Given my recent Youtube mentioning Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, which focuses on hyperspecialization as a species threat, you can bet I'm able to nurse those worries at OSCON, given this is where we preach about "open" and yet we're siloed in our many professions. A lot of us are "cloud native" these days, which might as well be closed source in so many ways (or should we call it it "inner source")?
When I come to these professional geek conferences, I get overwhelmed on several levels. For one thing, I'm aware that a lot of people are wanting to be inducted into this world (or "space" as we sometimes say).
The current speaker is from South Africa. He thinks we're in a dire time, at a tipping point, and change is needed. Like the speaker before, he's putting a lot of eggs in the blockchain basket.
If I'm on a team going around in a bizmo, working at saving the bees, will viewers monitoring me through a video series be able to send me funding with proof of impact? They see the beehives they're helping to save. Instead of investors wondering where the money went, they see in micro detail how it was used.
I'm seeing consensus developing in a kind of science fiction language. "Programmable capital". The ixo platform I'm currently learning about has a fairly mature vision, expressed in software, for staffing up worthy projects. React, MongoDB, Ethereum, Tenderman, cosmos... Humans, sensors, any IoT device, are "ledgistered" to transact on the blockchain. The goal is to localize the "impact economy" and bypass slow-moving bureaucracies.
Politicians have no hope of keeping up to date on all this stuff, but then who does? How do we pay people to stay home and learn, which is not the same as only watching fictional TV. They always say democracy depends on an informed citizenry. The idea a few years of schooling towards the start of one's life constitute an "education" (after which comes "a career") comes across as quaint in this day and age.
Something I learned from the sociologist lady: the quality of attention we're able to give is declining, whereas the demand for our attention is increasing. Here at OSCON, the speakers are fire hosing dense and technical content, while listeners look at their laptops and smartphones, vaguely listening. I'm a case in point, tapping away on this Asus Tablet with attached keyboard, with a mouse pad that's driving me crazy.
When I come to these professional geek conferences, I get overwhelmed on several levels. For one thing, I'm aware that a lot of people are wanting to be inducted into this world (or "space" as we sometimes say).
The current speaker is from South Africa. He thinks we're in a dire time, at a tipping point, and change is needed. Like the speaker before, he's putting a lot of eggs in the blockchain basket.
If I'm on a team going around in a bizmo, working at saving the bees, will viewers monitoring me through a video series be able to send me funding with proof of impact? They see the beehives they're helping to save. Instead of investors wondering where the money went, they see in micro detail how it was used.
I'm seeing consensus developing in a kind of science fiction language. "Programmable capital". The ixo platform I'm currently learning about has a fairly mature vision, expressed in software, for staffing up worthy projects. React, MongoDB, Ethereum, Tenderman, cosmos... Humans, sensors, any IoT device, are "ledgistered" to transact on the blockchain. The goal is to localize the "impact economy" and bypass slow-moving bureaucracies.
Politicians have no hope of keeping up to date on all this stuff, but then who does? How do we pay people to stay home and learn, which is not the same as only watching fictional TV. They always say democracy depends on an informed citizenry. The idea a few years of schooling towards the start of one's life constitute an "education" (after which comes "a career") comes across as quaint in this day and age.
Something I learned from the sociologist lady: the quality of attention we're able to give is declining, whereas the demand for our attention is increasing. Here at OSCON, the speakers are fire hosing dense and technical content, while listeners look at their laptops and smartphones, vaguely listening. I'm a case in point, tapping away on this Asus Tablet with attached keyboard, with a mouse pad that's driving me crazy.
