Last night Sara Kaan and I were invited to present on a small panel about Open Source and the concept of a commons to a largely Greens audience. It was a great event, even after being advertised as fairly extreme (which it wasn’t) :). I put forward some views that Open Source can solve real social and economic issues for our country, which went down well, and then that working cooperatively with the Government is useful, the Australian Government is actually starting to understand and where useful embrace Open Source, and that patents as a concept isn’t completely evil in that granting a temporary short term monopoly to an inventor can be incentive to create, however the evil is in the implementation and broadening of what can be patented and that large companies run the show now, not the inventors by any stretch of the imagination. Anyway, these last points were obviously quite controvertial to some of this crowd, but it did get people thinking. There was much debate and it was a really fun night. It’d be great if there were more open forums right across the board and I’m certainly happy to help out with any that come up. I’ve got two NGO/Co-op functions coming up, a few industry functions, and a bunch of Open Source events. I’m certainly keeping myself busy 🙂