News

Cliff Schmidt • Rishab Aiyer Ghosh • Roy Fielding

• Cliff Schmidt – Using Audio Technology and Open Content to Reduce Global Illiteracy, Poverty and Disease
  
• Rishab Aiyer Ghosh – Apache and Steam Engines: the Magic of Collaborative Innovation
  
• Roy Fielding – Apache 3.0 (a Tall Tale)
  

For more about these keynote presentations ......

OPENING KEYNOTE • WEDNESDAY

“Using Audio Technology and Open Content to Reduce Global Illiteracy, Poverty and Disease”

Cliff Schmidt, founder of the Literacy Bridge, opens the conference with information about a new project that uses the power of Open Source to change lives in today's world.

Knowledge is power; but most knowledge is tied up in text.  So how do over one billion illiterate adults in the world access knowledge crucial to preventing disease, creating economic opportunity, and defending their political and human rights?

Cliff spent six weeks in a remote region of Ghana to understand rural poverty and sustainable development. He saw many impressive local organizations sharing valuable information for development; but he also experienced the inefficiency of delivering all this information
in person.

In response to this problem, Literacy Bridge (literacybridge.org) was founded to empower children and adults with tools for scalable knowledge sharing and literacy learning. The Talking Book Project is Literacy Bridge's major program, developing new and affordable digital audio technology to provide vital, locally generated information and literacy training to people with limited access to either. Imagine a $5 iPod used to play locally generated podcasts, plus a decentralized, digital content distribution system that reaches villages without electricity but also enables global content sharing. Aside from the innovative use of technology, partnerships with local businesses, civic organizations, and government agencies play a pivotal role in the Talking Book Project.

During this talk, Cliff will share his observations from Ghana and discuss Literacy Bridge's Talking Book Project.

THURSDAY KEYNOTE
“Apache and Steam Engines: the Magic of Collaborative Innovation”

On Thursday afternoon, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh will present a captivating look at how creative communities have effected innovation and the course of history.

The phenomenal success of Apache and other open source software seems incredibly new, even revolutionary. Yet the collaborative creation of knowledge has gone on for as long as humans have been able to communicate. Rishab looks at collaborative model of creativity, from 18th century steam engines to the human genome project and discusses why and how collaborative creativity works. Using data from the FLOSS studies, he shows how this makes free software a continuing source of economic value and innovation around the world.

FRIDAY KEYNOTE
“Apache 3.0 (a Tall Tale)”

On Friday, Roy Fielding will ask us to look into the future.

Thirteen years ago, the Apache Group founders finished the first beta release of Apache httpd, having reached the end of their initial pile of small improvements, and began to look
forward to a complete rewrite of the server architecture. Suddenly, our forward progress slowed to a trickle, mailing list traffic dropped by two-thirds, and our focus diverged.

The small steps of group collaboration were useless for crossing such a chasm of design.  Were it not for an individual leap by Robert Thau, the project would have surely died a slow death of mediocrity.  Likewise, were it not for a willingness of the group to accept and admire individual leaps, the new design would have died a slow death of neglect.

Today, we face a new chasm, and our past successes have only made it wider and deeper than before. This talk is about the other side.