The Hon. Bob Rae is the Liberal Member of Parliament in the federal riding of Toronto Centre and foreign affairs critic for the Liberal Party of Canada. 

Bob Rae served as Ontario's 21st Premier, and has been elected ten times to federal and provincial parliaments.

Mr. Rae has a B.A. and an LLB from the University of Toronto and was a Rhodes Scholar from Ontario in 1969. He obtained a B.Phil degree from Oxford University in 1971 and was named a Queen's Counsel in 1984. Mr. Rae has received numerous honorary degrees and awards from Canadian and foreign universities, colleges, and organizations.

Mr. Rae was appointed to Her Majesty's Privy Council for Canada in 1998 and was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2000, and appointed an Officer of the Order of Ontario in 2004.

From 1996 to 2007 he was a partner in the law firm, Goodmans LLP one of Canada's leading international law firms. Mr. Rae's clients included companies, trade unions, charitable and non-governmental organizations, and governments themselves. He has extensive experience in negotiation, mediation and arbitration, and consults widely on issues of public policy both in Canada and worldwide.  He remains connected with the mediation and arbitration firm of ADR Chambers.

Mr. Rae is the past president and founding Chairman, of the Forum of Federations and served as Chairman of the Institute of Research on Public Policy (IRPP).  He was chair of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and is the Chairman Emeritus of the Royal Conservatory of Music, as well as National Spokesperson of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society of Canada. He was the Chief Negotiator of the Canadian Red Cross Society in its restructuring, and also served as a member of the Canada Transportation Act Review and the Security and Intelligence Review Committee for Canada.  He has served on the boards of a number of public companies and charities.  He was Chancellor of Wilfrid Laurier University from 2002 to 2007.

Mr. Rae completed a review of Ontario's Postsecondary School Education for the Ontario Provincial government, with a report entitled Ontario:  A Leader in Learning, which in turn led to significant policy and budgetary change. 

In the spring of 2005, Mr. Rae was appointed a special advisor to the Canadian Minister of Public Safety on the Air India bombing of 1985.  His report, Lessons to be Learned was published in November of 2005 and led to his further appointment as Independent Counsellor to the Prime Minister of Canada.

Mr. Rae's books From Protest to Power, The Three Questions, Canada in the Balance, and Exporting Democracy: The Risks and Rewards of Pursuing a Good Idea are published by McClelland & Stewart.

Mr. Rae is Senior Fellow of Massey College in the University of Toronto.

Jonathan Zittrain is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and served as its first executive director from 1997-2000.

Zittrain's research includes digital property, privacy, and speech, and the role played by private "middlepeople" in Internet architecture. He has a strong interest in creative, useful, and unobtrusive ways to deploy technology in the classroom. He has wriiten a book  The Future of the Internet- And How to Stop It.

Education: Harvard Law School, J.D.; Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government, M.P.A.; Yale University, B.S. Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Drawing on data from summer 2008, I will compare top U.S. political blogs on the left and right. The comparison shows significant cross-ideological variations. Sites on the left adopt different, and more participatory technical platforms; comprise significantly fewer sole-authored sites; include user blogs; maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content; include longer narrative and discussion posts; and (among the top half of the blogs in our sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization. The news producer/consumer relationship is more attenuated  on the left wing of the political blogosphere than the right. The practices of the left are more consistent with the prediction that the networked public sphere offers new pathways for discursive participation by a wider array of individuals; meanwhile, the practices of the right suggest that a small group of elites may retain more exclusive agenda-setting authority online. The cross-ideological divergence indicates that the Internet can equally be adopted to undermine or to replicate the traditional distinction between the production and consumption of political information. Moreover, the findings imply that the prevailing techniques of domain-based link analysis used to study the political blogosphere are misleading. These findings have significant implications for the study of prosumption and for the mechanisms by which the networked public sphere may or may not alter democratic participation relative to the mass mediated public sphere. 

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School, he was Joseph M. Field '55 Professor of Law at Yale. He writes about the Internet and the emergence of networked economy and society, as well as the organization of infrastructure, such as wireless communications. In the 1990s he played a role in characterizing the centrality of information commons to innovation, information production, and freedom in both its autonomy and democracy senses. In the 2000s, he worked more on the sources and economic and political significance of radically decentralized individual action and collaboration in the production of information, knowledge and culture. His work traverses a wide range of disciplines and sectors, and is taught in a variety of professional schools and academic departments. In real world applications, his work has been widely discussed in both the business sector and civil society.

Information and communication technology platforms have transformed many aspects of modern life for many individuals around the world. They have revolutionized the realms of commerce, sociability, and even production. The realm of politics and governance, however, is more resistant to ICT revolutions. In this paper, we argue that there are fundamental dis-analogies between politics and these other realms that make the pace of innovation, and to the incidence of transformative ICT platforms, much lower. Instead of looking for "the next big thing," those who wish to understand the positive contribution of ICT to political problems such as public accountability and public deliberation should focus on incremental rather than revolutionary dynamics. We examine these incremental dynamics at work in six important ICT-enabled political accountability efforts from low and middle-income countries (Kenya, Brazil, Chile, India, Slovakia).

Archon Fung is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research examines the impacts of civic participation, public deliberation, and transparency upon governance. His books include Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency (Cambridge University Press, with Mary Graham and David Weil) and Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton University Press). Current projects examine democratic reform initiatives in regulation, public accountability, urban planning, and public services. He has authored five books, three edited collections, and over fifty articles appearing in journals including American Political Science Review, Public Administration Review, Political Theory, Journal of Political Philosophy, Politics and Society, Governance, Journal of Policy and Management, Environmental Management, American Behavioral Scientist, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Boston Review.

Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose will describe how the United States has failed in the aftermaths of every major 20th-century war-from WWI to Afghanistan-routinely ignoring the need to create a stable postwar environment. He will argue that Iraq and Afghanistan are only the most prominent examples of such bunging, not the exceptions to the rule. Rose will draw upon historic lessons of American military engagement and explain how to effectively end our wars.

Gideon Rose is  the editor of Foreign Affairs. He served as managing editor of the magazine from 2000 to 2010 . From 1995 to December 2000 he was Olin senior fellow and deputy director of national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), during which time he served as chairman of CFR's Roundtable on Terrorism and director of numerous CFR study groups. He has taught American foreign policy at Columbia and Princeton Universities. From 1994 to 1995 Rose served as associate director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the staff of the National Security Council. From 1986 to 1987, he was assistant editor at the foreign policy quarterly The National Interest, and from 1985 to 1986 held the same position at the domestic policy quarterly The Public Interest. Rose received his BA from Yale University and his PhD from Harvard University.

Professor David Kinley holds the Chair in Human Rights Law at University of Sydney, and is the Law Faculty's Associate-Dean (International). He is also an Academic Panel member of Doughty Street Chambers in London, the UK's leading human rights practice. He has previously held positions at Cambridge University, The Australian National University, the University of New South Wales, Washington College of Law, American University, and was the founding Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University (2000-2005). He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in 2004, based in Washington DC, and Herbert Smith Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge in 2008. He is author and editor of eight books and more than 80 articles, book chapters, reports and papers.

He has worked for 15 years as a consultant and adviser on international and domestic human rights law in Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Thailand, Iraq, Nepal, Laos, China, and Myanmar/Burma, and for such organizations as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, AusAID, and the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions, and a number of transnational corporations, and NGOs.  He has also previously worked for three years with the Australian Law Reform Commission and two years with the Australian Human Rights Commission.

His latest publications include the critically acclaimed Civilising Globalisation: Human Rights and the Global Economy (CUP, 2009), Corporations and Human Rights (Ashgate 2009), and The World Trade Organisation and Human Rights: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Edward Elgar, 2009) Another edited collection entitled Principled Engagement: Promoting Human Rights in Pariah States will be published by UNU Publications in 2011.  He is currently working on another book investigating the interrelations between human rights and global finance.

David was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and brought up there during the 1960s and 70s.  He studied in England in the 1980s at Sheffield Hallam University and the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge, and after obtaining his doctorate from the latter in 1990 he moved to Australia.  He now lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.

In medicine, transportation, commerce and entertainment, and countless other fields, technology has transformed our lives and provided immense value for millions.

Yet despite all of these revolutionary advances, it has yet to have a similar impact to radically improve the workings of public policy. This situation is especially unfortunate given the fiscal, economic, and social challenges facing our democracy and those around the world. If there's ever a time where politics could use some creative solutions, it's now.

This seminar will highlight some of the legal, political, and social barriers preventing disruptive innovation from taking hold in the public policy sphere, as well as ways to remove these barriers. Drawing on sources ranging from theoretical physics and constitutional law to popular culture, the seminar will provide unique and practical perspectives on how technology can help democracies around the world evolve.

The seminar will offer provocative insights, thought-provoking discussions, and practical tools to help our society can facilitate the evolution of better political, economic, and social institutions.

Matt Harrison graduated from the University of Miami with a Bachelor of Business Administration in Political Science and from the University of Southern California with a joint law degree and Master of Public Policy. Matt founded Prometheus in 2003 and serves as the Institute's President. As the driving force behind the creative and strategic vision of Prometheus, Matt identified and recruited a talented team of engineers, designers and contributors. He was the brainchild behind the DIY Democracy iPhone app, has authored over 200 articles, publications and other features for Prometheus, has been a guest on several talk radio shows and has been quoted in the Orange County Register and Chicago Tribune.