from the Inventing-the-Future dept.
Foresight benefactor and associate MG Taylor will hold a TANSTAAFL DesignShop Event, "Coding the Transparent Society," on May 8-10 in Palo Alto, California, bringing together a community of people concerned with impact of the advent of the Internet, an "Information Revolution that will alter global societies as dramatically as the invention of the printing press over 500 years ago . . . The decisions we make regarding the design of cyberspace will have an ever greater impact on our everyday lives in the years to come."
You are invited to participate in the event, where critical issues concerning the future of society and of the global information infrastructure will be discussed, solutions explored and next steps designed.
Read More for a sampling of issues on the table . . .
TANSTAAFL DesignShop events are forward-looking events designed to address strategic, policy, cultural, and philosophical aspects of a particular issue or group of issues. They bring together individuals, teams, and organizations who are "stakeholders" within the context of the subject matter and are meant to be catalyzing events that substantially augment, leverage, redesign and create new intellectual tools and processes that narrow the gap between Vision and Current Reality.
A sampling of issues on the table:
– It was once common to hear that cyberspace is immune from any type of government (or anybody else's) control. Lawrence Lessig argues that this is not the case, that cyberspace has no inherent nature, the Internet is what we make it. The question then becomes, how do we design and implement the cyberspace Commonwealth we all want?
– As David Brin has discussed at length in The Transparent Society, the sensors are coming. A related concern is the loss of control of personal. What is the appropriate response of an open society? Do we guarantee people's right to strong encryption, or do we insist on reciprocal transparency?
– The Digital Divide – How can we insure that information tools are used to eliminate the current economic, social and political disparities, rather than magnify them? As new and exciting technologies are developed, how do we insure that new and unforeseen divides do not open up?
– What forms of global governance might become necessary as a result of the information revolution? While the industrial revolution produced large scale technologies which required centralized decision making, the information revolution is producing global technologies which empower individual control. Is the notion of intellectual property consistent with the emerging knowledge economies? If so, are there steps we can take to reform the current system? If not, what can be done to encourage and protect innovation in the information age?
– What is the role of "open source" in creating the desired outcomes?
