Open Serendipity

The title of Tim O’Reilly’s ETech 09 Keynote last night was Work on Stuff that Matters.  This is the second reason I came to ETech: I’m a total sucker for inspirational save the world messages to the faithful, and Tim’s was great.  I’m really  happy that O’Reilly  is sponsoring a Gov 2.0 summit in D.C. next fall.  I wont be able to go, but I cannot wait to tell my cousin-neice about it.  She lives a few blocks from the mall and I think she works as a researcher in public health.  She is an amazing, wonderful young woman.

I feel like right now, today, for any political issue, e.g. tax reform, I should be able to go to a website produced by Obama’s army of volunteers and find out:

• what is Obama’s position/plan on the issue, and time frame
• what recent legislation is in the works or passed or failed or whatever
• links to the gory historical details of the issue
• who is working for and against, and why
• what I can do to help

As far as I know, that does not exist today.  And that is only the smallest bit of open government.  But it is an easy to understand and important bit.  I’m looking forward to reading more now about Carl Malamud and his Yes We Scan! site.

But Tim’s keynote last night was not just about government.  That was just one piece of it, an example of his more general points: work on stuff that matters, something that matters to you more than money!  (Yeah yeah, so the man is independently wealthy, one hopes, but he still has a good point.)  There are different ways to respond to dire times.

Which brings me to the first reason I attended ETech: to be able to go to Gavin Stark’s presentation, Your Energy Identity and Why You Should Care.  Gavin is founder and CEO of AMEE, The World’s Energy Meter.  I’ve been studying the amee website and trying to understand where the community arount all this very cool open source platform and ton of data is or should/will be.  I think now I understand that there may never be a really large community around amee itself, directly, but rather a smaller community of experts, many of whom will work for other companies or organizations.  AMEE is a platform, and they really want application developers to build on top of it and around it.

The beginning of that ecosystem is now listed on their affiliates page.  As Gavin pointed out, the list is really a fascinating mix of tiny orgs and huge corporations.  As a recently unemployed geek looking for my next employer where I can work on stuff that matters, I’d be excited about all of them as potential employers if only my former employer (Sun) was not on the list!  So that keeps my enthusiasm from getting out of hand.

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Tech by marla