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A friend of mine with the trade group ITFlorida, Ken Zeszutko, emailed me about a speech recently by Jimmy Wales, the co-inventor of the Wikipedia Web site.
At Wikipedia, people write, update and edit their own encyclopedia-like entries on everything from biographies to history to scientific definitions and theories.
Wales’ hugely popular site is based in St. Petersburg, Fla., but announced last month that it is moving to San Francisco, closer to the nation’s high-tech epicenter.
Two weeks ago, he told ITFlorida members that Florida was too heavily weighted to a business culture rather than a geek culture. He compared technologists to artists rather than businesspeople.
It’s a good comparison, I think, at least from the standpoint of innovation. The best computer geeks think out of the box like a Picasso might.
It’s a dilemma. How do you create a geek culture in the land of sugar cane and cruise ships? Zeszutko said the ITFlorida folks were thinking of holding an unconference-like conference of programmers, a get-together where the agenda is spontaneously created. Loosely formed conferences like that are often held by hackers. There was one over the summer in Las Vegas.
John Sawyer and Jordan Wiens, two University of Florida software engineers, won the annual hacker’s competition at DefCon in the Nevada desert.
Each year, the conference brings together button-downed corporate engineers with purple-haired Goths of the hacking underworld to compare notes on Internet security.
Is that enough to build a geek culture around? No, but it’s a start.
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By login01
November 17, 2007 1:59 PM | Link to this
I left Florida for the same reason just 1 year ago, after 24 years. Creativity and thinking out of the box is not a strength to get and maintain a job in Florida. And unlike John and Jordan, we can’t all work at a college.