Surviving the Culture Wars

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

From OSNews:

Straight from the mouth of Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, on March 3rd during a Q&A session in San Francisco:

What's particularly interesting about netbooks is the price point. Eventually, it will make sense for operators and so forth to subsidize the use of netbooks so they can make services revenue and advertising revenue on the consumption. That's another new model that's coming.

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer already made predictions of his own earlier this year and figures that the big MS can handle anything Google brews up.

I assume we're going to see Android-based, Linux-based laptops, in addition to phones. We'll see Google more as a competitor in the desktop operating system business than we ever have before. The seams between what's a phone operating system and a PC operating system will change, and so we have ramped the investment in the client operating system.

All the big companies see it coming, new media is open media.

The soft revolution comes as no shock to the people who know. After all, Cory Doctorow told Microsoft that DRM was a silly move back in 2004. But to the general public, open source is still a concept that isn't fully grasped. How can a company make money on something that can be given away for free? I would say "innovation" or more specifically "Reason to Buy" or even added services, as Canonical and Red Hat understand. Hardware vendors know it too, which is why genius netbooks either demand open source or simply offer it as their cheapest option.

Video below of the Touch Book, which I envisioned about a week before it was released. But that's nothing special, because genius people envision this stuff all day, and with the power of open source at their disposal, these geniuses are starting to pull off the marketing and distribution of new goods and services under new, open business models.

The talks I attended were stellar. The conversations I had on the expo floor were powerful. SCaLE 7x was, in fact, the best weekend of my life. I got to hang around with Jono Bacon, among others. Expect lots of revisions to this post, mostly expansions particular talks.

The best:
Stormy Peters - Companies & Communities (read)
John Todd - Open Source in an Economic Downturn (it wins)
Ross Turk - Open Source Business for Hackers (watch):


The day after SCaLE ended I got to have a conference call with Jamie Boyle and Joi Ito, the Chairman of the Board and CEO, respectively, of Creative Commons. You can listen to the call here:

At about 34 minutes in, in the middle of one of my questions, you can hear a car peel out. I was mortified by embarrassment, but in retrospect it's hilarious. I was calling from a park in Boyle Heights, a physical commons, since I needed a space to listen to the call and take notes away from middle-school kids. As it started to rain, I had to take shelter under a tree with some construction workers from a project nearby while they were cooking some tacos for their lunch break. As it lightened up a bit, they offered me one. Too glued to all of Jamie's words, I didn't want to take any time away from the call. "In a bit," I said. Half an hour later, the call was over and the workers had left, with one taco left on the grill for me. I learned an amazing lesson about community, and it's hard to articulate completely. Here's how I usually think it: "We're all in this together." Our commons are something we all intuitively understand, through our basic understanding of each other's basic human needs and those needs of our common planet, we can also intuitively understand what needs to be done. All that is left to do, is to do it. With that, I give the Legacy of Lessig:

It is more or less a combination of all his talks up until now, and even still in a modern context.

P.S. I might be busy as I have some internships to apply to.

P.P.S. At the end of the call Joi mentions rebranding? I thought this was good:

And this is even older:

I guess digital natives like myself are biased. True enough, the possible brand confusion with closed captioning must be rectified.