The Faculty of Applied Sciences at SFU warmly welcomed Cory Doctorow to deliver our Leonardo Lecture for 2007 (entitled “The Totalitarian Urge: total information awareness and the cosmic billiards”).
It was a packed event, and a great speech (the same one he’s been delivering elsewhere of late). Ivaniv at Blogaholics has posted audio from the event.
Some of we grad students got a chance to chat with Cory earlier in the day. The man’s an encyclopedia, able to switch from discussing the feudal commons to discussing authoring collectives to marketing to activism in rapid succession. Although there was insufficient time to thoroughly articulate my critique of the application of open knowledge paradigms to artistic spheres (I will be continuing the dialogue over email, Cory), it was a great opportunity to converse in person with someone who’s been so entrenched in free culture activism as him. Kudos to Barry Shell, Richard Smith, and Brian Lewis (and whoever else I’ve maybe missed) for bringing this event here.
More photos from the day are on my Flickr page.