getting my act together: papers and projects

Honestly, this was one of my more productive years. While I still haven’t gotten any further on either of my private projects (and in fact abandoned one of them, having been beaten to the punch by a startup this summer. You ambitious entrepeneurs should leave me some hobbies) , I did manage to get some reasonably meaningful things out.

Worked on some pretty awesome stuff at Y!RB. Programming, data analysis, and social media research – it doesn’t get any better than that. Now I just need to figure out what I want to be doing after this year, which may in fact mark the end of my affiliation with graduate school and possibly academia in general. Scary thought. Where to go from here…

Information Services and Design symposium, brief retrospect

Participated in the Information Services and Design symposium last week. Gave a short talk on intellectual property rights in context of economic development and the knowledge economy, as well as submitted a small paper that is now part of the UCB iSchool Report Series, 2007-011 (PDF).

In truth, I’m not terribly confident about the paper. The domain was too large to be effectively covered in either a 5000-word paper or a 15-minute talk. There are significant implications in IPR in development that falls more into international political economy. The problem is very multifaceted, and there are a number of IPE perspectives that can be used as a lens on this. I think my conclusions here derive from a realist position that national interest has trumped any pretenses to free market liberal economics in this case, but that would be a fairly gross simplification of the factors at work.

Eh, but it’s a tangible output that’s seen more publicity than anything else I’ve done lately.