Berkman Center's Herdict Receives $1.5M Grant

Herdict, an online Internet accessibility and censorship database run by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, recently received a $1.5 million grant from the Omidyar Network.

Herdict—whose name is a portmanteau word of “herd” and “verdict”—provides a real-time picture of Internet accessibility around the globe by allowing Internet users to report any accessibility issues they experience.

“Herdict is a powerful tool that exposes regimes’ intent on preventing citizen access to certain sites,” wrote Stacy Donohue, director of investments for government transparency at Omidyar Network, in a press release issued by the firm. Omidyar is a philanthropic investment firm that aids organizations hoping to bring about economic, social, and political change.

Herdict plans to use the grant to spin off from the Berkman Center and become an individual non-profit, according to Robert M. Faris, research director of the Berkman Center and one of the core members behind the website.

“We don’t see ourselves as the long-term home for such project,” Faris said. “We see ourselves as the incubators.”

With the grant, the website is one step closer to its goal of contributing to research on Internet neutrality—the idea that the same online content should be available regardless of location.

The website also has versions in Chinese, Russian, Persian, and Arabic, languages spoken in countries where government censorship is relatively strong.

By allowing Internet users to report on any access problems they face, the website ensures that “blockage is not a quiet thing,” said Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan L. Zittrain, who conceived the idea for the website.

Herdict will also use the grant to test new methods of “crowdsourcing”—the increasingly popular technique the project currently uses, which involves asking large groups of people to perform a given task in an open forum.

The grant will also fund the redesigning of the website to make it more user-friendly and to hire more staff to work on the project, according to Laura S. Miyakawa, Herdict’s project manager.

“We are ecstatic about the grant,” Miyakawa said. “We are absolutely thrilled to have the opportunity to really grow.”

—Staff writer Sirui Li can be reached at sli@college.harvard.edu.