 I'm Dave Lane from the open source society among other places. But I've been given the task of explaining a word which makes up at least half of the words in the title of this conference. And hopefully, people have a bit of a grasp of it. I think it will help to frame the conversations quite substantially. So I'm going to be defining the word open for the purposes of open source and open society. For that context, because obviously the word open has a lot of different meanings to, well, pretty much everybody who hears it probably has a slightly different flavor of understanding. And it also depends on the context in which you use it. So open is an interesting one, because like many other words that we hear incessantly, Dan and Dave, things like natural and low fat and organic and words like that. The word open has been used and abused in our world to an extent that I like to think leads to something called open fatigue. We all have this idea that open things in general are better. We have this kind of general sense. I think most of you who are here will probably think that this open thing, the word open, signifies something that's better. Unfortunately, the word is also so vague that it has been, the marketeers have left upon it and have seen the opportunity to stretch and pull and prod its meaning in such a way that it can be pulled over the edge of the thing that they're trying to hawk to you. And even if the thing that they're trying to sell to you actually isn't really open in any conceivable way, they'll find an angle which allows them to justify it to themselves. And so what we do is we have this dilution of the term open. And so what I'm trying to do with this definition is to bring it back to what I think is the essence of the term in this context. I'd like to show you a group of people that I think understand the essence. All these kids, I think, understand the meaning of the word open in a way that most of us have been forced by the conditions in our lives to try to forget or repress. The thing that these kids are all taught and most of them actually already know it innately is this thing. And to me, the essence of openness is the concept of sharing. And we encourage it in our kids and then we progressively try to teach them how to stifle that desire to share, which I think is a natural human desire. And it's a latent human desire that exists for all people, really. And I think we're in a time now, in an age where the ability to share has never been greater because we have the internet. I think I've been working in the world of open source for 20 years, and I've pretty much not used anything other than open source for 20 years. And to me, it's been a huge source of passion for me and a huge source of insight. And I've been just completely swept up in what appears to be a rising tide, which, as many of you will have heard, lifts all boats. And to me, that is one of the most beautiful concepts that each of the little contributions that we can make to an open world can help people we never met. We've never even didn't even know exist, but that we can help them through our actions, through our openness. The purpose of this conference, I think, is to help the people who are tending get over this discomfort that they feel, this dissonance that they feel with the idea of sharing and openness, because we're so conditioned now in our world where closed is the default position, particularly in things like government and most of our business dealings and so on. It's to try to identify where that discomfort actually lies and to remedy it, to work out how you can make it feel OK again, and to work out an action plan for making open that feels right be right. I suspect that most of you are actually here today because you're either already working towards open in your own existences, or you want to understand what this buzz is all about, because everybody's talking about it. Many people won't realize that actually the most widely used computing platform in the world today is open source. So Linux, which was mentioned earlier, is now running on substantially more computers than any other operating system. So it's actually kind of a core of our technical ecosystem. And I hope to show in this conference how much power you'll find in the principles of openness. Openness, the first thing that leaps to mind for people with regard to openness, is the idea of transparency. But what I want to say is that transparency is necessary, but it's not enough. In addition to transparency, we need to have the ability, so transparency is the ability to see what is happening. It's kind of a passive thing. You can look at it, but you can't necessarily do anything more than look. In order to really understand something, though, you now have to be able to do more than look at. You have to be able to work out the how things work instead of just the fact that they do, or what they look like. You have to work out how they work. You have to work out why they work. And then most importantly, you have to work out what could you do differently? What if you change this? What if you change that? You need to be able to poke and prod things that are open in order to deeply learn what they actually do and what they're all about. By the way, I'm sure the student amongst you will have worked out that this is in fact a exploded view of a donut machine, which was one of the few exploded views things that I could find under Creative Commons license on Flickr. So the key to fostering community around open, I think, is to recognize that it requires someone in a position of power to take a leap of faith and to relinquish control. One of the things about openness is that it is allergic to attempts to control it. And in fact, you will probably have heard the adage that the internet is the open internet, I should point out, is capable of routing around censorship because it sees it as damage. And basically, censorship is a form of control. And the idea with openness is that in order for it to thrive, people say, if you love something, set it free, even though that feels uncomfortable and so on. Basically, openness is, well, not to be too twee about it, but openness is effectively a demonstration of love for the world. That's how you can show that you love the world. And the beauty of what our technology platforms allow nowadays is for us to attract global groups of people who have never necessarily collaborated with each other before to invite them and enable them to contribute, to participate in something, and to more than just participate to take ownership of it. And to scratch their own itch, sorry, they can scratch their own itch. And more importantly, the things that they do to scratch their own itch then can be available for others who have other itches to scratch, but might be able to use that as the handle of the back scratcher. The idea that you can accrete all of this capability, all of this knowledge in a form, in a canonized form, in software, for example, or in the society sense, you can do it with policies and practices and so on. But the idea that these things all become part of a commons. And I see the commons in the digital world as being that rising tide. People buy into and commit to communities where they have something that they have something that they can share and they can offer. That's what motivates us mostly, I think, to participate in communities. We don't generally do it for out of a financial motivation. A lot of us just like to do stuff with people. And I think that in order to really build a vibrant open community, we have to have that release of control, and we have to have the ability to participate and contribute and to share ownership. One of the coolest things about openness, and this is something that's only relatively recently become really clear to me, is that one of the things that control of an ecosystem does is it creates gatekeepers for the ability to participate. Things like the open internet and open source software remove the gatekeepers, and they replace them with simple rules, which you can, if you adhere to those simple rules, like, for example, taking part in the internet requires you to have a computer. You can buy something for $25 that will do the job. That has the hardware that knows how to talk TCP IP. You need to have access to the internet somewhere somehow, which is pretty easy to find these days. And then you need to have an IP address. And most places will give that to you. You've been handed one today if you're connected to the internet here in the auditorium. And those are the building blocks of participation. Once you adhere to those simple rules, if you have an idea, you can realize that idea. And you can take it to the world with no further barriers, none, except for most people see you for patent infringement, but that's not the story. So I think that this is one of the most powerful ideas about openness is that the idea that we can expect or we can receive innovation from anywhere. And we will never know. We will never be able to predict where the innovation will come from. And that's the beauty of it. I mean, to my mind, that's the most exciting thing about openness is that people who previously didn't have the agency or they weren't enabled to participate, I can only imagine what's going to happen when people in parts of the world that don't currently have good connectivity or have repressive regimes and so on. When they, by all the means that they have been acquiring them already, fulfill the manifest destiny of joining the open community, the open world, they will be a source of huge innovation. And I can't begin to imagine what they're going to bring to the world that we haven't seen yet and it's going to be exciting and brilliant. It's important to recognize that openness is not a state of being. It's kind of a continual cycle of action and reflection. We live in a world where closed is the expected norm at the moment and we repress those tendencies, those urges to share because of intellectual property, for example, and the threat of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement and other things like that, which are kind of an immune response from a world that realizes that its ability to control closed is being taken away from it by the rest of society, the 1% realizing that the rest of us have something to say. To my mind, and I think probably for most of you here, the concept of openness just feels right. I like to say that open just tastes better to co-opt a marketing catchphrase for junk food. Sorry, it just tastes better. I should say not just tastes right. So this conference will explore other opportunities and mechanisms for achieving openness. And I encourage all of you to pick the steps that you yourselves are going to take to increase your own personal openness, because I think all of us have decided to pick various battles that we're willing to fight. I probably have, having had 20 years to work on it, have leaned more heavily towards the openness than some. And it has its challenges, mostly because openness extracts a sense of responsibility from people who participate in it. You need to ensure that not only do you, not only can you take ownership of open stuff, but you kind of have to in order to make sure that it works for you. And so that empowerment comes with a flip side, and that is that in order to accept and make use of the power, you have to actually contribute back to it. We need to accept also that not everything will be open right away. As I say, we pick our battles. But the key thing is for us to recognize that there's an ideal at stake here. And I'll explain why there are threats to that ideal. But the ideal is that we will always move towards openness when we see closeness in our lives. It'll be a bit of a niggle for us that will make us feel uncomfortable and make us feel like it's something that we have to change. We might not have time or energy to change it right now, but we know that it's not as good as it could be because it's not as open as it could be. There are a lot of people out there, as I mentioned at the start of the talk, who are trying to trade on the idea of openness and build themselves as the bastions or the exemplars of openness. And I think it's important for us to evaluate and investigate all these things. One of the other prices of openness is constant vigilance and constant reflection and skepticism when we see things around us. We have to try to understand as much as we can about the world around us. There are people out there who use the concept of openness to sell things that aren't open. And I think as a community, what we need to do is we need to call them on it. There's this concept of open washing and open source. Somebody might have heard that. But this concept of open washing, which is to misuse the term open to actually mean something that's closed. And so I think that the key thing is that we don't have the capital behind us and the lawyers that the corporations of the world, for example, have. But we have community. And we have the court of public opinion. And we have the ability to call, hold people to account in that. And I think that's even more powerful. And in fact, I happen to know that a lot of organizations that would dearly love to retain control and to keep things closed basically are searching for new shorts. Because they realize that it's too late. The horse is bolted and the world is opening. It's too early. The tipping point has been reached. And now it's just a matter for us to work out how to control, or not how to control, how to harness what we've created. So I'd like to leave you with an idea. A lot of people think that this concept of openness is really pretty novel and pretty new. I would like to suggest that it's actually not nearly as new as you might think. In fact, there's something that occasionally occurs to me when I'm feeling a bit down the dumps about things not being as open as I'd like. And it occurs to me that just about every town that we know will have a bastion of openness, kind of a beacon of what it means to be able to have community and to share. And I just want to leave you with this image. Because they exist in all of our communities, and they fly in the face of all the conventional wisdom that business tries to, well, convince us is conventional wisdom, the idea of we need to not share. We need to maximize revenue for corporations and ensure that their profit motives are addressed as a first priority, and then everything else is just gravy, that the number of times that I've been literally laughed at by telling people that I was going to start a, I ran an open source company for 14 years until I sold it to another open source company. And the idea that you could make a living and make a business out of giving away things and sharing, people would literally laugh at me, and they would actually, they would accuse me of being suicidal and self-destructive. They were that offended by the idea that I would do this, and yet who hasn't benefited from the fact that libraries have been open and sharing for a lot longer than corporations have been around? So that's it. And yes, thank you very much. And please feel free to download this talk and use it however you might like. It's available there. The whole talk is Creative Commons License. The entire platform that it's been used to present it is open source as well. So you can just grab the files and create your own versions of it if you like. And I would be very keen to hear about it if you do. Thanks very much.