 Hi, thanks for the warm welcome and also for the setup of many of the themes that I'm going to be talking about in my conversation today. This talk is about tech and politics and I don't mean what distro that you use, something a little more important than that. Right now we as technologists wield incredible power, we just heard the growth of open source technology, we're now the dominant way that people access the internet and another great thing, we had a plug for encrypted communications. Right now the math is on our side in terms of secure practices, it's something that we can do, it's something that we need to get together as a community to do. Not only the math but also the people as we heard, every person who uses the internet, a smartphone, a computer, it's touched by our work and as we also heard they're depending upon it, this is critical infrastructure. And the foundations of our impact are totally radical to their core, distributed labor, shared tools, radical governance, this is something out of the utopian sci-fi novel from the 1920s. And then we have these radical governance structures, duocracies, benevolent dictatorships, targeted control and we're changing the face of capitalism, how community value can also be corporate value, how corporations can see something beyond their small byline, beyond the next quarter and see into the future where we need to invest in projects we're depending upon and any one of these projects is too big even for the largest corporation to maintain and share on their own. And the very way knowledge is acquired is shaped by our work, yes, not only every day people but also scientists depend upon our work, our science infrastructure and scientists depend upon us. I work in the field of high performance computing and in observational astrophysics and both of these I use Linux every day. The reach of open source technologists, it spans all seven continents and beyond Earth into space, so this is huge. I'm here to reiterate what you might already know that with great power comes great responsibility, I didn't invent this phrase. And all of our software, not just the way that it's been developed organically, it's inherently political because technology shapes the course of our world and lines of code that we all are contributing projects that you choose to develop that your organization chooses to contribute to. These are votes for a particular future. Thinking of lines of code as votes, it then becomes our responsibilities as advocates for a just and prosperous society, prosperous meaning monetarily prosperous, meaning quality of life prosperous, that we need more people to participate in this technology doocracy, more people, more corporations. We can't afford to gerrymander and have the votes for the particular future be in the hands of one class of people or one type of corporation. In my career, I've been lucky to be enfranchised in this world, incredibly lucky, might not have ended up that way, but I ended up going to MIT. I intended to be a lawyer but thought it might be fun to learn more about technology and what better place than MIT. It was there that I discovered programming and an introductory programming course. I ended up changing the course of my life and majoring in computer science and now I use programming and open source work every day of my professional life. The telescope that I ran at the South Pole, not just for a winter but for a full ten and a half months in Antarctica, it too ran Linux. There's really nowhere that you can go to escape this. I helped to write the signal app powering open source and crypto communication, building upon the theoretical work and implementing work that other cryptographers have shared. From my work as an Antarctica astrophysicist to my hardware and software side projects, I've been enfranchised not only by learning how to use technology but learning how to do things with technology. It's kind of twofold. With projects like signal and signal protocol impacting more than a billion people worldwide, my vote for a future without mass surveillance is multiplied at scale. I remember I was at a sort of world policy forum in Monaco. I was invited there as a delegate from a youth organization and I was looking around at all these politicians talking about the past, not really ingrained in technology and the future, and I realized that looking around, I was probably more powerful than most of the people in the room, even those from heads of states of smaller countries. That's not just me. That's every one of you guys and girls and people and humans out in the audience. We are all incredibly, incredibly powerful as technologists and what we decide to do with our time and our skills impacts where the world is going to head. We can't get off easily as a community. My individual success in this room and our individual success mean nothing unless we share it, just like we share our source code. The reason why is that we've become so powerful because people can build upon our small projects, our small successes, and grow it more powerful as a group than as an individual, but that's the same with technological empowerment. So we need others to be able to build more powerful projects and more powerful communities ever quicker. Excluding on the basis of borders will hold us back. This is some recent turmoil in the sciences where people are choosing where they're going to contribute their best years of their scientific lives to which country, to which infrastructure they're going to contribute to. So we can't exclude on the basis of borders. We can't afford the brain drain on the basis of race, sex, nationality, age, and we can't afford just one type of person to monopolize the type of future we live in because that's a dystopia, that's not a utopia. So to enfranchise more people we need to get the power to shape our technology future into more hands and to do this we need to use our code to shape our culture. We heard in the previous talk as well that sometimes it's not a matter of being technologically impossible. It's a matter of actually using the technology to slowly chip away at cultural norms to make those cultural norms more conducive to the world that we want. So choosing not to be political is not a choice everyone can make and no one in this room can make that choice because by participating in the open source community you're already a radical, proving by your very success concepts only dreamed of by utopian sci-fi writers but as our previous speaker encouraged us to think we need to not only think this is radical we need to dream even bigger. We're not in a utopia quite yet, it's pretty good as a technologist I have to admit money, impact, even a bit of fame you know speaking to a community, speaking to a local users group, sharing your knowledge with a young person who looks up to you and even fame for the founders of certain companies and high profile contributors. But around us the world is reeling from this rapid technological growth, climate change, income inequality, unemployment, mass surveillance, the prison industrial complex, racism, sexism, even how we perceive truth, how lies and half truths spread, these are all shaped by our tools and our algorithms. Sometimes a lie is just easier to believe than a truth. When I was working at the South Pole sometimes we get a wrong number and basically people would call up and I'd answer the phone and if I told them I was at the South Pole they just wouldn't believe me they'd hang up. Even though that was the truth whereas if I said you know this is Donato's pizza they'd be like oh yeah sure wrong number. So making progress doesn't mean a world where everyone has to work with people who don't pull their weight to shape a better future although sometimes on an isolated research station with just 46 people cooped up for the winter it did. This was a popular book around the station. Our planet is much, much larger than an isolated South Pole research station. There's space for everyone in our communities. It means that we have to use our lines of code to work on really important projects which of those you know 1100 new projects per day, millions of GitHub projects actually matter. We have to work on making the truth easier to digest and to discern to not require a PhD to get at that we can effectively act on it. Back in 2010 I spent a huge amount of time trying to figure out my position on one element that I was seeing in the news, WikiLeaks. I was interested in security here is this you know kind of convoluted ethical issue of leaking information of a complicated founder. What did I think about that? So I tracked down every citation on the Wikipedia article on WikiLeaks. There are more than 300 and I read through them from top to bottom. And I found plenty of line repetition and misinformation including a circular reference that seemed to violate causality where one article was referencing another article that was referencing the original article. Don't know how that worked out. In the times that moved far beyond when I did that project in 2010 now the influence of bots and propaganda are ever present. It was there back then and we've seen it in the recent cycles. And those are powered by our technology making the truth far remote, far different from just telling someone read the manual or check the source. What is the source? What sort of information are people being displayed? People don't trust the police. At least not certain police, certain crimes, certain victims. I worked on an app, not just Signal, but another app called Circle of Six, to combat sexual assault by informing communities of its prevalence and empowering victims to report it to the police if they wanted, but if they wanted instead to a circle of friends. This app gained huge traction in India where the police are often corrupt and cultural norms can inhibit prosecution. But this isn't a problem of just India, you might recognize some of these issues from here at home. So using technology to circumvent harmful culture and abuse of power is something that is needed worldwide. These problems exist here in America and also around the world. The scientists and technologists behind the atom bomb built a weapon. And that weapon was then rested away from their control. Those scientists, if you read the original transcripts, some of which I have, not all of them, they thought that they were building this bomb to defeat Germany. They didn't want or realize that this would be used for purposes far beyond what they originally intended. And this ushered in an age of fear that we're now just reigniting. So may we build power that is distributed and checked by our peers and always realize what can be used with the power that we are invested with. And may we ever expand our circle in franchising more people in the technological vote we saw in some of the previous speaker's facts and figures how many new developers were training. But I believe that that is an order of magnitude lower than what it could be. Only by inclusively empowering new contributors in open source will we have the person power as well as the mandate to shape our social and political landscape for the better. Unless everyone is a technologist, then it's a ruling elite class of technologists deciding the future. So, sort of my political spiel, but I'll end with a little anecdote about how one might, without having to found an app that's used by billions of people or an operating system that has taken over the world, how you might go about this in your local communities. This summer I paid 12 high school students of a variety of backgrounds in programming interests, some of them express programming interests, some of them said, I could take it or leave it. Paid them to learn to program, learn to work on Linux, learn to share their contributions on GitHub as open source. And they also learned that they can get paid to learn. So we heard the stat that 90% of developers are actually being paid by their corporations to make these open source contributions. But we expect our young people to go into perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt here in the United States to learn the ability to make these contributions on the behalf of a corporations. So, I interviewed more than 120 applications. Applicants, and I used an anonymous platform to select only 12 because I had limited funds. I was committed to paying these students and limited monetary resources and time. So, the vast interest, this was just in Pasadena, and the progress that these students made, whatever their preconceived notions of what programming and open source technology could be, showed that the fact that this isn't a core ability of every high schooler in this nation or around the world, is not the fault of our young people, but it's the fault of our educational system. And everyone in this room can do that in your local community. So I end with imagine what Utopia we could really build if our workforce were 10 times stronger and represented our community. Thank you.