The Empowerment

This OLPC video really speaks to the heart of the potential of young people the world over waiting to be given the chance to be all they can be. We should work towards making child-friendly content and experiences for OLPC and other small child laptop users.

I attended OpenSocial's first birthday at MySpace Soma HQ which was filled with MySpace and Google people and many other OpenSocial companies. I ended up meeting lots of very interested folks working on open social applications.

It turned out to be a good night for meeting developers. From the very first moment I got into elevator I met Ben from London. It wasn't long after that before a fellow approached me asking, "Are you the man to speak to about a socially progressive project?" Larry turned out to be a brilliant programmer looking for his next challenge and we discussed the Empowerment project. I also saw Jeremy who had volunteered to help the night before at Mozilla Labs and Justin from SocialHelix who I had met at Barcamp LA.

In the funding department, I met a MySpace fellow named Paul who has already begun showing Empowerment to some potential investors. I have more work to do in the days ahead to get Empowerment's legal framework established and to clarify our investment story.

All in all, not bad for our first week in San Francisco.

I presented Empowerment at the Mozilla Labs Meetup last night in Mountain View. It went great and I condensed my 45 minute Barcamp talk into 5 minutes of Micromachines Micromachines Micromachines! without losing anything significant which makes me think I should do more of this condensed talk format to get the whole thing down and make a video of it.

Jono and Jeremy volunteered to help out with the project and I learned more from Mozilla staffers about how to structure a non-profit/for-profit hybrid like Mozilla does. I still have a followup quest though to meet Wise Chris Beard Man, head of MozLabs. I can't get funded till I figure out the legal structure of the organization, so this is mission critical.

I realized two things as I considered our potential as humans.

1. Silly Hats are a must for presentations.

2. The world is a campus and all of us are a dorm away from enrolling in it.

Today William Gibson met his thought child for the first time. Bill signed the EmpowerThyself "new glory" banner that has been Iwo Jimad at every Barcamp and Empowerment office from LA to SF to DC. It only took me six years to figure out what to say to him.

When I first met Bill I was reading his books and beginning to write and develop the ideas that became Empowerment. I used to see him at the Vancouver Bread Garden on 16th and Granville where I lived. I was in awe of the man. I introduced myself once but at the time I didn't know where to begin to explain the ideas growing into Empowerment from the seeds he had planted in my mind.

The Empowerment is directly inpsired by Neuromancer and the whole cyberpunk movement. 'Cybernetic' means steering yourself and 'punk' means steering against the flow so to me cyberpunk is about shaping yourself and shaping the future.

That is what Gibson inspired us all to do, and that is what we are now doing. Cyberpunk science fiction has become cyberpunk non-fiction.

By the next time I see him (hopefully at Rant's 10th Anniversary in Vancouver if he has time to accept my invitation) I will have a more concrete finished system to show him and the Wog cyberpunk community as a whole.

If Empowerment is Bill's memetic baby, this was more of a sonogram than a meeting, and it is time for the team to give birth. Remember:

"Great artists ship!"

We've just moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and we're hunting for a new headquarters. If you know of suitable spaces from rooms to warehouses in San Francisco or Oakland, let us know.

We're currently beginning operations at the Noisebridge hacker space, which looks an awful lot like our old office: steel shelving, rolly chairs and hackers.

UPDATE: Since taking this picture a few days ago, Arram from Justin.tv on the right volunteered to help with writing and usability and J from Wikia has volunteered to help code! Noisebridge is hacker paradise and the support is really encouraging!