The Age of Literate Machines: A Visionary Look at Free Software
About twenty years ago, Mr. Hughes (my excellent grade eight and nine science teacher) showed my class a television series called “Connections.” The series, written and hosted by British wit and science historian James Burke, focused on how sets of seemingly disparate events came together to shape the modern world. Connections was (and is) amazing – it altered my view of the world and fired my already heated curiosity.
In the last few years, I’ve been thinking about how I could borrow some tricks from James Burke for my own presentations but I had never had the chutzpah to try it.
About twenty days ago Mozilla Europe president Tristan Nitot had just cancelled his attendance at the eZ Conference and the eZ conference team asked me to cover for him. This would have been fine, except that he was to present a keynote with the formidable title of “A Visionary Look at Open Source.” What’s more, he didn’t have slides or notes prepared for this specific topic.
At the time, it seemed clear that I would need to present on a different topic – I’ve worked with many of the real leaders in Free Software and Open Source; they have vision enough that I feel myopic by comparison.
However, after a few uncomfortable days and nights of thinking about alternate topics, I couldn’t get the title of Tristan’s keynote out of my head. What is a vision of Free Software and Open Source? Why is this thing so very important?
In trying to answer this, I wrote the following alpha presentation. In writing it, I tried to stand on the shoulders of James Burke and several other giants (though I fear that I only managed to stand on their toes.) I hope that you enjoy it. Please comment with suggestions or questions – I’m working on improving the session, as I know that I made more than a few gaffs in it.
Many thanks to all those who sat through rough drafts and helped improve the session. Many thanks to Knut Urdalen who made and posted the above recording at the 2007 PHP Vikinger unconference.
Posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 15:06
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.8 Responses to “The Age of Literate Machines: A Visionary Look at Free Software”
Leave a Reply
Comments are moderated. I delete obvious SEO attempts and other content-free comments.
June 14th, 2007 at 15:24
Note that I’ll post my slides in the next few days. The slides include sources for the images and links to more information on some of the various points covered in the presentation.
June 14th, 2007 at 22:03
Thanks for the great presentation, Zak! I enjoyed it very much!
June 14th, 2007 at 22:56
Hi Zak,
watching your presentation while waiting for a deleyed flight.
Fantastic talk! Dense, knowledgeable, grounded in human history, easy to understand for non-native English speakers, relaxed presentation style, surprising twists, etc.
What I miss is a smashing thesis right at the beginning of your talk that gives me a rough idea what I am going to expect. Put in other words: Add something right at the beginning of your talk that catches my attention and touches the essence of your presentation. After that, it should be easy for you to keep the attention with what your talk already contains.
Greetings!
Sandro
June 14th, 2007 at 23:39
Thanks Toby! Thanks Sandro!
June 15th, 2007 at 15:27
[...] just posted slides and (rather) rough presenter notes and image credits for my Age of Literate Machines [...]
June 18th, 2007 at 03:47
[...] just received word that my proposal (which was to present my Age of Literate Machines presentation) for FrOSCon has been [...]
June 25th, 2007 at 11:05
[...] and MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius (and yours truly, but the slides are a bit weak – check out my Age of Literate Machines talk for a more developed version of my eLiberatica [...]
July 2nd, 2007 at 01:46
It’s funny how small the world is. I learned to know the cute fox picture from the Dortmund PHP Guys when they chatted about it on #phpug. Afterwards I gave you the hint in Brasov to use it in this presentation.
In the end you showed it to Toby again in norway.