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This course surveys the political and economic history of the commons, its strengths and limitations over the centuries, and its burgeoning contemporary manifestations.  We will be guided by the writings of Elinor Ostrom, Peter Linebaugh, Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig, Peter Barnes, Lewis Hyde and David Bollier as well as by a range of films, essays and Web resources.  The course will have direct conversations with policy experts, academics and activists who are at the forefront of commons work, and confront the ambiguities and perplexities of this still-emerging realm of thought and action.

Worth reading! "Such enthusiastic assessments also grace the rapidly growing body of academic and popular literature on digital natives in the United States and Western Europe. Books such as Born Digital by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Grown Up Digital by Don Tapscott, iBrain by Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, and The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason, as well as a recent three-year study on digital youth by the MacArthur Foundation, come to mind. In these already-democratic societies, optimism about the Internet's impact on the civic engagement of young people-even the notion of "digital citizenship"-is a justified, if not particularly new, intellectual thread. "However, outside of the prosperous and democratic countries of North America and Western Europe, digital natives are as likely to be digital captives as digital renegades, a subject that none of the recent studies address in depth. If the notion that the Internet could dampen young people's aspirations for democracy seems counterintuitive, it is only because our media is still enthralled by the trite narrative of bloggers as a force for positive change. Recent headlines include: "Egypt's growing blogger community pushes limit of dissent," "From China to Iran, Web Diarists Are Challenging Censors," "Cuba's Blogger Crackdown," "China's web censors struggle to muzzle free-spirited bloggers.""

The papers presented here seem to be from a wide range of backgrounds. Some from a social perspective (identities, etc.), and others from technical perspectives (identity management using FOAF, OpenID, etc.), still others from a legal perspective. Quite interesting.

Smita Srinivas is Assistant Professor in the Urban Planning program at Columbia University, Director of the Technological Change Lab (TCLab), and a Faculty Associate of the South Asian Institute (SAI), Columbia University. Current and past projects include primary research in India and Finland, and comparative and collaborative work in the USA, Brazil, South Africa, and elsewhere. She advises students for their M.S. and PhD. dissertations on diverse settings: Yemen, Kenya, S. Korea, Mexico, Spain, Germany, USA, Uganda, India, and others.