The Declaration(s) of the Interdependence of Cyberspace

This workshop, a continuation of the recent “Building blocks of Web 3.0” workshop held at Harvard Law School, will discuss existing narratives coming from different standpoints or communities with regard to how the Internet could or should be governed. It will then move on to discuss whether, as the Internet is slowly embracing every aspect of our life—both online and offline— there is a need for a new narrative around which we should rally. To prepare for the workshop, we ask participants to read this article, which reviews existing narratives and introduces the problem.

SPEAKERS Primavera De Filippi is a permanent researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. She is a member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum, and co-founder of the Internet Governance Forum’s dynamic coalitions on Blockchain Technology (COALA). Her fields of interest focus on legal challenges raised by decentralized technologies, with a particular focus on blockchain technologies. She is investigating the new opportunities for these technologies to enable new governance models and participatory decision-making through the concept of governance-by-design. Her book, “Blockchain and the Law,” was published in 2018 by Harvard University Press (co-authored with Aaron Wright).

Juan Ortiz Freuler is a PhD candidate in Communication at the University of Southern California (USC), where he explores how political systems can be affected by the internet. Juan is also an Associate at JustLabs, and has held positions as a Fellow (2017-2018) and an Affiliate (2018-2020) at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Before moving to the US, Juan developed and executed research projects at several non-profit organizations in Argentina and Mexico. A graduate from the Di Tella Law School in Buenos Aires, Juan has also obtained Masters degrees in both Public Policy and Social Science of the Internet at the University of Oxford.

Joshua Tan is currently a doctoral student in computer science at Oxford studying under Samson Abramsky and Bob Coecke; previously, he completed my master’s in pure math at the Courant Institute at NYU, where his research involved applications of geometry and topology to artificial intelligence. For his thesis, he’s been exploring different ways of applying category theory and sheaf theory to computational learning theory, from work on the sample compression conjecture to diversity measures in boosting. His interests include category theory, computational learning theory, sheaf theory, robotics, and art history.