Incredible. Everything Open is an evolution of linux.conf.au, an event I first attended 20 years ago in Dunedin. Whilst I've not been every year since then, I've been to most, and it was wonderful to say so many hellos to familiar faces yesterday.
Kylie McDevitt gave an excellent opening keynote. Breaking things to build understanding. "Hacking is not nefarious" - Systems level exploration and analysis, looking for patterns, not villains. Importance of sharing the knowledge gained, of the fails, as much as the wins.
Vanessa Teague talked and walked us through some of the projects in her care at Democracy Developers, beautifully illustrating one of Kylie's points of sharing what didn't work as well as what does. A tool to make it easier for people to find their electorate or local MP, to ask a question, to see what happened to their senate vote. How Might We make it easier for everyone to engage more deeply with democracy? Or even motivate them to want to do that? Or even intervene earlier in the policy process? Good questions, good work, and I look forward to partnering with Vanessa as OpenAustralia plans its next steps.
Jade Ambrose invited us to consider neighbourhood first systems to avoid the inevitable enshittification of everything, and create more resilient digital infrastructure to weather the climate catastrophes ahead. Thoughtful, and radical, and wonderful, I found my mind weaving together threads from the previous talks too. He also shared references to key elements of his project - one of which I managed to toot Common Guide - and a couple of others stayed in mind to check out cloud co-op and p2panda I met Jade some time back at one of Maia's soirees, and I really enjoyed learning more about https://lores.tech
Next up was Rob Norris speaking on the unreasonable cost of open source contribution. Bring skill, time, motivation, and privilege, and build debts to family, friends, and self-care. We must think about the money, and the people, and turn the "random person in Nebraska" into a real, living, breathing human being. No-one wants to pay for maintenance, but we now have so much critical software infrastructure that needs this care and feeding, that this is an existential issue to be solved. Thank you Rob for your honesty and vulnerability. Powerful presentation.
J. Rosenbaum - "The battle against the beast of AI Slop" - some scary GenAI images in this presentation still dancing on my retinas like having inadvertently glanced at the sun. Too many teeth. I particularly valued J's perspective as a fact checker, calling out how much harder it's getting to spot the slop, and also validated my issue with much genAI text - it's really hard to read. "My mind slides off the words, and doesn't take it in" - Maybe this is some kind of cognitive immunity? Shall ponder this more.
Brain full. Switched to hallway track, hung out with itgrrl, andy block, and cafuego.
Locknote - all about the SKAO - square kilometre array observatory from JC Guzman - how wonderful - It won't be fully built and operational until 2030, but it's already gathering data, and having an impact. I even learned that the radio data it collects is in spectrum - with visible light in the middle and gamma rays at the other end. This is a tool to help us answer the big questions. It's too easy to forget the power of wonderment.