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Welcome to the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group

Linux - The Operating System of the 21st Century TM

Next Meeting:
Wednesday Feb. 3rd, 2010, 7PM-9PM
Speaker: David Weekly
Location: Symantec (formerly Veritas), Mountain View
Topic: Infrastructure Memes: How Spreadable Concepts Can Create and Empower Communities



SVLUG meetings are first Wednesdays of each month at 7PM-9PM!
Date Location Speaker
Feb. 3, 2010 Symantec (formerly Veritas), Mountain View David Weekly

Topic: Infrastructure Memes: How Spreadable Concepts Can Create and Empower Communities

The Internet enables ideas about how communities can self-organize to spread rapidly and globally, along with the infrastructure required to power a group, enabling "freely franchiseable" models like LUGs, BarCamps, DevHouses, hackerspaces, etc. In this sense, the infrastructure for the community is communicated as an idea virus, or meme - a sort of cultural "grey goo". Maintaining a sufficient consistency of the idea such that global community "identity" is coherent is a challenge, leading to discussions of Community Marks and other novel forms of trademark. Models vary wildly in this level of control, from the Catholic Church through TEDx and all the way through those who self-label as "anarchists". These models often lead to friction with existing, slower-moving establishments such as governments, to whom these forms of organization are alien and subversive. Examples and mild historical perspective will be provided; the talk hopes to at the least to stir discussion about effective ways to spread positive community concepts.


MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
David Weekly (1, 2) is the founder and chairman of PBworks, an innovative host for business collaboration. He was graduated as a President Scholar from Stanford U. in 2000 with a BS in Computer Science, and has worked for such institutions as Harvard Physics, MIT Lincoln Labs, Stanford Graphics, atWeb, Legato, and There.com. David wrote the first layman-level description of MP3 in early 1997, reverse-engineered the Napster protocol in an evening, and was a finalist in the ACM International Programming Competition. David lives in a Hillsborough mansion with five others and throws periodic all-night hackathons called SuperHappyDevHouse, there. He is also a Founding Director of Hacker Dojo, a Mountain View-based non-profit community center for coders and thinkers.

Earlier meetings and more details are available on our previous meetings page.
Possible future meetings, yet to be scheduled, are listed on our TBA page.

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