This year I have been attending a couple of seminars and presentations which I liked very much and from which I learned the power of the open, interconnected, social networking.
I started in February (February 22) with Richard Stallman and his lecture at the VUB in Brussels about “The danger of software patents” which I very much appreciated. In Stallman’s vision, patents are mind restricting and does not allow creative minds to freely explore and innovate using others’ ideas.
He exemplified many issues that software developers are facing in large U.S. organization which involves patent breaching and causes the developers to be sued by multibillion companies which holds royalties on some algorithms.
His presentation cleared out that if we insist in patenting every single piece of software, soon there will not be any freedom of innovating but to pay royalties to big companies. It recalled me how Google bought Motorola only for its patents and not for its assets!!
Small software companies will likely abandon new ideas just for the fact that they may be breaching some patented software or simply because they might not be capable in determining if and when their software is potentially breaching a patented software.
Although is very much related to US patent’s systems, Stallman warned that soon the same situation may be applicable to the entire eurozone, because there’s no clear legislation on the matter.
In June 29, 2011 I’ve attended “The Power of Open” by Creative Commons at Google’s office here in Brussels – a friend of mine organized 🙂 🙂 🙂 (I am so proud about that) – where I learned the importance of “open licensing” that in facts, made me re-think on how to promote myself and my music. I now publish my music under the Creative Commons “attribution, non commercial, share alike” license which I hope that will improve my music sharing among my (few) followers and enables other creative minds to create derivates and remixes.
Creative Commons is now in my opinion one of the founding pillars at the basis of this new changing world. The reason I learned from the next conference I attended.
I ended up blogging (in their official, password protected blog ) for the 2011 EuroCIO Annual Conference in November 30, a 2 days conference in Paris where I had the pleasure to attend speeches and lectures by many of the most influential CIOs and thought leaders in Europe.
The main thread there was openness and change management in this new ever changing economy. Every single company is now attempting at tackling the recession with new management ideas and tools, most of which are concerned at social networks and systems’ elasticity in the cloud computing era.
The most interesting lecture was the one by Pieter Hinssen which presented the “New Normal”, describing how we have spent 20 years becoming digital and that now we are only half-way to become it. Today the new normal is to put the customer at heart of the company operations because people is starting to become shaped by technology (in his slideshow is showed a split picture with the upper part depicting the “old normal” where a family was having a dinner altogether and the lower part depicting the “new normal” where everyone around the table is watching the TV).
From these 3 conferences I learned that Belgium is a common gather for thought leaders (Stallman was invited by ESI, Google invited Mark Patterson to talk about CC here and Hinssen is a Flemish). There are so many new challenges in the world, and sharing is the key to master it.
Share your thought, your work, your pictures, your music, your life.
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