w3c icon

joseph.m.reagle

PGP Key | CV
Work and Chairing Style

[This is a historical page as I no longer work at the W3C, please see my personal home page for the latest.]

In 1996 I joined the MIT Lab for Computer Science where I acted as a W3C public policy analyst and Working Group Chair. I've worked within the Technology & Society Domain on the technology and policy of digital signatures, encryption, privacy, and content-selection/free-speech. I've also worked on W3C's privacy and intellectual property policies: authoring and maintaining the copyright and trademark licenses and performing patent analysis. I was the W3C co-chair of the joint IETF/W3C XML-Digital-Signature Working Group, Chair of the W3C XML Encryption Working Group and the Chair of the P3P Harmonization Group (developing a OECD privacy guideline like implementation language for the Web).

In February 1999 I returned to MIT from a short sabbatical as Resident Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. I had a lot of fun working with the faculty and students of a few Harvard/MIT courses and writing about Internet culture and democratic/anarchist principles.

After receiving a Computer Science degree from UMBC I moved to Boston and attended MIT. At MIT, I completed the two year Masters program in Technology and Policy. During that time I worked with the Research Program on Communication Policy. In the summer of 95, I worked at Open Market on electronic commerce protocols. In between graduating and returning to MIT, I did Internet and interactive media consulting with McCann-Erickson, and Internet gambling consulting for go-Digital in NYC. I obviously now work at MIT/W3C.

My research interests focus on the interactions between the technical, social, and legal disciplines -- I like finding relationships, patterns, and equivalences. In my Master's thesis, I examined how trust and risk are commonly managed by financial, policy/legal, and cryptographic instruments. This work led to my thoughts on social protocols: computer protocols (or their applications) that enable individuals and communities to express social capabilities. At the Berkman Center I was able to advance these thoughts further by looking at the relationship between Web-data schema design and contract law, computer agents and legal agency, and Internet culture and democratic/anarchist principles.

Relevant Presentations