We are privileged to be involved in building the future in such a tangible and concrete way. Developing the super software that will enable and manage the services offered through the backbone of tomorrow, designing and constructing the future internet is undoubtedly The Big Thing.
Big matters are never easy to accomplish, important advancements come never without a price. We face and witness the jungle of challenges on various levels and of various kinds every day by reading, following, trying to understand and manage the super-multi-faceted topic we are dealing with. Even if we had technically designed the network with the means and knowledge available today without legacies and ROIs in mind; even if we had single legislation, one set of institutional guidelines to cope with; even if the users were all bona fide obedient rule-followers and happily using the platform as it is designed and offered; even if we controlled the economical trends and business prospects, understood and could satisfy the sometimes contradicting needs of industry and public sector, we still wouldn’t have any trivial task in our hands.
Today is an interesting day for the old-fashioned, free, open and public internet – content-wise. On January 18, 2012 many sites around the web — from small personal blogs to internet institutions like Mozilla, Wikipedia, reddit, and I Can Has Cheezburger? – will be going dark in protest and to drive their visitors to sites like americancensorship.org to take action and help fight the passage of Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The internet neutrality vs. its fairness and safety for the contributors and users of all kind is a typical tricky issue we are trying to manage. Human solidarity takes care of the weaker ones – in the cyber world as well – but the solidarity needs to be sincere and not to serve for other agendas or forget its other rationale and aspects – free and open worldwide media.
Big boots come with big responsibility. It is rewarding to be building the future, solving the topical challenges, the expectations are exciting – yet: to be met. Human kind has achieved and solved amazing puzzles, once set it’s mind and full effort in it. It has also stumbled in enormous embarrassments of equally amazing scale in its vanity and blinded rivalry. Usually committed co-operation and conscious collaboration help avoiding most pitfalls. Our highest ambition could be how well we play together – program-wise – > internationally. Let’s see how far and constructively we fly with that guideline!
- Susanna Avéssta, CONCORD
