PDF 2016 - How we lost the open web

I spent the last couple of days attending Personal Democracy Forum 2016, described on their landing site as:

The world’s leading conference exploring and analyzing technology's impact on politics, government, and society.

That's the reason why I haven't posted my latest Emacs video.

PDF is a great conference and raised a huge number of important issues. I'll probably blog about a few over the next few weeks.

One topic that I've already lamented about has been the way we as a society are allowing so much information to be silo-ed in platforms like Facebook.

I use Facebook as much as the next guy but it always irks me when I see a CS Education post followed by rich discussion hidden within Facebook's walls and not available for discovery to the outside world and the future.

I generally don't get a lot of comments on my posts, but when I do, more appear in the Facebook link to my post rather than publicly on the post itself.

At the conference, we watched a video by Hossein Derakhshan which talked about the direction the web is moving in and the red flags it should raise with all of us. He echoed my concerns and beyond but in a much more eloquent way.

I'm urging you to take the less than ten minutes to watch this video. I know school's winding down for all of us but for those of you who are teachers out there - share this with your students. I'm sure a rich discussion will follow.