It gives me great pleasure in welcoming Donna Benjamin up to the stage today to deliver our keynote.
Donna is a passionate advocate of free and open source software.
She has served on a number of community boards and different committees,
organised events including this one, and made various contributions to various projects over many years.
In 2013 she received the Rusty Ranch Award for service to the Australian and New Zealand open source community.
Currently she is employed by Red Hat as an engagement lead in the Open Innovation Labs,
but she also runs her own business, Creative Continuencies.
Please join me in welcoming Donna to the stage.
Oh of course. It's gone to sleep. So you can just take a deep breath, telling myself this right.
Okay.
Wow, look at all of you. I'm looking at all of you.
Who is watching? And why are they watching? And why does it matter?
Why does it matter to you? Why does it matter to us? And why might it matter to me?
So who am I? Thank you for the introduction. I'm Donna Benjamin.
I'm an engagement lead in the Open Innovation Labs at Red Hat, where I lead teams, help teams change the future.
I want to acknowledge the Yolnguimba people, the elders past and present and emerging,
and thank them for their generous welcome to country on Monday, and acknowledge the country we're meeting on today.
Over the years I've been involved in a bunch of different organisations in one way or another.
I'd also like to acknowledge that that work and those engagements with those people have made me who I am today and informed what I have to say.
But I'm not here to talk about them and I'm not here to talk about me.
When I first heard that the conference theme for LCA 2020 was who is watching,
I immediately thought of mass surveillance and the increasing threat to our collective privacy.
So why does this question, who is watching, matter to me?
Let me tell you a story. In 1938, my grandmother set off on an adventure with her new husband.
They boarded the Jarvis Bay to Australia, not for their honeymoon, as you might have thought, but to escape Nazi Germany.
They were incredibly lucky. You see, this was before World War II, before the war,
and my grandmother had been arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo for hanging out with dissidents, allegedly.
She was eventually released by the Gestapo, somewhat ironically because she was a Jew and they thought she'd be no good for breeding stock.
Later during the war, her mother and my grandfather's mother and sister were killed in camps in Europe.
They were incredibly lucky. I wouldn't be standing here today if they hadn't got aboard the Jarvis Bay.
So who is watching and why? It matters.
So in the past, surveillance involved spycraft and tricky devices.
Think James Bond. Think Q. Think every spy movie ever. I love spy movies.
Who else likes spy movies? Hands up. A lot of people do. They're awesome, right? It's fun.
But now, well, what's your wake word of choice? Do you have a virtual assistant by your side?
CCTV cameras are everywhere to help keep us safe, to keep our stuff safe.
I put out a call on Twitter to have people send me pics of cameras they came across in everyday life.
This was fun. So here's a few that I got sent. Webcam. Thank you, Sarah. And thank you, Adam.
And phone cam. Thank you, Katie. I think I saw you here somewhere. And also thank you, Katie, to Opera Cam.
I think this was actually my favourite. It took me a little while to figure out what is that and where is that?
Library cam. Series of photographs from Clinton, thank you, wherever you are. Library cam.
And David sent me a series of photographs too of this traffic cam, which is just one of them.
It was kind of fun, David, wherever you are. It looked like a little journey that you were sort of taking photographs as you went.
I was like, I kind of like this. I want to hear the story about this little trip that you were taking.
Tram cam. Also one of my favourites, Steve. I think is this the tram that just goes past here, I suspect? Yes? Very good.
Also, I'm from Melbourne, so I like trams. Car cam, a late entry from Yakov, thank you.
It's hard to see the actual camera here, but it's the automotive sensing system in his car.
And curry cam, which Pete took just as we were having dinner at an Indian restaurant a few weeks ago.
They're everywhere. And we don't really usually pay them much heed.
But seriously, we're kind of making it too easy. We're making it too easy in two main ways.
And firstly, many of us willingly, mindlessly, throw our data around like confetti at a wedding,
throw our data around like confetti at a wedding, paying no heed to how it will be cleaned up or by who.
I know that's not all of you. Some of you are hyper-conscious of your digital footprints, of your security settings, of your privacy.
Some of you take a great deal of care. I don't. I should. I know I should. But I don't.
And I don't know why that is. It's not that I've got nothing to hide or any of those kind of things that people say.
I'm not really sure why I don't take more care. Perhaps it's just all too hard.
Perhaps I'm just lazy. Perhaps I don't think the consequences are dire or a big deal. I don't know.
I actually ask myself this every now and again. Why don't I take more care? I should.
But what if my government decides I'm a threat? What then?
What then? This is the front page of my dad's ASIO file.
For those of you who don't know what ASIO stands for, it's the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
Now, why on earth does my dad have an ASIO file? I mean, he's my dad.
Well, he was seen as a little bit of a troublemaker in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
He was involved in things like campaigning against capital punishment and getting Indigenous people counted in the census.
Thanks, Dad. I'll tell him he got a round of applause for that. Good work.
He was photographed attending meetings and conferences just like this one.
His phone was tapped. Is mine? Who cares? Siri is listening.
Hey, Siri. What's the weather like today?
It's currently cloudy and 26 degrees in Broadbeach. Expect cloudy skies starting in the afternoon and thunderstorms tonight with mixed conditions for the rest of the day.
Temperatures are heading down from 27 degrees to 24 tonight.
Oh, thank you, Siri. That's very handy. See, I like asking Siri about the weather and what the time is, like if my hands are full and I'm running like, hey, Siri, what's the time?
And I like asking Google, like telling Google where I'm going so it can give me directions. And I do this willingly, gleefully. I think it's amazing. This is fabulous. This is the future.
But there's another way that we are making it too easy. We makers of free and open source software are kind of like surveillance arms dealers.
Our free operating systems, databases, libraries, servers, all the tools we make are being used by the persuasion industry, whether we like it or not.
So here's an uncomfortable question, and Lana explored this yesterday in her talk. Are we responsible for that?
Are we accountable for the acts enabled by the tools we make, the tools we support, the tools we sell? Are we responsible? Are we accountable?
Well, that's a complicated question with an even more complicated answer or answers.
I'm looking forward to Nicola's session tomorrow on practical ethics to learn how to build some ethical muscle.
And yesterday, Lana's talk was very powerful, and if you missed it, then I urge you to find the video and watch it.
Maybe one way to think through this is to ask ourselves a leading question.
A leading question. What's the intent? What's the big why? The why matters.
Search and rescue is one very good reason for watching.
For some time now, Dr. Andrew Trigil, better known to many of you just as Tridge, has been working on an open source autonomous drone project called ArduPilot,
and I believe they're developing flight path algorithms to aid in search and rescue. This is awesome, right?
This is life-affirming work. This is work that matters.
Social media is now being monitored by global public health authorities to watch for signs of disease outbreak.
A number of studies around the world have shown that tracking leading indicators for signs and symptoms of influenza, Zika virus, dengue virus, these sorts of things,
matches that being reported to doctors and health providers, but it does so faster and sooner,
and allows those organisations to prepare and stock up on medicine, or help track the origin and likely spread of infection to warn or quarantine people who may be affected.
Later today, Rachel Bunda will talk about smart energy meters. These machines are constantly monitoring our energy usage
and sending that info direct to the energy provider rather than having someone come and physically read the meter.
Cathy Reid will be talking about sensing in prosthetics and how important it is to protect the sorts of private and sensitive data they can collect in good, better breasts later today.
Compliance with road traffic regulations, bland, banal, but it's another why, another reason for monitoring and observation.
And the very obvious placement of cameras is thought to be a deterrent to unwelcome and criminal behaviour, to the extent that fake cameras are often installed with that aim in mind.
So in that case, the intent, the aim to deter would seem to matter more than capturing and recording evidence of the unwelcome behaviour itself.
The why matters. But when the intent is to suppress, repress or oppress, then it matters even more.
But we are freedom lovers. We are agents of change. And we can change the future.
But first we need to ask and answer some important questions. How do we work together?
How do we work together to create the future we want or resist apathy?
Janis Joplin sang that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.
But I think that freedom is what we make it to be. Let's be makers.
Let's shift our thinking from the scary realm of surveillance to the somewhat more objective space of observation.
Last year, sitting beside my dad in hospital in intensive care, I noted the professionalism and attention to detail of the nurse who was taking hourly observations of his vital statistics.
She was tracking blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, respiration, skin tone.
She was also paying attention to me and to my mum. And I realised this too was a kind of surveillance. But it was all good.
Observation isn't always a bad thing. So what's the real difference between surveillance and observation? Intent.
Surveillance is observation when the subject is under suspicion.
There are very many reasons we have to observe things, observe each other or observe the world around us.
Benign reasons, good reasons, bad reasons, lots of different reasons.
But when the primary intent of observation becomes suspicion, that's surveillance. Intent matters.
This image is from police infrared footage of the fires near Mallacoota on New Year's Eve.
So from a nurse's careful observation in intensive care to public health teams using social media to track the outbreak of disease, to early warning detection for natural hazards like volcanoes and bushfires.
Monitoring, sensing, automation, machine learning, these are all being used to watch, to learn and to help us, help us make decisions to act.
We should and we must use our skills and our smarts to fight fire with fire.
We should all be watching and learning so we can make meaningful choices to act.
We should also work to protect our own privacy.
My New Year's resolution for 2020 is to clean up my own data act because just as vaccination fosters herd immunity, using VPNs and encryption helps protect our collective privacy.
Normalising strong privacy for everyone protects those who need it most.
There are things we can all do right now and some of you are doing them and can help the rest of us also do them.
But what about the future? I want to go on a journey to the future. Fast forward to the year 2121.
Not 2021, not next year, but 101 years from now.
Can you imagine what the world might be like in 2121?
It was William Gibson who said the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
The telephone was invented well over 100 years ago.
But, and we probably all have one in our pockets, I do, and if you don't you're probably a conscientious objector.
Right? Who doesn't have a phone in their pocket or about their person?
I don't actually see a single hand, is there one? There was one. One! Good, talk to me later.
No tracking device on you. Sorry, you've got two. Who's got more than two phones?
Okay, so we are well endowed with phones in this room.
But there are places in Australia right now that do not have a phone that works.
Combs tower burnt out, power down, no NBN.
The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
One way to help imagine the future is to study the past.
And some people like to think that the past was some kind of perfect golden age and would like to go back there.
The truth is though, humanity is better off today than it has ever been.
Hans Rosling and his successor Max Rosa advocate for a fact-based optimism.
And if you haven't seen their awesome animation showing key indicators changing over time, then I urge you to go and check them out. They're really cool.
Humanity, according to many measures of progress, is actually doing really well.
If historical trends continue, it's likely the world will keep on getting better.
So whilst it may seem bleak right now as we start to really feel the heat of the climate crisis,
we're doing really well.
Some people are even saying, you know, rebuilding after the bushfires is going to stimulate economic activity.
Well, others suggest we need to be thinking much more critically about using growth as a measure of progress.
People like Greta Thunberg, Time Magazine's Person of the Year,
scolding our leaders for believing in fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
So what was I talking about? Oh, that's right, the past.
A hundred years ago this week, our friends in America enacted prohibition and banned booze.
I think it's fair to say that had a few unintended consequences.
OK, fast forward to 1996.
Now, some of you probably weren't born then.
But some of you may remember things like we were about to become a republic here in Australia.
Remember that? John Howard was elected Prime Minister.
There was an unbelievably tragic massacre in Port Arthur in Tasmania.
Dolly, the cloned sheep, Dolly was born. Remember that? Yes, one person.
But more recently, New Zealand paid some compensation to Maori for the loss of their land in the 1800s.
Coffee Ann-Ann became Secretary-General of the United Nations.
And I attended a global futures forum called 2121.
And it's been on my mind ever since. 2121. 101 years from now.
So let's begin. Let's start now.
Let's talk about the future. Not your personal future, the future of the world.
You can plan for your own future. We all can. That's just called a to-do list.
Planning what to do with our own lives isn't the same as planning the future.
I think the future exists beyond our lifetime.
Trouble is we can't do anything then. We can only act now.
So let's stop for a moment. Let's gaze out through the galaxy and just breathe.
Let's take a leaf out of Eckhart Tolle's book. Quiet all the noise in your head.
Breathe in, breathe out. Feel your breath filling up your lungs.
Feel it flow out of your mouth and nose.
Now take those breaths a little deeper. Just think about the breath.
Are other thoughts rushing in? They're just thoughts. You can deal with them later.
Close your eyes. Feel yourself here in this room.
How are you sitting? Are you warm? Are you cold?
Feel the energy in your body. This might sound like woo woo to some of you,
but every blood cell in your body is carrying oxygen from your lungs, powering your brain.
Feel the energy of your breath. Feel that power.
We are all here, joined in this moment.
This one single moment.
Are you here now?
This is what Eckhart Tolle calls the power of now, living in the moment.
Once you start living in the moment, you can stop reliving the past or fretting about the future.
The future is coming anyway. You can't stop it and you can't wish it away,
just like you can't relive the glory days of the past.
Don't let the past prevent you from living your life now.
Welcome to 2020. Here we are now.
So thinking about next year, I'm prepared to bet, predict, that some of us will meet again at Linux Conf eu 2021.
Yes? Good. And it will be in Broom or Antarctica.
Or where? On a boat. I think there's a bof, is it, today, to chat about the future of LCA?
So we can make some fairly confident predictions, but again, it's kind of planning. It's a to-do list.
But what about next century? Truth is, you probably won't get to see it. None of us will.
OK, well, some of us might. Human lives are getting longer. There's that progress thing.
Life expectancy increases. But I'm not as confident I can predict what it will be like.
The picture painted by climate science isn't great.
But can you imagine what the world might be like in 2021?
Take a moment and just dream a little.
Just dream a little.
Have you imagined a perfect world?
Or can you foresee some issues you could act to prevent?
If the future is a destination, what are we going to do today that will have an impact in 2021?
What do we want to do to impact the future?
Can we work together to prevent the dark dystopia foretold by Orwell?
On Friday, Esther is speaking about RFC 1984 and why we should start worrying about encryption backdoors and mass data collection.
I very much hope she will have some action steps for all of us.
Or on the other hand, perhaps we could work together to build some perfect utopia or a meh-topia.
How do we avoid sleepwalking into a bland future of unfulfilled potential?
How can you make the future happen?
The trick, I think, is not to worry about the future at all, but act now to gather what we need when we get there.
Pack like for a hiking trip. Take everything you need with you.
But you will need to make some choices about the things you want to take, but don't necessarily want to carry every step of the way.
So what will we need on this journey to the future?
It's not just about technology. It's about people. It's about you and what you do.
It's also about social change. Change in thought. Change in mood. Change in attitude. And changes in ourselves.
What are we learning about ourselves when we make these kinds of changes?
Ursula Le Guin's beautiful phrase, it's good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
So if we look to 2121 as our destination and getting there is a journey, let's ask ourselves, what will we need?
I think this is a useful way to stop feeling powerless about what the future might bring, because you are powerful.
Together, we are incredibly powerful. But we need to understand what power is and how to use it.
So what do you want to do? What kind of world would you live in if you could change everything?
You can start making it now.
Another attendee at the 2121 Global Futures Forum 24 years ago, that's a long time ago, was my mother, Joan Benjamin.
She is a lifelong educator. Working together to tackle poverty in the 1970s, she and her colleague Connie Ben identified four key sources of power
to harness to affect change. They designed and ran a pilot program at the Brotherhood of St. Lawrence.
It was an evidence-based approach that rejected casework as the key methodology, because it tended to see people experiencing poverty as cases to be solved,
rather than people who simply lacked resources. They lacked more than resources. They lacked power over their own lives.
And looking through the lens of power itself proved to be the key.
So, four powers. One, power over resources. Food is a resource. Electricity is a resource. Your internet connection, thank you, Arnett, is a resource.
A safe, secure, stable roof over your head every night is a resource.
How much power do you have over your resources? How much power do the people around you have over the resources they have and the resources they need?
Is there a sense that resources are scarce? Should they be rationed or restricted? Are they a basic human resource?
What resources will we need to forge our future on this journey toward 2121?
Two, power over information. Now, in the past, when Joan and Connie were talking about this stuff, information was not as easy to come by as it is today.
Although, as we're seeing in this apocalyptic bushfire crisis, incorrect information can be just as powerful as the truth.
Eco-anxiety was on the shortlist for the Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year. The Oxford Dictionary chose climate emergency.
Today, we have info overwhelm, a veritable glut of data. We have more information than we can deal with, so we've started to ask machines to help us make sense of it.
We're still developing ways to manage information, to wield power over it.
How will we verify increasingly compelling deep fakes?
Number three, power over decision making. The power of decision making is how we're going to make 2121.
The power of decision making is how we're going to make 2121. Think about all the things in this world that were decided for you long before you were born.
Our system of law, even road rules, really simple things were decided long ago. We don't really discuss them anymore.
Occasionally, we tweak the edges of them, but lots of stuff gets decided all the time by someone else and has long lasting impact.
The decisions you make today will likely impact people your age living 100 years from now.
So let's not take our power over decision making for granted.
Later today, I'm not sure if it's today or later in the week, no, today. Josh Simmons is talking about open source citizenship.
Josh, is that today? Today, awesome. Which should provide some food for thought for the power dynamics of decision making in and about our own communities.
This community, the communities we intersect with.
Number four, speaking of intersection, power over relationships.
None of these powers is any more important than any other, but let's just say some are more equal than others.
Our communities, our voices, our feelings, the way we work together.
We're all so connected now, across the world. There's huge power in our relationships.
So how do we nurture them? How do we protect and respect different voices?
We need to have the space and the means of communicating each other and our institutions.
And we need ways of knowing we've been heard and understood.
How do we create a future where everybody feels empowered to speak and everybody can feel their viewpoint is valid,
but do so in a way that respects everyone else's agency, privacy and perspective?
I think I'm... So now let's take a look at those four powers in relation to each other.
The link between information and relationships is communication.
We need resources and decision making are linked by allocation and distribution.
And we need information to help us find and use resources and make decisions.
Our relationships with others also help determine how we share and allocate resources.
The four powers are connected and interdependent.
So just as the future isn't evenly distributed, the same is true for power.
So where do we begin? 21-21 is a long way off and we need to get started.
What's something small you can do today, tomorrow, this week, this year?
What change can you make?
I'm going to try and improve herd immunity to mass surveillance by cleaning up my act with data.
And tomorrow I'm going to try and get to Opal's session to learn about collecting information with care.
What step will you take?
Do you know of good resources on how we can all improve our herd immunity to mass surveillance?
Please share them and if you're willing to share, please add them to this etherpad that I've set up.
It's very slow to load, so take a deep breath, be in the moment, let it load.
Or feel free to tweet or talk about it on IRC or in the hallway track here this week or even blog about it later.
If you know waves, if you're good at this stuff, please share it, please make it accessible, please make it open and help other people do it too.
People like me who just go, eh, it's too hard. I should know better. I do know better.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. So what are you going to do?
What step can you take to help more evenly distribute now? Sorry, distribute power now?
What step will you take to help more evenly distribute power now and more evenly distribute the future in 2121?
Take a moment to think about it and I'll have a sip of water.
So imagine if the future was like using software and you found a bug, right?
Could you replicate the bug? Could you submit a bug report? Could you fix the bug?
How might we all take more responsibility and accountability for what we're making possible?
And how could we take one single step to make that happen?
One of the organisations I've been involved with is Open Australia. Who's heard of Open Australia?
Few of you? Most not, I think. So Open Australia runs a bunch of websites that help us watch the government.
The first one they created was putting Hansard online in a machine readable format.
Rather than in PDFs. Another one they've got is called Right to Know.
And it's a really easy way to submit a Freedom of Information request to a government agency.
Now I know some of you have used it. Hands up, few of you. Thank you.
It's a really easy way to submit Freedom of Information requests.
It can get a bit interesting and complicated, but it's a good way to start.
This helps us move from being watched to being the watchers.
It helps us take responsibility for what becomes possible.
Theoretical biologist Stuart Kaufman coined this phrase, the adjacent possible.
It's all the possible combinations of factors that could call something into being, that could summon some new future.
Everything is in place, it makes something new possible. We don't necessarily know what that is.
He used it to describe the primordial soup of life.
That sequence of things and stuff that was in place that meant that the future was in place.
That sequence of things and stuff that was in place that meant that this chemical interaction happened that ignited life on Earth.
He called it the adjacent possible.
The idea was popularised by Stephen Johnson in his book Where Good Ideas Come From.
He used the idea of the adjacent possible to look at the history of innovation.
He suggested that this kind of theory of the solitary inventor is an utter fallacy.
He says it actually all comes from groupthink.
As he puts it, chance favours the connected mind.
At LCA, this conference is very much a place to connect with other minds.
So what's coming next?
It's hard to know until it happens, but we can work together to foster more positive kinds of observation
and work together to achieve fairer distribution of power and guard against the worst excesses of oppressive surveillance.
Finally, I'd like to talk about one more old idea, just one more thing.
And that's appreciative inquiry. Hands up if you've heard of appreciative inquiry.
Maybe three or four? Really? Cool. Well, I'm glad I'm introducing this idea to you then.
If you're not familiar with it, please, please do go and check out the world of appreciative inquiry.
We tend to be problem solvers, right? So we look for problems to solve.
This means we focus much of our time and energy on problems, and that magnifies their importance.
Appreciative inquiry says let's work to discover the best of what is happening.
Look at what is working and do more of that. The next step is to dream.
Imagine what could be possible. Then go ahead and design a future state that is compelling and desirable.
We design a desirable future together, and then we figure out how to deploy or deliver or implement that future we've designed.
By focusing our time and attention and energy on what's good, on what we want, perhaps we'll spend less despair, spend less energy on things that can't be fixed.
Let's look at what we can do, what we could do. Let's plan to do it together.
The Dalai Lama Centre for Peace and Education in Vancouver is using appreciative inquiry to facilitate compassionate communities.
I'd like to think we too, here at Linux ConfEU, are a compassionate community. I think we are.
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
So, who is watching? We are. All of us. But we are not voyeurs, we are not spies, we are not secret agents.
We are change agents, and we can change the world. Some say we already have. And why are we watching?
To learn how best to leave this place just a little better than we found it. Thank you.