This is a talk I gave on April 23rd at the WWW 2009 Conference in Madrid, Spain. I talked about innovation in the wild, that I have tended to look for and follow enthusiasts involved in technology. Enthusiasm is a quality I seem to recognize in others, perhaps because I see it in myself and in O'Reilly (both the company and Tim.)

1. INNOVATION IN
THE WILD, WILD WEB

2. Who Are
These
Innovators
in the Wild?
GEEKS, ENTHUSIASTS, AMATEURS, PIONEERS,
SCOUTS, SAVANTS, SEERS, PROPHETS,
FORECASTERS, HOBBIESTS, EXPLORERS,
SCAVENGERS, COLLECTORS, MAKERS, EVEN
ARTISTS.

3. A WILD-EYED ENTHUSIAST
TIM BERNERS-LEE

5. User Manuals

6. “Users of products and services
are increasingly able to innovate
for themselves.”
“Users do not have to develop
everything they need on their
own: they can benefit from
innovations developed and
freely shared by others.”
“Users benefit directly from their
innovations.”

7. Things Change By
The Way They Are
Used

8. Things Change By
The Way They Are
Used

9. Systems and
devices should
be designed so
that users can
change them.

10. Tools for
Users

12. When the Multics system is shutdown, this group
of researchers at BellLabs, against management’s
wishes, begin writing their own operating system
for their own use. The work began after they’d
written the game “Space Travel.”

13. SHARING TOOLS,
SHARING WORK
“What we wanted to preserve was not just a
good environment in which to do programming,
but a system around which a fellowship could
form. We knew from experience that the essence
of communal computing, as supplied by remote-
access, time-shared machines, is not just to type
programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch,
but to encourage close communication”
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html

14. HYPERCARD

15. Pei Wei

21. OPEN INNOVATION

22. LARRY WALL
FATHER OF PERL, ENTHUSIAST

23. PERL CONFERENCE 1997
Andrew Schulman gave a talk “The Web as an API”
Every UPS package has its own homepage on the
Web.
He talked about “how complex URLs can be used
to cause programs to run on another machine and
produce large ranges of data.”
“Distributed Computation in the Guise of
Hypertext!”
http://www.sonic.net/~undoc/perl/talk/webapi1.html

24. OPEN SOURCE
Tim O’Reilly organized a summit
around Open Source in April,
1998, bringing together leaders of
many open source projects.
The infrastructure of the Internet
was built on open source and
continues to be developed as
open source software.

25. WEB AS AN OS PLATFORM
The Web as an Open Source Platform
Blogs, Flickr, and RSS
Small teams were creating cool applications

26. WEB 2.0
A new generation of applications built on the Web
A new group of enthusiasts

27. EVAN WILLIAMS

28. TWITTER
Twitter is an open API
A Messaging platform for all kinds of devices

29. THE WEB MEETS THE WORLD
OF THINGS

30. HACKS
Hacks are clever solutions
to interesting problems.

31. The First Hacker
Peter Samson of MIT and
the Tech Model Railroad
Club in 1960’s
“[He] had grown up with a
specific relationship to the world,
wherein things had meaning only
if you found out how they
worked. And how would you go
about that if not by getting your
hands on them?”
from Steven Levy’s Hackers

32. The Hacker Ethic
HACKERS SHOULD BE
JUDGED BY THEIR
HACKING, NOT BOGUS
CRITERIA SUCH AS
DEGREES, AGE, RACE, OR
POSITION.
from Steven Levy’s Hackers

33. “I just loved going
down to the Homebrew
Computer Club,
showing off my ideas
and designing neat
Steve Wozniak
computers. I was
willing to do that for
free for the rest of my
life.”

35. “I’m not exactly sure
why so many people
are here. A lot of
them are just curious
about what’s going
on.”

36. A DIY
Tradition

37. MAKE IS
WHERE
HACKING
MEETS
TINKERING.

38. Makers are wild-eyed
enthusiasts.

39. Send a Camcorder Up in
a Model Rocket

40. ARDUINO
OPEN SOURCE
HARDWARE PLATFORM

42. Phil Torrone, Enthusiast

44. Look for the
Wild-Eyed
Enthusiasts
Dale Dougherty
dale@oreilly.com