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XPRIZE's Jono Bacon On the Next Great Challenge
itwbennett writes: After just under 8 years at Canonical where he was Community Manager of Ubuntu, Jono Bacon left in search of a new challenge. Now, a year and a half into his tenure at the XPRIZE Foundation as Senior Director of Community, Bacon reflects on the changing nature of community and how he is working to bring the 'anybody can play a role in a bigger picture' aspect of open source to "solve the grand challenges facing humanity." Update: 09/17 00:20 GMT by T : Jono wants everyone to know that he's certainly not leaving the world of open source software, either; headline has been updated to reflect that.
ok. Donald Trump FTW.
...a title of easily replaceable unimportance to the open source movement.
The guy is just another burden on the communities he takes advantage of to make a living. He's called free software developer pathetic on reddit and his general attitude is extremely offensive to those who *are* actually contributing. Particularly when those people he is calling pathetic *are the ones doing the real work and doing it without pay*.
Oh, that's easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy! Just change man's nature. Problem solved. No applause, just send money, thankyouverymuch...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
As a community manager, he's one third marketing, one third support and one third PR, and at the bottom of all those totem poles in terms of influence. If he's changing anything, its the diapers of his bosses' kids after he picks them up from daycare.
He probably realized there's no money in open source unless you work for RedHat.
mmmmm, Bacon!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Have being involved in open source projects. Let me.tell this is all lies. Fundamentally core developers exploit community contributions and take credit for it.
But there's more, after an initial influx of core developers and collaborators. This hierarchy will remain for some period of time. More concerned with status or position than anything else. Later and perhaps more talented individuals. Would remain at the lower rungs of the developer hierarchy.
tldr; any "community" development model has LIMITED positions some may find benefit. But ultimately a generalized community development model DOES not exist.
Positions are held - and rarely given up - hierarchies form quickly and the community of idealist remain without a clue and spectate from a distance under some illusion that they are involved.
It wears off as soon as differences of opinion is expressed - and you are not within the clique.
YMMV
See subject. Bennett is shit. ITWorld is shit. ITWBennett is shit squared. And these self-promotional posts on Slashdot are dingleberries.
(On a related note, I just made dingleberry whine. Drink up!)
In no particular order, the grand challenges are:
Some of these may be rooted in human nature, so getting rid of them will not happen unless or until we evolve past that hurdle.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"XPRIZE is a non-profit organization that designs and manages public competitions intended to encourage technological development that could benefit mankind. Their Board of Trustees include Elon Musk, James Cameron, Larry Page, Arianna Huffington, Ratan Tata among others." ref
"Communitizing the Community thru Communitization tools."
I miss that podcast.
Do it you smarmy bastard!
Don't do it without Aq.
Expand the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge to include the entire edit history of Wikipedia as well as the entirety of Wikipedia's current contents.
Why?
Because it solves the artificial intelligence problem and does so in a way that optimally enables natural language communication of the accumulated knowledge of humanity.
What I mean by "optimally enables natural language communication" is what every professional writer uses as the first rule of composition:
Write to your audience.
In other words, let's say you are attempting to write an article about quantum mechanics and your audience is a 12 year old from New Jersey, raised without a father in an impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhood. This is a very different composition task than communicating quantum mechanics to a college educated liberal arts graduate from Iowa who is considering a career in accounting. Indeed, it is the essence of pedagogy -- universalized.
By including the entire edit history of Wikipedia, the worldviews, perspectives, biases and agendas of a large number of editors will provide insight into the cognitive as well as social structure of a wide array of humans.
Moreover, while Google and companies like it are increasingly casting their role as "publishers" with the "right" to "editorialize" their search results, the Hutter Prize has a mathematical objective function that is simply not subject to editorialization: Kolmogorov Complexity. KC is a rigorous definition of Ockham's Razor that is mathematically sound and provably an optimal measure of mastery of knowledge.
Seastead this.