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by Karen Coyle

CPSR News Volume 15, Number 4: Fall 1997

At this conference, we asked ourselves: what are the effects on society as business becomes increasingly digital? Saturday's four panels addressed aspects of this topic. The first, moderated by CPSR board member Nathaniel Borenstein, talked about technologies for responsible business. The second panel, Fairly Free, examined the issue of how to reward our intellectual workers, the writers who create the very stuff of the information age, while protecting the public's right to open access to information. Speakers were Bruce Hartford of the National Writers Union and Pamela Samuelson, nationally known expert on copyright and cyberspace. (See the panel write-up by Chris Mays, on page , and Bruce Hartford's article on page ) The third panel, on access to all, had speakers from three local community organizations that provide computer training to underserved populations. You'll find the URLs to Plugged In, Women's Economic Agenda Program (WEAP) and Access to Software for All People (ASAP) at the end of this article; if you're involved in community training or thinking about how it could happen in your area, you can visit these sites for ideas and inspiration. The last panel asked the question, what is the nature of the digital economy? As you'll read in Josh Rai's piece on page , this panel sparked quite a bit of controversy. Michael Goldhaber, one of the panelists, gives us a brief look at his vision of the attention economy on page of this newsletter issue.

On Sunday morning, conference attendees had a choice of workshops, again covering a wide variety of topics, from the issue of DNS assignment to a reading by author Paulina Boorsook from her upcoming book on the techno-libertarian culture. There were also workshops on staying healthy in the computer intensive workplace and on models for community networks.

Sunday afternoon's annual meeting of CPSR was well attended and quite fruitful. Aki Namioka, CPSR's President, handed out copies of the draft principles (p. ??) for CPSR's work on the issue of Internet governance, and the group discussed and revised each principle. Even though the board had gone through a similar editing process just days before, this group brought up many new ideas, confirming, at least for me, the value of issuing the document as an Internet draft and opening as wide as possible of a debate.

Each CPSR conference merits a round of well-deserved thanks. This year's conference committee consisted of volunteers from the Berkeley chapter: Dave Kadlecek, Chris Mays, Michael Paoli, Josh Rai, and Madeline Stanionis. Our cosponsors for this meeting were the School of Information Management and Systems, the Computer Science Department, and the International Computer Science Institute, all of the University of California at Berkeley; the National Writers Union; and Access to Software for All People. Our corporate sponsors were Internet Travel Network, Interval Corporation, Pacific Bell.

Here are some URLs related to issues the conference addressed:

Women's Economic Agenda Program, http://www.sriconsulting.com/weap/
Plugged In, http://www.pluggedin.org/
A.S.A.P., http://www.asaponline.org/
National Writers Union,http://www.nwu.org/nwu/
Pamela Samuelson, http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/
Michael Goldhaber, http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/
Hal Varian, http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal
Resources on the Information Economy, http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/resources/infoecon

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