Berkman Center for Internet & Society Launches Herdict

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NggzBHSXdCo

Quoting from an email received from The Berkman Center:
Today, a special announcement from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. We are pleased to announce the official launch of Herdict Web --

http://www.herdict.org

-- a tool that employs the distributed power of the Internet community to provide insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility.

We invite everyone to explore http://www.herdict.org and participate by reporting websites that they cannot access, testing sites that others have reported, or downloading the browser add-on for reporting sites on the fly.

Herdict is a portmanteau of ‘herd’ and ‘verdict.’ Using Herdict Web, anyone anywhere can report websites as accessible or inaccessible. Herdict Web aggregates reports in real time, permitting participants to see if inaccessibility is a shared problem, giving them a better sense of potential reasons for why a site is inaccessible. Trends can be viewed over time, by site and by country.

The project’s mascot -- a sheep -- demonstrates “the verdict of the herd” in a short video at http://www.herdict.org (or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NggzBHSXdCo).

The brainchild of Professor Jonathan Zittrain (The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It ), Herdict Web builds out from the OpenNet Initiative's research on global Internet filtering. The OpenNet Initiative tests Internet filtering through an academic methodology. Herdict Web takes a different approach, crowdsourcing reports to learn about and display a real-time picture of user experiences around the globe. For more information about the OpenNet Initiative and the book Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, visit http://opennet.net.