Here are the PDF slides from the talk I gave on Saturday, August 2 at the amazing and wonderful FOSSY Conference in Portland, Oregon.
Decentralized Project Management
It was definitely worth it for me to drive two hours and stay at a hotel, just to be there! Will update this post when streaming video is available.
Let’s face it.
The American people have lost faith in the electoral process. Whether you’re on the right wing and a die-hard Trumper who truly believed that evil liberals conspired to steal the 2020 presidential election, or whether you’re a mainstream progressive and concerned about the fact that in the United States, candidates who win a majority of votes (like Hillary Clinton in 2016) actually cannot become President due to the weirdness of the Electoral College, you know that something is wrong in this country. There is also the huge problem that ballots can get lost in the mail, and that not everybody has time to get to the voting booths or wants to come out and vote in the age of COVID.
What if we just had an app, or a website, for voting? Wouldn’t that make things easier?
It absolutely would. Turnout would go through the roof. Open source election technology is already mainstream, as this PDF from the respected Open Invention Network (OIN) clearly shows. Existing voting machine technologies could certainly be adapted for remote use.
But then the risk of fraud becomes higher.
How could we keep our elections secure, yet enable everyone with a cell phone or a computer to participate?
The answer is another open source technology: blockchain.
The basic premise resides in the reason why blockchain (the technology behind Bitcoin) works: it is analogous to BCC. You encrypt or do not store the identity of a person making transactions on a blockchain network, but you make many copies of the record of this transaction, so that it can be verified by independent third parties (and 4th parties, 5th parties, etc.)
My proposal is that we use the same blockchain technology to prevent fraud in US elections, and of course also elections anywhere else in the world.
#opensource could lead the way.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
These can be benign, like re-creating a classic Star Trek episode.
They can also be used to assassinate someone’s character and reputation. They make it incredibly simple to create pornographic images and video about someone, based only on photos of their face.
Here is a story about to how to detect them in real life:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/13/what-are-deepfakes-and-how-can-you-spot-them
Full article at https://www.pdxlocal.net/bluetooth-vulnerability/
“…my cell phone locked up on me. Nobody ever touched it — I hadn’t installed any new apps. It just went dark, with a tiny bit of purple visible. Occasionally it would come back to life, but not reliably.”
Full disclosure — I have a lot of blogs. Medium, Substack, WordPress.com… this site, my startup site. That’s probably not the complete list but it’s what I can think of offhand. These sites are separate for a number of different reasons, the two most important being:
(1) Branding/messaging
(2) Privacy
Why do I lump brand and message together? Because once you have established a brand (be it “the brand of you” or be it a new venture you hope to sell for somewhere at the fashionable end of the neighborhood of seven figures) you have to stay on-message.
For instance, I recently took down one of my earliest posts on lotusrose.substack.com. The reason was that it was an opinion piece masquerading as fact. It made a very broad (and in my view, plausible) assertion but provided no hard evidence to back it up. This doesn’t measure up to my own standards for objective, fact-based journalism.
Lotus Rose is a journalism site, focused on sustainable and socially responsible investing strategies for retail and day traders. The articles are based on my own experience and online research. I provide citations and believe that the work stands on its own merits. While future predictions (such as the value of the Dow at the end of 2023) cannot be evaluated as true or false, any other information cited should have a source, whether or not it is made public. My memory is crap so I make a lot of notes and copy-and-paste a lot of links. This served me well as a journalist for American City Business Journals in the early 2000s, when I published several hundred print and online articles for ACBJ and other publications (including numerous features and covers). I have clips on everything from banking to restaurant reviews. I don’t recall ever receiving a single complaint about the facts, much less any situation that required a retraction.
Writing will always be my first love. (Sorry BWT, you came along 13 years too late.) Too bad the work didn’t pay a little better, or that is what I would still be doing.
Objectivity may be hard to come by — a mythical island of truth, an invisible city shimmering on the horizon of an ocean of uninformed groupthink — but facts are as real as any other construct we can assemble from the abstract building blocks of language.
What is my definition of a fact? Something you can evaluate as a Boolean statement.
Anyway, it’s possible I will re-post that earlier article on this, or another, site. I haven’t really decided yet. I have this week off from my day job, because I am recovering from surgery. It went well.
I will be posting more about the outcome, but I want to wait until everything has healed and I am completely out of the woods. I do claim to be superstitious (and that is a fact). Looking back on the previous two decades, tempting fate seems to be something I excel at. In the meantime, I will be reposting a few other older blog posts that seem to fit better here than anywhere else.
Trigger Warning: One or two of these may address the topic of religion…