So, this is my first real post. Consider everything before this point a warm-up, getting past that "awkward" blogger phase where the new blogger isn't very sure of themself or their ideas. After this last week, I am sure.
First, about me. I currently work full-time as a volunteer for an AmeriCorps program called City Year. City Year's tagline is "give a year, change the world." I used to think this slogan was terribly hokey and far too rose-colored. (And that's saying a lot--I'm an idealist to begin with.) However, over the last nine months of my service, I have become a believer. As a result, I will blog (and tweet) more about my experience as a corps member in the future.
Now, about my goals and beliefs. Just like a right to water, I believe everyone on earth has a right to knowledge. That pretty much sums it up. Knowledge is power, it's the foundation of a democracy, and everyone has a right to it--everyone. My goal is liberating that knowledge and making it accessible and open to all who desire it. I see a number of barriers to this goal: legal, technological, and linguistic. Right now I evangelize Creative Commons to attempt to overcome the legal barrier. Next, I intend to help create more free and open source software to help overcome the technological barrier, alongside projects like One Laptop Per Child. Finally, my dream is to someday create fantastic free and open source language learning software (think Rosetta Stone) or even machine translation tools to overcome the linguistic barrier.
So this week has been huge for me. A massive step forward for education and the world, California announced an initiative for Open Educational Resources. Personally though, I was able to participate in an amazing conference in which I met many awesome people. In addition, I met one very special person through my work at City Year.
Over the weekend I gave two talks at a conference called BarCamp. The first was more of a group discussion in a Socratic seminar style format, and one person told me that it was the best talk he's ever heard. The second was my first serious presentation of my ideas (one in particular) to an audience. To those of you who gave it, thank you for your positive, constructive, and invaluable feedback. I will use it as I continue to give talks in the future, ideally with my next at MindShare. The video of my second talk is below.
I made a lot of amazing new friends at BarCamp, like some people who have developed a technology that actually makes the Internet faster. One very noteworthy and related to this post is Alex Peake, who runs empowerthyself.com, which uses the absolutely amazing tagline "Apathy is obsolete." I'll let you check out his site for yourself.
However, just this morning, here at City Year Los Angeles, I had the privilege of hearing Ben Sherwood talk about his life and his goals. To be blunt, I'm freaking out. We share so much vision and belief that it's ridiculous. I sincerely hope that he watches the video of my talk and that we continue to have a dialogue about survival, the media revolution, and the education of mankind.
My most memorable quotes from Ben are "everyone is surviving something," and "live life out of balance," while believing in your own efficacy. He has inspired me to completely defeat the determinism that I feel plagues so many in this world. We tend to believe that the world is too big, and that we can't make a difference. News flash: the world is getting smaller, and our power to change it is proportionately getting larger.
I was so impassioned by my interaction with Ben that I ran off to one of the computers at the office to write this post immediately. In fact, I'm already late for an opportunity to be at a gang prevention workshop in Watts. I have to go. Please check back as I continue to update an revise this post.
P.S. Ben, if you're reading this, please read the following article. I believe it will apply to your and your wife's work, as well as the future of media and the Internet:
iPods, First Sale, President Obama, and the Queen of England
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Countdown to Ubuntu
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Remix: the Book
Copyright Policy
Surviving the Culture Wars by Thom Hastings is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
About Me
- Thom Hastings
- My dream is to create a free and open source machine translation tool that is so helpful that the United Nations uses it. My theory is that language evolves from the bottom up, and I hope that by combining natural language processing algorithms with machine learning algorithms, genetic algorithms, as well as massive corpora and audio data, we can create much better translation algorithms. I hope to study linguistics and machine learning on the undergraduate level. My back-up plan is investing in open source, building capital, buying out the current commercial competitors in natural language input (such as NaturallySpeaking) and releasing their source under a free software license.
News I Care About
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Lijit Search
My Blog List
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Never forgive them1 day ago
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Exclusion Principle2 days ago
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novelty quest6 days ago
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PIT in Action: Climate4 weeks ago
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Hello world!4 years ago
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Steampunk Cephalopod?10 years ago
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Upgrading Tombuntu in 201311 years ago
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Flosse Posse is moving11 years ago
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little kids explain the holidays12 years ago
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Book Signing at OSCON12 years ago
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Flexible Futures13 years ago
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Transition13 years ago
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#136: My So-Called Life14 years ago
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Streaming Movie Wonder Woman (2017)14 years ago
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The Seven Movies of Destiny!
This section has problems with formatting, it's so important that it breaks the rest of the page. I'll be migrating to wordpress someday anyway.
Eternity
These are the seven must-see movies on the future of business, the Internet, and culture.
- Lawrence Lessig @ 23C3 - On Free, and the Differences Between Culture and Code
- Jonathan Zittrain @ ISOC-NY - The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It
- Joi Ito @ DLD 09 - On Creative Commons
- Lawrence Lessig, Molly S. Van Houweling, James Boyle, Joi Ito, and Jonathan Zittrain @ Berkman - The Commons: Celebrating Accomplishments, Discerning Futures
- Thomas Friedman @ MIT OCW - The World is Flat 3.0
- Pia Waugh @ VITTA - Closing Keynote: Open Source Futures
- Originally I had "Either a James Boyle or a Jimmy Wales or a Mark Shuttleworth or a Cory Doctorow,
as well as everything @ TED.com" here. Now, I know that the 7th Movie of Destiny is RiP: A Remix Manifesto.
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