Jean-Brunel Webb-Benjamin

Image: 
Description of the candidate: 

Inventor of the world's first post-quantum encrypted messenger, he is always working towards the edge of innovation. With active partnerships with OpenCV and Luxonis he is committed to furthering democratisation and wide-spread adoption of volumetric technologies. His company, Kryotech Ltd, was last year listed as one of the top ten cyber security startups of 2021. Additionally, he is a semi-finalist in the XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling Challenge, where he led development of an educational solution that provided novel training via ar/vr and neuroadaptively altering educational content.

How will you contribute to the board

I will contribute to the board by actively pushing for wide-spread adopt of open-source development methodologies, not only in the Web 2.0 space, but especially in the rising Web 3.0 space. A space where it is even more paramount that we do not make the same mistakes of the past with. We will be striving for open-source, decentralisation and personal data sovereignty.

I should be elected because I do not just speak about ethical business practices and cryptography, I live it every day. I actively engage widespread and am able to build amazing relationships with corporate, enterprise and academic alike, which will prove useful in gaining more partnerships across different groups of peoples and cultures.

Type of seat: 
Individual

Comments

Hello, I have a small set of questions ....

(1) In you contributions section, what you are expressing seems (and feel free to say if this is a misreading) to describe advocating for the merits of open-source principles to the web-3.0 community — rather than, for example, advocating for web-3.0 issues to OSI. How would being an OSI board member change your advocacy? Isn't advocating for open source something anyone can do?

(2) Following on from the above, what is unique about the web-3.0 development community that requires a different or concerted effort to promote open-source principles?

(3) What are the "mistakes of the past" you mention that pose a danger to the web-3.0 community?

Thank you for your questions N Willis. Super appreciated and I'm happy to get to answering them. 1) At the moment a lot of the Web 3.0 world appears to be focused on a rapid race to the discover or develop new technologies without a lot of consideration of the ramifications of that technology on the general public or even society. I'm more referring to the Corporate and Enterprise members of the community when I say this. A lot of work is being done that is ostensibly sold as 'open-source' which very rapidly becomes closed-source when it serves the creators requirements, normally involving funding or profit. For example the work of OpenAI which has generated some amazing technologies, including GPT-3 which was released with a known and reported racial bias. The release without a fix was irresponsible in my opinion. Certain technologies like facial recognition, artificial intelligence, volumetrics, lidar, and various IoT sensors, should be all open-source frameworked to ensure that our future digital cities and other new realities are not tied up in proprietary software leading to vendor lock and, ultimately centralisation and control. Unfortunately a lot of organisations won't listen to someone they consider 'outside', despite however much industry experience or innovation they may have behind them. Not being a member of the OSI Board makes it easier to dismiss my concerns. 2) The Web 3.0 technologies stack includes a lot of technology which, if implemented incorrectly or exploitatively can have a disastrous effect on real human lives. A lot of the technology, like volumetric scanning, streaming, facial recognition, artificial intelligence etc are reliant on data and datasets derived from a humans personal existence. We should be agreeing on a common standard of ethics and conduct in the handling of these technologies and their implementations and deployments. Otherwise, without taking precautions and ensuring that much if not all of the ongoing Web 3.0 infrastructure is underpinned by open-source technologies, we will be rapidly racing towards the same disasters being experienced with Facebook/Meta and their atrocious and irresponsible handling of our personal life data for their personal profit and societal control. 3) By the mistakes of the past I'm referring to how we allowed the proliferation of exploitative mechanics in technologies, for example in Web 2.0 it was many years before we realised the dangers of spam and hacking in the consumer space, and that was only after many people had lost fortunes, livelihoods and lives. We have the advantage of hind-sight. We know that consumer capitalism driven exploitative systems, while financially rewarding for a small group of people, ultimately leads to negantropic affects on others. Exploiting our personal data for financial profit is a no longer viable business model. We need to make sure that we look at this generational evolution of the internet differently, not as a cash machine to be exploited but instead as doorway into whole other dimensions of our subjective reality. This holds the key either to our ultimate imprisonment or freedom, digitally. Please feel free to comment or ask for more clarity if I've not explained something suitably.

To promote and protect open source software and communities...

For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice. As a global non-profit, the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition (OSD), and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.

Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form. Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open source software.