Consider ideas from "Free software/utopia" talk by Deb Nicholson from LibrePlanet 2019

[pdurbin]

Deb Nicholson recently gave a talk at LibrePlanet 2019 called "Free software/utopia" full of ideas worth considering. I've transcribed a bit of her talk, where she says the following.

"My name is Deb Nicholson. Today I'm going to talk about free software and utopia... I work at the Software Freedom Conservancy which is itself a fairly idealistic organization. We are a fiscal home for about 50 free software projects that are all community-driven, bound to the public interest because we are a charitable organization. So we think about how the world could be, all the time...

When I thing about utopia, awake at night... what should the world be like? I hope that we agree on a couple of things, that it involves justice and transparency and empowerment. When I think about the utopia I hope that some of the things that are common to our ideas don't involve a large section of the population being kept in the dark and not in control of anything, and then a couple of other people, maybe four or five large companies like Amazon being in charge of everything and then just pestering us with ads all day... So I hope we have some kind of personal autonomy, some kind of transparency, some sort of control over our lives online might be part of that utopia."

You can watch the whole talk at https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/free-software-utopia/

Some of the key ideas for me:

• community-driven
• bound to the public interest
• justice
• transparency
• empowerment