Design and the Blockchain

What is the blockchain and how might it be relevant to emerging business models? How does the blockchain case reveal the principles and practices around values such as decentralization, transparency and security that have been integral to the development of the Internet itself? We’ll hear from an anthropologist and a computer scientist about the significance of recent blockchain events as well as the mythologies that currently surround this emerging technology. 

Speakers

Smiljana Antonijević, author of Amongst Digital Humanists

Smiljana Antonijevic (PhD) explores the intersection of communication, culture, and technology through research and teaching in the U.S. and Europe. She is currently appointed as a Research Fellow at the Integrative Research Center of the Field Museum, and as a senior user-research consultant for the Newberry Library and the PCH Research Institute. Her research and publications address a range of topics, such as qualitative digital data (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); ethnography of coding (OpenBook Publishers, 2017); user-centred design of research tools (ACRL, 2016; Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); data curation (Johns Hopkins University Press Award for Best Article of 2014); digital scholarly collaboration (MIT Press, 2013); interaction design in 3D virtual environments (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 

Karl Fogel, partner at Open Tech Strategies, LLC

Karl Fogel is an open source software developer, author, and consultant. He has been active in free and open source software since 1992. In 2005 he wrote Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project (O'Reilly Media), based partly on his experiences in the Subversion project.

He is a founding partner at Open Tech Strategies, LLC, where he helps organizations launch and engage with open source projects. He has worked at CollabNet, Google, Canonical, O'Reilly Media, and Code for America / Civic Commons, all as an open source specialist. He has also been an Open Internet Tools Project Fellow at the New America Foundation and a member of the board of directors of the Open Source Initative. He is currently a member of the Apache Software Foundation and President of QuestionCopyright.org.

He can be found at @kfogel on Identi.ca and Twitter, and his home page is red-bean.com/kfogel.