
govern innovation and commercialization can either constrain or
facilitate the development and application of innovative
technologies to tackle poverty, disease, hunger, and ignorance.
Global Access in Action (GAiA) seeks to contribute to the
improvement of those frameworks. Guided by six
principles, we conduct action-oriented
research into access to lifesaving medicines, and alternative
incentives for the development of medical treatments for
underserved populations. During Summer 2015, GAiA’s intern(s)
will conduct research and writing related concerning new and
underused strategies for increasing access to medicines and
designing alternative mechanisms to incentivize pharmaceutical
research, respectively. Support with event planning and
coordination may also be involved. More information is at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/globalaccessinaction.
Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP)
HOAP fosters open access (OA) to research within Harvard and
beyond, undertakes research on OA, and provides OA to timely and
accurate information about OA itself. HOAP interns may enlarge
the Open Access Directory (OAD), a wiki-based encyclopedia of
OA, help with ongoing OA research projects, or contribute to the
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP), a social-tagging project
organizing knowledge about OA. They might also help document and
promote TagTeam, a HOAP-directed open-source tagging platform
built at Berkman to support OATP. More information about HOAP
can be found at
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Main_Page.
Media Cloud
Media Cloud, a joint project of the Berkman Center and the MIT Center for Civic Media,
seeks summer interns to contribute to our team’s effort to build
new tools and methods that allow us to study and better analyze
the shape and dynamics of the networked public sphere. The
interns will contribute to the technical development of the
Media Cloud platform and will help to extend and improve the
project's features, including the Controversy Mapping tool,
which allows researchers to use the Media Cloud platform’s data
collection and network visualization tools to map the evolution
of a particular public affair, debate, or policy conversation.
We are looking for developers interested in online media
research, big data, and natural language processing. More
information about Media Cloud is at http://mediacloud.org/.
metaLAB
metaLAB is a research and teaching unit dedicated to exploring
and expanding the frontiers of networked culture in the arts and
humanities. In summer 2015, up to three interns will help us to
produce a workshop in digital art history involving scholars,
developers, and designers from across the country, to take place
in early July at the Harvard Art Museums. In the balance of the
summer, the interns’ time will be split between Curarium, a
platform to document, annotate, and remix collections in
libraries, museums and other institutions; a suite of short
films to be incorporated into an interactive documentary; and an
ongoing project documenting urban ecology. These projects will
call upon writing, media, and design skills, and will furnish
opportunities for learning across such varied domains as
ethnography, editing, and software development. More about
metaLAB is available at http://metalab.harvard.edu/.
Municipal Fiber Initiative
The Municipal Fiber Initiative at Berkman is documenting
alternative models of Internet provisioning by cities and towns
in the United States. An intern with this project will assist
with documenting specific municipal
efforts—detailing chronologies, lessons, costs, and benefits of
municipal Internet projects—or in organizing workshops to
disseminate research findings. This work will build off of the
research conducted by Berkman Director Susan Crawford and teams;
previous publications may be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2013/internet_to_leverett
and http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2014/community_fiber.
Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data
The Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data project brings
together expertise in computer science, statistics, law, policy,
and social science across four research centers at Harvard. It
seeks to develop privacy-preserving methods, tools, and policies
to further the tremendous research potential of data containing
information about individuals. The legal team, led by Prof. Urs
Gasser at the Berkman Center, explores cross-disciplinary
approaches to data privacy and devises new privacy frameworks,
legal instruments, and policy recommendations that complement
advanced tools for private data analysis being developed in the
project. To support this work, the Berkman team is looking for
rising second and third-year law students to conduct research
and analysis on topics related to privacy law and policy. Summer
interns will write legal memoranda on selected topics in law,
draft data sharing agreements, survey recent privacy-related
publications in academic journals, aid in the development of new
conceptual models for privacy and data sharing, and attend
lectures and events with privacy experts from a wide range of
disciplines. More information about the project can be found on
the Privacy Tools project website at http://privacytools.seas.harvard.edu.
Special Projects - Urs Gasser
A summer intern will work on a variety of projects undertaken by
Berkman's Executive Director Urs Gasser (e.g. work on privacy,
globalization of law, cyber-liability, interoperability,
internet governance). Tasks include research for presentations
and events, op-eds, a book, and articles. This position requires
the ability to find, absorb, critically analyze, and debate
large amounts of written and other media materials from sources
including scholarly articles, news articles and blogs, and
interviews. This position is an ideal opportunity
for individuals interested in pursuing graduate or legal studies
in the future, as well as those individuals currently enrolled
in graduate or law school. Knowledge in German or
an Asian language is a plus. More information about Urs’
research can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/ugasser.
Special Projects - Jonathan Zittrain
Summer interns will work on a variety of projects undertaken by
Professor Jonathan Zittrain, assisting in a variety of research
areas (e.g. human computing, linkrot and internet robustness,
platforms, and Internet filtering). Summer contributions include
research for conferences and presentations; brainstorming
article outlines; fact-checking materials; and reviewing
original article or paper drafts. This position requires the
ability to find, absorb, critically analyze, and debate large
amounts of written and other media materials from sources
including scholarly articles, news articles and blogs, and
interviews with public policymakers. This intern position is
ideally suited for students or others who would like to get a
deeper understanding of academic research and the broader world
of Internet law. As well, this position may be extended into the
2015-2016 academic year; if you would be interested and
available to continue working from Cambridge, MA in this
capacity beyond the summer, please indicate so in your cover
letter. More information about JZ’s research can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jzittrain
and at
http://www.jz.org/.
- [ccAfrica] Berkman Center -- Summer Internship Program 2015 - Now Accepting Applications!, Alex Gakuru, 01/09/2015
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