Hacking Society

Today, from 10am to 4:30pm eastern, USV will be hosting an event called Hacking Society. This is one of our "sessions events" that we do from time to time.

Hacking Society brings together a small group of thinkers and doers to discuss how networks are transforming our economy and society, and what this means for the future of innovation, competition, regulation and policy advocacy. A list of the attendees is here.

Over the course of the day, we will:

• Discuss how the economics of networks might help solve challenging social and economic problems.
• Examine how incumbents use their influence over the current policy process to stave off competition from networks.
• Define a proactive, network-friendly “Freedom to Innovate” policy agenda.
• Examine how “net native” policy advocacy works and how it can be harnessed to promote a positive agenda as well as overthrow bad policy and bad regimes.

We will record the event and make the audio available live here. We will also be livetweeting the event and invite everyone to join us at #hacksociety. We will make the audio and video recordings available on the web under a Creative Commons Attribution License (their most liberal license).

The format of a USV sessions event is a small group of folks (less than 40) around a big table talking with each other (not at each other) about a big issue that we are trying to wrap our heads around. Because the group is designed to be small, we cannot invite everyone to attend. But we hope that the stream, the tweetstream, and the recordings will allow others to participate in this event, and more importantly take the themes we are exploring forward with their own thoughts and actions. That's why we are publishing the recordings of the event under a creative commons license.

I hope you can listen in, follow the event on twitter, and engage with us on these important issues.