Photo by Jean Baptiste Labrune

“In the Exploratory Seminar that David Parkes and I led at Radcliffe, we brought together people who simply wouldn’t occupy the same room under normal circumstances. They became immersed in one another’s work and made interesting connections among their research agendas.

“Since the seminar, I’ve been in touch with several of the participants and am working on a couple of new research projects with them. Perhaps most exciting is that some of the doctoral candidates and postdoctoral fellows made new connections with leaders in their fields.”        
    
Yochai Benkler is the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and the faculty codirector of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He helped to define the role of the commons in information production and explain why cooperative enterprises like Wikipedia and open-source software became so prominent in the networked society.

Benkler’s books include The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, 2006), which won awards from the American Political Science Association and the American Sociological Association. 

Benkler and David C. Parkes, a professor in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, met through a doctoral student of Parkes’s and subsequently applied to lead an Exploratory Seminar at Radcliffe. Their collaboration continues today.

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