Presentation: "IT as a people's movement - people's movements and IT"

Track: IT in the World / Time: Wednesday 15:35 - 16:35 / Location: Room 202/203

Scandinavian countries have a long-standing tradition of non-profit organisations acting as a glue in society and as a training ground for democratic values. One may speculate if this has laid a foundation for the popularity of Open Source in this part of the world.

In Sweden, the National Sports Federation has a 108-year history, and 22,000 member clubs, including one-third of the population, where each member club must be based on a democratic charter. As the son of an Olympic Athletics coach, I grew up in sports; as we see these clubs playing a diminishing role in our lives, we can also observe a loss of democratic schooling in young people.

In this talk, I will compare the dynamics of Open Source Software with the Swedish Sports Movement. I will describe some of our early attempts at pairing the two together in a happy marriage. We were perhaps ahead of our time, but the idea remains as attractive and urgent as ever.

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Ulf Wiger, CTO of Erlang Training and Consulting

Ulf Wiger

Biography: Ulf Wiger

Ulf Wiger became one of the first commercial users of Erlang (certainly the first in North America) when he bought a license in 1993. At the time, he was busy designing disaster response systems in Alaska. In 1996, he joined Ericsson and became Chief Designer of the AXD 301 development. At nearly 2 million lines of Erlang code, AXD 301 is the most complex system ever built in Erlang, and probably the most complex commercial system built in any functional language.In recent years, Ulf has been involved in several products based on the AXD 301 architecture, and has been an active member of the Open Source Erlang community. In February 2009, Ulf began his new job as CTO of Erlang Training and Consulting.