Presented at
HOPE Number Nine (2012),
July 15, 2012, 2 p.m.
(60 minutes).
Mitch Altman caused a stir this spring when he publicly announced that he would not be helping U.S. Maker Faires this year, after it was publicly announced that they received funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). So, what’s the controversy? DARPA, an agency of the U.S. military, has funded many famous projects over the past several decades, including GPS and the Internet. People in DARPA are now making large amounts of grant funding available for hackers and hackerspaces to do projects of their choice, as well as funding for education through hands-on learning, which MAKE Magazine is using to help schools. Does it matter that DARPA is responsible for the development of new technology for the U.S. military with an annual budget of $3.2 billion? What are the ethics of using funds from people or organizations that may or may not be aligned with one’s own goals? What are the ramifications for the hacker/maker movement? Is DARPA funding overall a good thing? There is no simple answer. Explore the ethics and ramifications with Mitch, as moderator, and the panelists, as they give their perspectives on this complex set of issues.
Presenters:
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Fiacre O'Duinn
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Mitch Altman
Mitch Altman is a San Francisco-based hacker and inventor, best known for inventing TV-B-Gone remote controls, a keychain that turns off TVs in public places. He was also co-founder of 3ware (a Silicon Valley RAID controller company), did pioneering work in virtual reality at VPL Research, and created the Brain Machine, one of MAKE Magazine’s most popular DIY projects. For the last many years, he has been on the road from hackerspace to hacker con leading workshops around the world, teaching one and all to make cool things with electronics and teaching everyone to solder with his open source hardware kits. Mitch is one of the co-founders of Noisebridge (a San Francisco hackerspace) and president and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.
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Willow Brugh
Willow Brugh is the director of Geeks Without Bounds, an accelerator for humanitarian projects. Previous endeavors include being co-founder of Seattle makerspace Jigsaw Renaissance, the hackerspace collaboration initiative Space Federation, and the response-development competition GameSave. Years of participation in the hacker and makerspace community have created purpose towards distributed systems, engaged citizens, and mutual aid. With heavy involvement in Maker Faire, Random Hacks of Kindness, and the SpaceApps Challenge, Willow’s main skill is “getting out of the way.”
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Matt Joyce / openfly
as Matt Joyce
Matt Joyce is a former federal contractor, having worked on the Nebula project at NASA Ames Research Center. The Nebula project is responsible in part for the Apache 2 licensed OpenStack project. Today, Matt works at Cloudscaling, a startup centered around the open source cloud infrastructure market.
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Psytek
Psytek is an inventor, engineer, and entrepreneur. He’s CEO and CTO of multiple companies including CoderBounty.com. He co-founded the Alpha One Labs community hackerspace in Brooklyn and is currently making progress on a groundbreaking aerospace transportation vehicle. He’s been a 2600 reader and meeting participant for more than 15 years and is a proponent for hacker culture and community.
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