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Free Culture

OpenTech 2008

OpenTech 2008 was amazing.

It was a day of talks about free software, free data, cyberculture, economics, digital rights, the whole technology and society thing. I met lots of ORG, OKFN, OSM and other generally cool people, some familiar faces and a few names I previously knew only from email.

I went to about 10 talks and I can’t mention them all but they were all great. To mention a few examples: I’d like to see Ben Gimpert’s slides from his talk on financial quantitive analysis put online. Danny O’Brien mentioned identi.ca and really put it in the context of restoring freedom “in the cloud”. Kim Plowright used the word ‘jouissance’ in a way that made sense of more complex ideas of virtual presence (the Lacanian league will have dispatched assassins). And Adrian Hon presented some wonderful hypermedia fiction to considerably more than twelve people (the Doctor Who finale having started five minutes previously).

I hope we don’t have to wait another 3 years for the next one.