The State of Open

To London for the State of Open Con 2024 - the OpenUK conference for all things open in software, hardware and data.

The new entrant to the two days of Plenaries, Panels and expert led workshops and discussion was , of course, Artificial Intelligence. The disruptive nature of reflective AI is already marked across most social and industrial social sectors trained as it is by data taken from existing public records.

In a brilliant and challenging keynote speech, Bruce Perens, the Founder of the Open Source Initiative which emerged from the idea of free software discussed the path to this point and starting with the enormous failure of the open source movement.

Did you know it underpins and enables most of the software and hardware in use today? And yet this software is now owned and exploited by the wealthiest eneterprises on the planet.

Thanks to OpenUk you can watch his full speech here and I commend the 11 minutes you will spend doing it.

And the effectof this failure are only growing with the constant emergence of newer and more powerful AI models, eventually to the point of independent cognitive ability.

As you can see, this single session was challenging enough and combined with the huge range of engagement across the two days, this made for an intense event with so many understood patterns standing in the face of an enormous and ongoing change.

To take one example, in the UK, the likely incoming government of the Labour Party sent its Shadow Minister for Science, Research and Innovation who gave a powerful keynotewhich you can see below.

Naturally in the year of Elections, Chi Onwurah, MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central,) was very focused on the transformation opportunity beyond the UK General Election.

Suffice to add the more than 100 sessions are rich indeed and we’d commend a thorough explore to better understand the digital age we are now in. And if you are not already, please do follow OpenUK.