O'Reilly ETech Conference

I just applied to give a talk at O'Reilly's ETech (Emerging Technology) Conference. Won't know until October; the conference itself is next March. Here's what I proposed:

Realities such as climate disruption and the current extinction crisis suggest that humans are having a wee bit of trouble grokking the tragedy of the commons (TOC). A big part of every TOC, though, is an information problem: TOCs arise when we don't know (or can easily ignore) the consequences of our actions, when there's no collective oversight of the commons, when we're unaware of better alternatives to existing behaviors, and when we have the illusion that our actions don't matter -- because we can't see our aggregate impact.

Framed this way, it's not hard to believe that software -- especially social software -- could be a key in helping us make the societal transition to sustainability. This talk will give an overview of new efforts in this area, ranging from data infrastructure (eg., NICK) to future simulation (MetroQuest), and focusing on Reef: community software that provides a citizen's dashboard for the 21st century.

Reef takes the three great ideas of social software -- wiki, social networks, and syndication -- and integrates them into a framework to support ecological footprint reduction. It is a GIS-based, action-centered ecosystem for content.