Late last night, when it was early the next afternoon in the land down under, our Christine Hall was virtually down home Australian style!
So far the Everything Open conference that opened its three-day run this morning in Adelaide, Australia, is about the most grass rootsy conference I’ve ever attended — which to this old ’60s hippy is like a breath of fresh air. The event is also very Australian — which is partly by design given the organizers local focus, but also because… well, what else can it be? I’m pretty sure that even the most internationally flavored tech conference in the US feels uniquely American to those attending from the EU or, say, Australia.
Bear in mind that I’m coming to this conclusion after attending only three online presentations that were held late on the conference’s first day. I would probably be in a better position to knowledgeably use the “grass roots” phrase had I been present from the event’s opening keynote, which is what I had planned but which didn’t happen (and that’s entirely another story). When I joined it was already the middle of this afternoon in Adelaide, even though it was about 10:45 last night here on the East Coast of the US.
I started with a presentation called Everything Open Is HopePunk with presenter Nicola Nye. Everything Open has four things going on at once, three of which I believe are livestreamed, so I could have watched Using SimpleSAMLphp When You Only Have 20 Users or What Happened In Production? Instrumenting With OpenTelemetry had I wanted.
I didn’t, because I generally don’t attend technical sessions at conferences unless they’re dealing with technology I actually use, which is a pretty limited amount. Some people consider that strange, since tech reporting is what puts beans on my plate.
Everything Open Is HopePunk
I’m probably telling you too much about myself when I tell you that this is exactly the type of presentation that I look to find at conferences, and usually when I find them I’m disappointed because they typically attempt to give legitimacy to the corporate version of community, which is somewhat akin to calling the inside of a penitentiary the heart of the free world. This presentation didn’t do that, so I wasn’t disappointed.
I must say, however, that what passed for punk in this presentation, while accurate enough from a Merriam-Webster perspective, was a version that’s been watered down enough to make it socially acceptable to the Starbucks crowd — a group who thrives on misappropriating and capitalizing on everything countercultural. That didn’t bother me, mainly because Nicola Nye is very much not a Starbucks yuppie. She’s not a punk either — although she does have pink hair in her LinkedIn profile pic — and she’s very careful to make it understood that her version of punk doesn’t involve anything like slam dancing in a mosh pit.
“I have to confess I’m not a punk rocker,” she said. “That is not my genre of music, but it turns out I’ve got a lot of the punk attitude going on. Their culture is all about rage. It’s about challenging authority and standing apart from the norm. Power in a community of like minds, because their subculture is just so strong.”
According to Nye, all of us techno, free and libre, freaks and geeks folks are punks of a sort, even if we’re a bit closeted about it.
“HopePunk is about finding the weird little things that make your heart happy, and finding the community of people who also have a weird little happy heart,” she said. “The act of just even having that kindness, and sharing that compassion, is an act of rebellion, when corporations, governments, and just the rising cost of living is grinding all of us down and making it hard to lift up our heads and say, ‘I’m looking forward to something.'”
Revolution for the Necessity of It
All of that sounded very familiar to this old hippy who never left the ’60s behind. It also has relevance to the free software and open-source communities in much the same way that the Occupy movement could’ve had to what was left of the ’60s counterculture had it come along 15 or 20 years earlier.
“Open source is now being used at a scale where we’ve got new challenges that we are not really well equipped to handle,” she said. “People who like writing code are generally not the people who like getting into the space of governance. They’re not people who really want to go and deal with lawyers, although they do tend to turn out to be very good at dealing with lawyers.”
“We’ve got people leaving, and I don’t think we’re getting many new people coming in,” she added. “If I look around the room, I feel like we’ve all got more gray hair and there’s fewer fresh grads, not in the way that we used to see 10 or 15 years ago,” she added.
She went on to explain how the melding of ‘hope’ — the vision of a better world and all the other positive yearnings the word implies — with the rebelliousness and determination of ‘punk’ might be harnessed to help bring open source back to what it was before it became a corporate tool.
If Everything Open ends up posting the video of this session to YouTube or something, I recommend it. I’ll try to let you know if it happens.
After Nye I watched Please Don’t Forget My Parents! – Digital Exclusion Is Happening, So You All Better Know About It, a delve by Sae Ra Germaine into the digital divide as it’s manifesting in Australia, and Open Justice Within a Justice Reinvestment Framework, a look at Australia’s justice system from Emma Davidson.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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