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[Thomas Gramstad <thomas AT ifi.uio.no>]

Hi,

I have an idea for a one-day track at this year's FSCONS. The 
idea grows out of a couple of talks at this year's Open Source 
Developers' Conference in Oslo, which took place this week-end: 
www.osdc.no . (FSCONS is credited as a helper organization for 
OSDC.no, because of my and Stian's efforts.)

So for me two of the most interesting talks at OSDC.no were these 
two:

"Bitshares & Bitcoin 2.0: The blockchain as platform and 
Ecosystem: Bitshares as an example of "Bitcoin 2.0", and how 
blockchain technology can be used as a new platform for a lot of 
other services than just money/currency. The development and 
emergence of an entire ecosystem based on blockchain 
technologies."

and

"The Open Food Network: How open source can change the way we buy 
food. Food distribution systems are not transparent: Where does 
the food you buy in the supermarket come from? How many 
intermediates have taken their margin on it? How much goes into 
the farmers pocket? How have the products been grown? More and 
more alternatives are offering alternative distribution systems 
to both conscious consumers and committed farmers: CSA buying 
clubs, food cooperatives, consumers and producers start to 
organize themselves to invent a new - and sense-making - 
distribution system. But it's hard to build and organize a 
community, and you need tools to be able to buy as a group. The 
idea of the Open Food Network project is: what if instead of each 
community having to find, pay for, customize, a licensed 
solution, we could all mutualize our energies and money to build 
a platform that will answer the needs of all our communities, and 
make it easier for the next communities to start in order to 
scale up the emergence of this new distribution system?"

These two talks may seem very different, but they share something 
fundamental in common: They are about something very basic 
("money" and "food" respectively), and about how new enabler 
technologies change those basic things, by creating and 
establishing a new platform of services, information flows, 
organizations and production processes. They are new ecosystems 
rather than new single technologies. And that's what I'd like to 
have a track about. Hence "New Ecosystems".

I volunteer for track manager of such a track.

Thomas