We kick things off with Keith Bergelt talking about “Open Invention Network and Its Role in Open Source and Linux”. We’re just part of a larger group that exists to tackle current realities and problems with intellectual property and open source. One of the realities is that open source is the single-most important invention and innovation modality to come into being in the post-industrial era. (Oh no he just used the word “utilize”. Oh no “paradigm”.)
<CosmicRay> is this one of the talks that was randomly generated by that conference talk generator that was on /. awhile back?
The reality is that there’s a growing number of patent trolls, and people are turning this into a business model. Defensive patent pools are growing. Rabble rabble business speak rabble rabble.
Next up is Peter H. Salus talking about “Anniversaries”. Please don’t be as boring as Keith Bergelt, please! This looks to be an historical talk about software and whatnot. We talk about anniversaries and make the call that anniversaries are special when they’re divisible by 5 or 10. For example, this year is the 250th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. Last December was the 60th anniversary of the transistor. In the same year, IBM installed the first SSEC — selective sequence electronic calculator — the first electronic computer, in the modern sense of the word. A decade later DEC started with venture capital of $40,000. In 1963 Project Mac was formed at MIT — and out of that came computer sharing. Ten years after that the first Unix paper was written by K&R.
Next year is going to be a great one for anniversaries: moon landing, Unix, ARPANET with four nodes — expanded to 216 in eight years and they were worried about hitting 256 and running out of address space. “If you pay attention to history, all of the stories are old stories. The magnitude may change, but they’re all the same stories.” First free software meeting was in 1996.
He’s coming out with a book soon about the history of open source, which should cover most of what he’s said in this keynote.
After Peter comes David Recordon of Six Apart with a talk titled “Supporting the Open Web”. We’ve been talking a lot about open source, and there’s a lot of open source to talk about. Open Data is increasingly important as services move apart. The open web needs open data, and open data needs open specifications. The web needs to be accessible everywhere. In 2007, the web started becoming more open. OpenID, OAuth, and Open Social are all quite similar: they have communities ranging from individuals to companies, implemented in many languages, being adopted at an increasing rate, and are occurring outside of formal standards bodies. The Open Web Foundation is announced so companies and individuals can come together to work on the open web. It will focus on four things: incubation (creating new open specifications for the web), licensing (or really no licensing; non-assertion agreements), copyright (Creative Commons for each specification), and community (to support the open web).
Danese Cooper comes next with her presentation about how “Why Whinging Doesn’t Work”. She kicked things off with the Helsinki Complaints Choir. Why do we love to whinge? There are a lot of theories: misery loves company, we do it because we’re fundamentally afraid. Confirmation bias is “what you believe comes back to you” — if you believe that the glass is half-empty, then you’re going to see half-empty glasses wherever you look.
What does complaining do to us? It makes us isolated. You need to think differently — Billie Jean King pulled her competitors together to rally for equal pay for female tennis players as male tennis players. We need to recalibrate our language. We need to radiate gratitude — i.e. Randy Pausch. We need to acknowledge others. We need to be the world we want to live in.
Yay! Nat is back! Nat’s talk is titled “fork() && exec(): Spawning the Next Generation of Hackers” which sounds awesome. No aloha shirt though. :( This talk is not about how to have sex. This talk is about raising children to use computers. When Nat moved to New Zealand, he found that the primary school had utter crap for computers, and the administrator had the best one in the school. Nat ran Kiwi Foo and took some of the leftover money and bought the school a nine new computers. Then who could teach the kids how to use them? The teachers couldn’t because they had crappy computers and didn’t have the right skills, so Nat did. He had to start off with basic computer skills, but he wanted to move to teaching them how to program.
Programming is like changing a tire. It’s not rocket science. Nat kicked things off by running a computer club. He started with Lego Mindstorms, but the kids found them lame. You can make them go forwards, backwards, turn, and follow a line on a page. But they don’t, so robots aren’t that great for kids who need consistency and get disappointed when the Mindstorm goes off on some random tangent. scratch is much better for kids. With his own kids, once they progressed past scratch he moved to processing, which is more complex.
Lessons: lectures suck. You have two minutes tops when you stand up in front of kids. The gender gap is not what you think (at the eight-year old level). You have to follow their interests. Keyboards are a challenge. Math skills aren’t there yet (angles, e.g.). Teachers need teaching. Robots = lame.
An immodest proposal: 1) Volunteer in schools. 2) Courseware. Look at scratch, build your own courseware and share it.
Further reading:
