A few weeks ago I traveled down to a conference put on by the DOD called STAR-TIDES with Willow Bl00 on behalf of Geeks With Out Bounds. Ostensibly the purpose of the conference is to mesh NGO’s with government based relief organizations and share information and designs under a more open source and open access ethic. You can read more about the event on their about page, though their language a little dense. There were a few distinct groups that attended, and I think they each came out with a different picture on the purpose of the event.

The conference ended up having three broad categories of participants: vendors hoping to catch government buyers for their tech (many of them showing products that had direct military applications with plausible uses for relief), government agencies getting a handle on the field of NGO open source tech, and hackers. As you might be able to gather I was incredibly enamored by the hackers that showed up.

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