Friday, 9:00 AM in Rangos II.
As we leave the post-industrial era and enter the information age, programming will increasingly be deemed an essential skill. Similar to the efficiency and enabling benefits achieved by wordprocessing replacing dictaphones; so too will creating software to build one's own business solutions result in giving people the power to control their computers and produce results through a cost effective and easy to implement means.
The question is, how does Open Source Software help bridge this digital
divide of OSS by and for early adopters to include the late adopters and
even luddites? To some extent we are already part way there.
The bar has been lowered with respect to cost, freeware is after all free,
thus expense is not a barrier. Similarly, many in the community are
working at making applications both powerful and easy to use. For
example, Zope allows even non-programmers to manage simple websites with
little training. The Community needs to continue in this vein of
empowerment, of encouraging a much larger audience of people to participate
in infrastructure software development, in effect computer programming
for everyone.
Next | Previous | Author list | Schedule | YAPC 19100