A Friends of the Library Event – Join the Friends!
Elliot E. Maxwell
Wednesday, December 6th
4 – 5 pm, Lownes Room, John Hay Library
Reception to follow
The Internet and the increased availability of tools useful for the creation and modification of digital products have enabled and promoted openness in many areas of our culture and economy and have given rise to an “age of participation.” Openness, defined as a process, product or institution’s accessibility and responsiveness, is fundamentally changing innovation, making it more distributed and collaborative, in other words, more open. Open standards facilitate openness; open source software embodies openness in its organization, processes, and legal regime; and “open innovation” is becoming increasingly visible in everything from the creation of the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia by volunteers, to the marketplace of e-Bay, and ultimately to the Web itself. Openness is even changing the way value is created from a model based on holding one’s creation tightly and metering out access to one where value is enhanced by widespread sharing. Among the key challenges in this “age of participation” are how to make judgments about the information that is available–how to determine its credibility, how to rate it and its source–in other words how to decide what is worthy of trust. This is of increasing importance as new ways of organizing information are being developed, new sources of information rating are being employed, new threats to information security are arising, and new forms of economic activity based upon user contributions are coming into being.
Elliot E. Maxwell is an author and lecturer, as well as an advisor to public and private sector clients on strategic issues involving the intersection of business, technology, and public policy in the Internet, E-commerce and telecommunications domains. Mr. Maxwell is chair of the Advisory Council on Computing and Information Technology at Brown University and a member of the Emeriti Executive Committee. He is a Fellow of the Center for the Study of American Government at Johns Hopkins University and Distinguished Research Fellow at the eBusiness Research Center of the Pennsylvania State University. He was awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters by Brown with Ira Magaziner in 1994 on the 25th anniversary of the new curriculum.