Tag Archives: Tim Berners Lee

Articles of Interest

Google’s Global Impact Challenge Will Award $3M To Four UK Social Entrepreneurs

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By The Huffington Post News Editors

Google, the world’s largest search engine and one of the most powerful tech companies around, is now using its muscle to search for something new: social entrepreneurs. Today, the company is announcing the Global Impact Challenge, a new prize that will award £2 million ($3 million) between four non-profit startups based in the UK that are using technology for social good in areas like education, economic development, health, environment and community service. Judges for the award include Tim Berners-Lee, Richard Branson, and we the people via a public vote. If successful, the prize could serve as a template for future social enterprise competitions in other countries.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Huffington Post

Linux

ownCloud 5 released: a vision realized, a vision expanded

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Today we released ownCloud 5, a very important milestone for the ownCloud community and perhaps the most important release so far. But before going into the details I want to take a step back and look at what the original idea of ownCloud was at the beginning.
The idea of ownCloud was and is to enable everybody to host, control and sync and share their personal data without giving control away to the big data silos like Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive and iCloud. I think today we have all the features in place to say that we reached this goal. Everybody from a home user to a big enterprise can host their own personal cloud installation. I’m also super happy about the integration into KDE and GNOME because this is important to provide a really seamless experience for users.
It’s a coincidence that CERN invited me to give a talk about ownCloud and data silos that I will give here in a few hours at the exact same day ownCloud 5 is released. CERN is also the place where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web 22 years ago. It’s interesting that the Web was built as a completely decentralized system where no distinction between someone who is publishing data and someone who is consuming data exists. There is no concept of a centralized entity that everybody connects to. Everybody can be sender and receiver at the same time. Just as Berthold Brecht proposed in 1932.
Interestingly, the web looks a bit different today where a huge amount of the traffic goes through websites like Facebook, Google, Dropbox and Amazon. Where is the idea of a decentralized and federated web?
Today we are deciding how the world will look like in the future. We, the IT community, set the course of the train that is called “open society” now and we can decide into which station the train will roll into in 5-10 years. Is it the one where all the people still control their own data and information and can decide who has access to the personal files, photos, contacts, location data, chat messages and other personal information or will we live in a future where all the personal data of all the people in the world are stored on the servers of just a few big organizations and commercial interests, terms of services and secret services decide who has access to the digital life of everybody?
If you care about these questions then join the ownCloud community or other free software projects and work on decentralized and federated alternatives.
ownCloud 5 is the result of the work of our awesome developer community. More and more people join and are getting more involved. To me this is a sign that we are doing something right and that ownCloud is not just a crazy idea that no one needs but something that is very important to …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE