Back in the hippy times there was this thing called Woodstock, you might have heard of it. Hoardes of like minded people gathered to celebrate music, freedome and all that other cool hippy stuff. I wish I was alive, it was probably a blast.
Today there are a number of issues for geeks like us. We’ve got copyrights and patents on one side, the patriot act on the other and open source under our feet. That’s not even all of it, there is still spectrum policy and censorship to name two more.
I think it would be really cool if we had a Geekstock. The logistics of having such an event aren’t easy. But if somehow we could manage to make it happen, it would rock the house. Think of all the free publicity created by thousands of geeks collecting in the same location. We could get the message out on all of the geek issues of today. Look at it from another angle. Think about what we could get done their. Geeks bearing Gentoo or Debian flags would flock together and they could team up to fix bugs in their software. Developers and users could communicate at a thousand times the speed of a newsgroup or mailing list. It would be a long uninterrupted time where all the geeks could hack away without worry about anything else.
The greatest thing about a Geekstock is that once you get forces in motion the inertia is unstoppable. Everyone will show up, and everything that needs to happen will happen naturally. If someone sets it up properly the geeks will come. And after they come they will setup a huge wireless network to blanket the entire place. And by nature, like-minded geeks will come together and start doing their thing without being prompted to. It will be a beautiful thing.
The problem is of course, how to make it happen. A huge internet advertising campaign on every geek site? Promises to appear from prominent geeks like Linux & Co.? What will it take to make something like this happen? I think there is nothing more I would like to see in my lifetime than for this to be real. Anybody with me on this one?
