Portland Open Source Convention 2013
I’ve been to a handful of O’Reilly conferences—ETech while it was in San Diego, an OS X conference in Santa Clara, and the Open Source convention while it was in San Diego also. They are a firehose of knowledge. I’m especially looking forward to getting a handle on node.js this year—something I’d never heard of until I looked through the tutorial list.
- July 25, 2013: Open source value shift at OSCON?
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I’m at OSCON right now in Portland, Oregon. The last time I went to OSCON was when it was in San Diego, probably in 2002.
If, at OSCON 2002, a White House official had said that they were going to take visitor statistics from WhiteHouse.gov and use them to strongarm local legislatures with “localized data… to present the mood of their constituents”, there would have been an audible outcry. Here, there was nothing—the statement by Leigh Heyman (Director of New Media Technologies, Executive Office of the President) wasn’t applauded, it just went completely unnoticed. He was talking about the future of the White House petitioning system, We The People.
We The People was created by the White House “so that government can allow citizens to petition them.”1 Before We The People, he said, writing to the White House was “a bit like writing a letter to Santa Claus.”
He didn’t say this, obviously, but with today it’s a whole lot more like writing a letter to Santa Claus: writing a non-functioning third party to get free stuff from functioning second parties.
He had some interesting petition signing stats. There are currently (as of the time he made the slide, presumably) 9,660,791 members; he called that individual users. Ten million people is approximately 3% of the United States population. If you’re not a stats person, that might seem small. To me, it seems very large. I suspect that there are a lot of duplicate signups in the system—people who sign up under multiple email addresses to skew the petitions.
It’s likely to get worse. There’s a new API in the works to make We The People work more on the community organizing model: instead of having a place to go for votes (which will still exist to provide an illusion of voting), the new API will allow advocacy groups to bundle signatures into the system.
If, at the 2002 OSCON a speaker had said, as Jared Smith (Director of Open Source Outreach at Bluehost) did, that government is “too big to be efficient”, it would have fit right in: the government model of top-down one-size-fits-all programs is antithetical to open source’s focus on the end user doing the work themselves to create what they need and want.
- node.js
- “Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.”
More Live Blog
- 2020 in Photos
- For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2020.
- 2019 in Photos
- For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2019.
- 2018 in Photos
- For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2018.
- 2017 in Photos
- For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2017.
- 2016 in photos
- For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2016.
- Five more pages with the topic Live Blog, and other related pages
More open source
- Three OGLs walk into a bar: The Return of Gruumsh
- It has never been a good idea to use the OGL. That’s become obvious to a lot more people over the last several weeks.
- Open source value shift at OSCON?
- There is either a value shift occurring, or an attempt to create a value shift, in the open source community here at OSCON. The new heroes are big, resource-hungry government and cathedrals inside the bazaar.
- Open gaming
- Open gaming has a lot of benefits for gamers, and there’s a lot of discussion about it on the web.
More O’Reilly
- No second chances at ETech 2007
- O’Reilly’s Emerging Technologies conference is always interesting; this year seemed a little more commercial than previous ones with a little more of an emphasis on technology that’s already here, but was still fascinating despite that.