Social Science Research Council

The 2002 Summer Institute was hosted by the SSRC program on Information Technology, International Cooperation and Global Security (ITIC) and Columbia University's Center for Organizational Innovation was held in the first week of June at Columbia University. Leading scholars and practitioners brainstormed about directions for future social research on IT as it bears on communities and boundaries; design and the politics of access and openness; property, personhood and information; the securing of social spaces; and socio-economic development.

Kicking off the Institute was an evening roundtable featuring Zoe Baird, president of the Markle Foundation; Craig Calhoun; Michael Edwards, director of the Ford Foundation's Governance and Civil Society Unit; Denis Gilhooly, director of Information & Communication Technology for Development at the UNDP; and Saskia Sassen, Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and chair of the SSRC Committee on IT, International Cooperation and Global Security. The roundtable speakers discussed the international dimensions of governance of information technologies and the role of IT in governance; sharing their views on what important decisions they see ahead for governance; what possibilities- or lack of possibilities- exist for wider participation in those decisions; and what they believe is at stake in such decisions and participation.