I was never consistent with programming until I adopted Simon Willison’s workflow. Have I produced anything substantial yet? Not really. But I want to participate in the tech blogger scene. Writers like Bruce Schneier, Simon Willison, and George Hotz are the ones I’m following most closely.

The next step is showing others how to follow along, which reminds me of Terence Tao’s crowdsourcing project. My prediction: as government funding for universities continues to shrink, more academic work will migrate online, leveraging what Yochai Benkler calls “The Wealth of Networks”. Top researchers like Tao increasingly need contributions from amateur researchers doing independent work in their free time. Political uncertainty is essentially forcing this shift.

How do we create a context where more is being added to the commons? How do we convert rival to non-rival goods?

If we want abundance, we need to expand the commons, especially at the frontiers of human knowledge. All of my work in tech has been because I read Benkler, and one way or another its been political. It’s just a different kind of political. ~ Conor White-Sullivan