 Now I'm sure you're all super keen to start hearing from some of our amazing speakers and I am too so from now until about 10 o'clock We're going to be hearing from for Quite inspiring and awesome speakers who are going to help us to begin to set the context Define the terms get on the same page so that we can start this journey through open together Without further ado, I'd like to introduce Sasha Meinrath to the stage So I arrived in New Zealand about a week ago and immediately jumped into a juicy Caravan or thing that I didn't even know existed until I got here was awesome went all around the South Island and Was completely stunned. I mean really stunned by the natural beauty of this country and it was clear That in New Zealand, there's a sense of stewardship over this resource and I think Tech like the environment is an ecosystem And it's one that we have to curate and it's one that we have to protect It's a commons that can often be abused As well as one that can become a sort of a monoculture or otherwise become something that is quite devastated over-specialized fragile and I think that key decision-makers are like robber barons Right that the corporate elite are like the robber barons of the late 19th century They're extracting resources. They're extracting resources in terms of your money Right, you're paying more for worse internet service in New Zealand than a growing list of other countries around the globe Your privacy as Edwards noted and has made abundantly clear and very soon your your your livelihoods are great Right the technology is quickly Displacing folks and key decision-makers are ignoring those impacts on our societies In fact, it's all your problem now to figure out. What do you do when automated vehicles displace trucking for example? And I think fundamental change. Whoa now it's going fast Fundamental change throughout history has always come in these fits and spurts whether you're talking about hunter-gatherers They're talking about agricultural revolution industrial level revolution and now we've got this technological revolution that we are a part of in fact I would argue that all of us are this vanguard That actually because we are an elite in terms of using understanding thinking about Technology that we then have an onus a responsibility to explain What technological reality looks like to key decision-makers just end up in fight for the better alternatives? that are possible because we're actually laying a foundation for a 21st century civil society and when we're successful and We often are successful We're achieving sort of a more liberatory environment for everyone And when we fail when we're not successful Technology can be predatory it can be invasive. It can be oppressive and That's fundamentally what it's this is about. This is a fight between a future where we have this incredible inclusive liberatory participatory democracy potential and A future that looks more like what I call digital feudalism Where we're locked in disempowered where we have sort of masters the control ever increasing array of different facets of our lives Without us even fully comprehending it for my own part open source open society is something that I've been working on now for about 15 years Whether it's through something called indie media and helping build that global network Or building something called the community wireless initiative QN was a part of that the champagne Urbana community wireless network and commotion and then leading into my work in DC and DC is actually what I want to talk with you about because I see it as an exemplar of everything wrong right now So here's DC today, and I'm using one example inside DC, and I'll say very briefly What's wrong is too many lawyers Lawyers in DC are like our stout right like they there are possum and they've infested everything and Displaced the natural creatures that should be at the FCC in this example Because what you have are key decisions about the future of communications probably one of the most important technologies period Being decided by a bunch of people that have almost no technological acumen This should scare the bejesus out of everybody Because what it means is people are making decisions rather blindly and if you think the FCC is a problem Let me tell you as soon as you get to Congress It's even worse That the average congressional members, you know like geriatric to begin with We've we recently had a whole thing where a bunch of them were talking about how they never use email And I'm like well how the hell are you voting on Surveillance of the NSA if you have no comprehension about what that even is That they're doing Let me show you what congressional gridlock looks like so this is from Right after World War two to present day and what you have here is the number of bills being introduced declining and the percentage of bills that are actually being passed Declining and so I don't know if you can see this little blue bar at the bottom. That's the number of bills that have been passed and it's approaching zero which Unto itself would be a huge problem Except we have this other thing which is that technological change is increasing so if the knee of the curve here is The introduction of the internet to society of digital technology to society What's happening is the rate of change of technology the way that it is Infiltrating different facets of our lives is increasing the complexity is increasing and the knowledge base of Congress is proceeding at a very low pace Which means that this gulf of ignorance between technological reality and What people understand the people that are making decisions over technology is increasing dramatically and will Continue to increase dramatically and again. This is a huge problem So in the 2000s from 19 2008 onward I created something called the open technology Institute in Washington, DC grew it to its staff of over 50 people a multi multi-million dollar endeavor a public interest tech tank working to bring technological expertise to DC and What I learned doing that is like by the time we were engaged in discussions over what had gone wrong We were already fighting a defensive battle And so I created x-lab, which we'll talk a little bit about in order to be a vanguard that's looking three to five years ahead So that we can actually Educate key decision-makers today about what's coming so that that gulf of ignorance is at least lessened if not eliminated Now I would argue That x-lab and work that we're doing here and that you are doing in your everyday lives is the key element To safeguarding this technology ecosystem to safeguarding participatory democracy into the next century So what I do at x-lab is things like this talking about the future of war Right, so whether I'm breathing White House officials or folks over at the defense Industry Talking to them about what that future looks like most Congress thinks it's like this big burly guy with advanced weaponry And that should scare you because they're not preparing for what's actually going to ride But also we do a lot of work on things like distributed production Right, what scares me what scares Congress is the 3d printed gun. That's what everyone always talks about What scares me is the 3d printed car part Because once you're able to build de facto equivalents in a distributed manner entire supply chains collapse We're not just talking about retail. We're talking about everything leading up to that retail space Shipping collapses right the number one job in America for middle-class is trucking and Trucking requires a certain number of widgets to be transported from point a to point b and again No one's preparing for that and that scares me Smart infrastructure, this is a big buzzword in the US the self-driving car that everyone talks about et cetera, et cetera We'll never get there by the way. We'll never get to the self-driving car until we have tort reform because of liability the Google can never program a car that could break the law and In any major city you can't drive from point a to point b without breaking the law and That's a serious problem Priv where this is actually a picture from a Event that I had was presenting at in Silicon Valley and Every single person was talking about how great the Internet of Things is going to be because we're gonna be able to commoditize all of this Information that everyone's collecting and I'm up on stage, and I'm like is anyone here scared about all of this data collection But the dominant business model I would say almost the only business model for the Internet of Things Is to commercialize all of your privacy That's the business model not selling widgets collecting data about you and again that should worry everyone So convention tech we do a lot on safeguarding communications I'll talk a little bit more about this both later today and tomorrow But this was started before Snowden. It's a little more relevant to most people today post Snowden But it's incredibly important to area and finally commotion which I'll actually speak on I think later today Which is a large-scale wireless research and development initiative that we coordinate So if that's what I'm doing there what I'm really hoping to get out of here And what I hope is kind of inspiring or aspirational for everyone that is here Is to learn about everything else that's going on my work is predicated upon learning about Technological reality around the globe and I would say at this point I'm on the other side of the planet to learn about what's happening here But I also want us to think about big bold ideas I'm sick and tired of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic Right the kinds of changes that we need in society today are far larger than the average decision-maker can even comprehend And again the onus is on us to help dream that up and bring that about I Want to change minds? I want to both inspire but also be challenged. I don't need like trolls I just mean like you know really constructive challenging ideas that make me think oh wait I hadn't thought of this that way. I want to brainstorm and especially I want to conspire Like there is nothing like pints in a dark corner to make awesome happen And so I think there's like pent up awesomeness here in this in this community that I really wish to tap into I Want to interconnect and help others? I have a number of resources I bring to bear. I'm interconnected with a global Network of people that are doing amazing projects and often it's like I don't need more resources I just need to better connect the ones that are available both for my own projects But I also hope for some of yours as well And finally I want to collaborate not just here, but into the future. I love this idea of Using this as a stepping stone a platform For building some really wild crazy big ideas that we can then implement because we have the expertise And we have the ability to actually bring those changes about So with that said here's how you can follow up with me personally I'm really looking for the next couple days. I am of course just the warm-up act So I'm going to turn it over now to Brandon to continue to discuss sort of what github is doing and some of the other things there Thank you so much