The U.S.-Japan relationship is not much in the headlines these days—and when it is the stories seem to focus on issues, such as Okinawa and beef, that have bedeviled ties seemingly for decades. But, in the midst of seismic shifts in Asia-Pacific security and global economic relations, shouldn’t the two countries be talking about something else?

Many in American industry have thought so and in 2009 the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan released a white paper calling for a new set of discussions with Japan directed at capturing the innovation and growth potential of the emerging global Internet economy. Accompanying the call were a set of over 70 specific recommendations for discussion in areas ranging from privacy, security, intellectual property, spectrum management, cyber security to competition—an agenda for the future not the past.

The paper found resonance with the new Democratic Party government in Japan and the Obama administration that were searching for a new direction and vocabulary for U.S.-Japan economic relations and were mindful that partnership with Japan in this area strengthened the U.S. hand in dealing with preemptive attempts elsewhere to define rule of the road for the Internet and “cloud computing.” 

The Dialogue was formally launched in the fall of 2010 and its third plenary session is taking place in Washington, D.C. October 16 to 19, 2012. Professor Jim Foster is participating in the Dialogue as a leading member of the U.S. private sector delegation to the talks. He will be coming to Stanford immediately following the joint industry-government meeting on October 18 (the governments will continue in closed-door session through the 19th) and will offer his analysis and insight into the discussions in Washington and their implications for future cooperation between Japan and the U.S. industry in the cloud computing field and for the two governments on challenging issues of broader Internet governance.

Jim Foster is currently a professor in the Graduate School of Media and Governance at Keio University, where he teaches and researches on U.S. foreign policy issues and global Internet policy. He is the co-director of Keio’s Internet and Society Institute. Foster worked as a U.S. diplomat from 1981 to 2006, serving in Japan, Korea, the Philippines and at the U.S. Mission to the EU. He was director for corporate affairs at Microsoft Japan from 2006 to 2011. He is a former vice president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan and a co-author of the ACCJ White Paper on the Internet Economy.

Abstract
The manifestations of 'open' are permeating the society enabled by the rise of participatory culture and improved communication technologies. In her research, Tanja Aitamurto examines the impact of openness on traditionally closed processes such as journalism, policy-making and design. Aitamurto draws on several case studies, in which collective intelligence is harnessed through crowdsourcing, open innovation and co-creation. Her work is based on data from 150 in-depth interviews and about 8,000 data points recorded by netnography. Aitamurto's research is situated in social sciences, informed by organization studies and management science and engineering. She finds that the 'open' challenges the incumbent power structures when participatory mechanisms become a means to practice social control.

Tanja Aitamurto is a visiting researcher at the Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. In her PhD project she examines how collective intelligence, whether harvested by crowdsourcing, co-creation or open innovation, impacts incumbent processes in journalism, public policy making and design process. Her work has been published in several academic publications, such as the New Media and Society. Related to her studies, she advises the Government and the Parliament of Finland about Open Government principles, for example about how open data and crowdsourcing can serve democratic processes.

Aitamurto has previously studied at the Center for Design Research and at the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford. She is a PhD Student at the Center for Journalism, Media and Communication Research at Tampere University in Finland, and she holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy, and a Master of Arts in Humanities. Prior to returning to academia, she made a career in journalism in Finland specializing in foreign affairs, doing reporting in countries such as Afghanistan, Angola and Uganda. She has also taught journalism at the University of Zambia, in Lusaka, and worked at the Namibia Press Agency, Windhoek. More about Tanja’s work at www.tanjaaitamurto.com and on Twitter @tanjaaita.

Abstract
Drawing on open-ended interviews with more than sixty political staffers, accounts of practitioners, and fieldwork, in this talk I present the previously untold history of the uptake of new media in Democratic electoral campaigning from 2000 to 2012. I follow a group of technically-skilled Internet staffers who came together on the Howard Dean campaign and created a series of innovations in campaign organization, tools, and practice. After the election, these individuals founded an array of consulting firms and training organizations and staffed a number of prominent Democratic campaigns. In the process, they carried their innovations across Democratic politics and contributed to a number of electoral victories, including Barack Obama's historic bid for the presidency, and currently occupy senior leadership positions in the president's re-election campaign. This history provides a lens for understanding the organizations, tools, and practices that are shaping the 2012 electoral cycle.  

In detailing this history, I analyze the role of innovation, infrastructure, and organization in electoral politics. I show how the technical and organizational innovations of the Dean and Obama campaigns were the product of the movement of staffers between fields, organizational structures that provided spaces for technical development, and incentives for experimentation. I reveal how Dean's former staffers created an infrastructure for Democratic new media campaigning after the 2004 elections that helped transfer knowledge, practice, and tools across electoral cycles and campaigns.  Finally, I detail how organizational contexts shaped the uptake of tools by the Obama campaign in 2008 and 2012, analyze the emergence of data systems and managerial practices that coordinate collective action, and show how digital cultural work mobilizes supporters and shapes the meaning of electoral participation.

I conclude by discussing the relationship between technological change and democratic practice, showing how from Howard Dean to Barack Obama, new media have provided campaigns with new ways to find and engage supporters, to run their internal operations, and to translate the energy and enthusiasm generated by candidates and political opportunities into the staple resources of American electioneering.  While these tools have facilitated a resurgence in political activity among the electorate, this participation has come in long institutionalized domains: fundraising, volunteer canvassing, and voter mobilization.  Meanwhile, participation is premised on sophisticated forms of data profiling, targeted persuasive communications, and computational managerial practices that coordinate collective action.  As such, I argue that the uptake of new media in electoral campaigning is a hybrid form of organizing politics that combines both management and empowerment. 

Daniel Kreiss is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kreiss's research explores the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice. In Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012), Kreiss presents the history of new media and Democratic Party political campaigning over the last decade. Kreiss is an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and received a Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University. Kreiss's work has appeared in New Media and Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, The Journal of Information Technology and Politics, and The International Journal of Communication, in addition to other academic journals.

The third annual China 2.0 conference at Stanford University will bring together thought leaders from China and the US to discuss the driving forces and global implications of the rapid growth of China’s internet industry.

Already home to two of the world’s top five internet firms by market capitalization, China is a launchpad for both innovative start-ups and global powerhouses. These firms are increasingly shaping the global digital economy.

Comprising 1 billion mobile subscribers, over half a billion internet users, and a high rate of smartphone adoption, China’s internet is now so pervasive that in sectors from communication and commerce to media and entertainment, it is a key driver of investment and innovation.

While state-owned players dominated China's offline world, entrepreneurs are in the driving seat online, fueled by an increasingly deep reserve of venture capital and private equity.

The combination of ideas, entrepreneurs and capital is helping blur the lines between online and offline sectors, and the boundaries between industry sectors in China.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Image  Robin Li  Co-founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Baidu	Image Jon M. Huntsman, Jr. Former US Ambassador to China and Governor of Utah
Li has led Baidu to become China’s largest search engine, with over 80% market share and a market capitalization of $40 billion. A pioneer and leader of China’s internet industry, he was named by Time magazine in 2010 as one of the “World’s Most Influential People” and in 2012 he topped Forbes China’s list of best CEOs.	Huntsman served as US Ambassador to China through April 2011 when he stepped down to run for the 2012 Republican nomination for President.  Twice elected as Governor of Utah, he also has served as Deputy Secretary of Commerce for Asia, US Ambassador to Singapore, and Deputy US Trade Representative.

Other featured speakers will include internet industry pioneers and leading executives, investors and entrepreneurs from both sides of the Pacific.  Stanford faculty, researchers, students and alumni from the business and engineering schools will also actively participate.

Conference sessions will focus on key issues, such as:

• How are China's internet players expanding into new markets both at home and overseas?
• How are Silicon Valley firms shaping their global strategies for China, to tap opportunities there both as a market and a source of ideas and talent?
• How are new partnerships among US and China companies fostering new engines for innovation?
• What are the latest trends in China’s domestic and foreign venture capital and private equity investment landscape? Which sectors are over-funded and in which sectors will the next wave of entrepreneur-led market disruption emerge?
• With the challenges facing firms such as Facebook, Zynga and Groupon in the US, are China's immune from a downturn due to differences in business models?
• What innovations from hot sectors, such as mobile gaming, are on the horizon?

More information on the conference agenda, directions to the conference venue, parking information and media/press, please visit the conference website.

Any questions? Please email sprie-stanford@stanford.edu.

Education has provided the critical foundation for Asia’s rapid economic growth. However, in an increasingly globalized and digital world, higher education faces an array of new challenges. While the current strengths and weaknesses of educational systems across Asia differ considerably, they share many of the same fundamental challenges and dilemmas.

The fourth annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue examined challenges and opportunities in reforming higher education in Asia. At its core, the challenge facing every country is how to cultivate relatively immobile assets—national populations—to capture increasingly mobile jobs with transforming skill requirements. This raises fundamental questions about skills needed for fast-paced change, domestic inequality, the role of government, and choices of resource allocations.

Scholars and top-level administrators from Stanford University and universities across Asia, as well as policymakers, journalists, and business professionals, met in Kyoto on September 6 and 7, 2012, to discuss questions that address vital themes related to Asia’s higher education systems. These included:

• Can higher education meet the challenges of economic transformations?
  As skill requirements change with the increasing use of IT tools that enable manufacturing and service tasks to be broken apart and moved around, how can higher education systems cope? How can education systems address the increasing need for global coordination across languages and cultures? How can countries deal with demographic challenges, with developed countries facing overcapacity and developing countries with younger populations facing an undercapacity of educational resources?

• How are higher education systems globalizing?
  What are the strategies for the globalization of higher education itself? How are universities positioning themselves to attract top talent from around the world, and what are their relative successes in achieving this? What are the considerations when building university campuses abroad? Conversely, what are the issues surrounding allowing foreign universities to build within one’s own country?

• How can higher education play a greater role in innovation?
  What is the interplay between private and public institutions and research funding across countries, and what are the opportunities and constraints facing each? What is the role of national champion research initiatives? For developed East Asian countries, a focus on producing engineers raised the economic base, but many are discovering that they are still not at the leading edge of innovation. What are ways to address this dilemma? For developing countries, the challenge is how to improve basic education from the level of training basic factory workers to creating knowledge workers. How might this be accomplished? Is there room for a liberal arts college model?

• What are the challenges and opportunities in reforming higher education?
  What are effective ways of overcoming organizational inertia, policy impediments, and political processes that hinder reform? What are the debates and issues surrounding ownership, governance, and financing of higher education?

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) established the Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue in 2009 to facilitate conversation about current Asia-Pacific issues with far-reaching global implications. Scholars from Stanford University and various Asian countries start each session of the two-day event with stimulating, brief presentations, which are followed by engaging, off-the-record discussion. Each Dialogue closes with a public symposium and reception, and a final report is published on the Shorenstein APARC website.

Previous Dialogues have brought together a diverse range of experts and opinion leaders from Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Australia, and the United States. Participants have explored issues such as the global environmental and economic impacts of energy usage in Asia and the United States; the question of building an East Asian regional organization; and addressing the dramatic demographic shift that is taking place in Asia.

The annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko.

Seminar presentation on John Bender's new book, "Ends of Enlightenment."  In his book, Professor Bender explores three realms of eighteenth-century European innovation that remain active in the twenty-first century: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy.

Commentary will be provided by William B. Warner, Professor of English, University of California at Santa Barbara.

Books will be available for sale at this event by the Stanford Bookstore.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, Department of English and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.