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Flash Slideshow: Mass High Tech All-Stars Thought Leadership Roundtable
The ideas were flowing faster than the coffee, soda and bottled water at the second Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council Unconference, held today at Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Burlington campus.
Following up on its first unconference in October, this year’s overall subject was “The future of software and the Internet.” As an unconference, the event started with no real structured agenda, and after the process was explained to the crowd, any of the various attendees who wanted to run a session were invited to come up to the front of the main hall, grab a sheet of paper and write down a topic on which they wanted to lead a discussion.
Just as in the first unconference, the 220-person space was straining to hold all the attendees, and the opening session was standing-room-only with the crowd spilling out of all doors into the hallway.
Among the topics in the breakout sessions were the helpful (“What kind of capital do you need?” led by Simeon Simoenov of FastIgnite Inc.), the playful (a look at Google Inc.’s Wave and Microsoft Corp.’s new Project Natal run by Dan Bricklin) and the radical.
A sparse crowd gathered to listen to radical ideas about telecom and the Federal Communications Commission from Bob Frankston, a storied veteran of the technology scene who co-developed VisiCalc with Bricklin. Frankston contended that the FCC is a structurally corrupt dinosaur that exists simply to keep the also structurally corrupt and outdated telecom companies in business. According to Frankston, everyone should have essentially unlimited and universal access and, he said, the efforts to expand broadband is simply a smoke-screen to keep people complacent.
“You don’t eliminate slavery by making a bigger chain,” Frankston said.
Other sessions were run by well-known names such as Andy Updegrove, a partner at Boston law firm Gesmer Updegrove LLP, and Steve Vinter, Cambridge office site director for Google, who ran a session titled “Crowd-solving: Collaborating in 2015.”
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