Arjen's blog

Rotary speech

Had a lovely evening dinner with the members of the Kensington Rotary at the Regency Hotel in South Kensington. On invitation of one of their members I gave a table-speech version (no beamers or other crutches) of the type of talk I often do as a lead-in to scenario planning workshops. Had a good dialogue afterwards on the use of technology and its meaning to society. That is what Rotary is about after all; service above self.

For those members who could not make it: an example of the type of talk I did (somewhat more focused on the technology side of things) can be found here. The article about the Oyster card being hacked I was so furiously typing on my mobile phone during their charity concert on the 18th of last month can be found here.

The Last HOPE

Just finished my talk at the Hope conference about the national Dutch open standards / opensource policyplan. Hope stands for Hackers On Planet Earth and has been a bi-annual event since 1994. HOPE features presentations on a range of (IT) security related topics but also hosts all kinds of techno-creative workshops and lectures on the social relevance of technology. For a full listing see the conference site. Video's of the talks will become available in the future.

Because the mid-town Manhattan hotel just across from Penn station in New York may be demolished next year it is unclear if there will be (a) hope after this one. Because of this, and a certain facination with morbid themes, the conference organisers are calling this 'The Last Hope', refering both to their conference and the state of (digital) civil liberties in the US.

Cnet has the first coverage on the event.

My slides are here in ODF and PDF. For more background links and video see the 24C3 page (Dec 2007 talk in Berlin) and my blogpost about LinuxTag (May 2008 Berlin).

Camping with the community

Just got back from a (too)short visit to the ETH-0 summercamp after doing a talk on the impact of new technologies (slides here: ODF | PDF). ETH-0 (a reference to the networkport on a Unix computer) is a week of camping with your fellow nerds, geeks, hackers en techno-creatives in the North-West of the Netherlands. The Weather was typical Dutch today but thanks to several big army-surplus tents nobody seemed to be bothered by this too much. If you like (Inter)networking, opensource, gaming, onine communities or the impossible assignments of the 'scavenger hunt' drop by ETH-0 this week.

ETH-0 started this Saturday July 5th and continues until July 11th. I can't stay the week because of agenda-hell but will do my best to clear my calender for next year.

Location: Het boshuis, Noorderdijkweg 23, 1771 MJ, Wieringerwerf (Google earth).  Meer info about the program, who you can meet there and what you can do on the Wiki. Do drop the organising crew a note if you plan to come over, this is a volunteer-driven event and everybody is expected to participate in a pro-active manner - this is not a hotel ;-)