KEY POINTS:
For someone whose job suddenly disappeared on him, Auckland software developer Vik Olliver is on a high. Apart from his employment misfortune, good things have been happening to Olliver, a stalwart of the open source software community in New Zealand.
For one, he has a new job, courtesy of Wellington company Catalyst IT, one of whose directors, Don Christie, is president of the New Zealand Open Source Society. Christie and Olliver were vying for the presidency earlier in the year and Christie won.
For another, the thrill of rubbing shoulders with leading lights of the international open source movement at their annual convention, OSCON, in the United States is still a recent memory.
And last, and most memorably, Olliver has been shooting the breeze with many of the world's top thinkers and doers in the fields of science, technology and culture at an "unconference" in California. He attended Science Foo Camp, an event sponsored by Nature Publishing Group, organised - or not, which is the whole point - by technology publisher O'Reilly Media (which also staged OSCON) and hosted over a weekend last month by Google at its California complex.
Olliver found himself among the 200 invited luminaries by virtue of his open source interest. For most people that means software but Olliver's preoccupation is open source hardware.
With a scattering of like-minded people around the world, Olliver is trying to develop a machine that will replicate itself, called a RepRap (for self-replicating rapid prototyper). Connected to a computer, the RepRap will function like a 3D printer, producing components, initially from molten plastic, that can be assembled into anything for which it is programmed - including itself.
As the open source ethos dictates, the design of the RepRap, and software for driving it, will be freely available, making it an invaluable tool in the developing world where manufactured goods are unaffordable for many people.
Olliver took a prototype RepRap with him to OSCON and Sci Foo, where it was "a great crowd-puller". At Sci Foo, he encountered Hod Lipson, an assistant professor of mechanical and space engineering at Cornell University, whose Fab@Home project has similar goals.
But by no means everyone at Sci Foo was a technologist.
"It's quite an amazing thing," Olliver says. "You turn up there, 200 of you, and meet and greet and get to know one another, grab your swag bag and so forth. Then they wheel on these three large whiteboards, which are divided up into slots, and say, 'there you are chaps, organise your conference'."
By the end of the first evening, an agenda had taken shape.
Aaron Swartz, a 20-something San Francisco writer, software developer and general boy-wonder (he helped create Reddit, a site to which users post links to web content that are then ranked by popular vote) was there and conveyed the atmosphere on his blog, Raw Thought (www.aaronsw.com/weblog).
Swartz writes: "Martha Stewart fills a big room speaking on the paperless home ... Dalton Conley, the persecuted sociologist, and his art hack wife, Natalie Jeremijenko, gab at dinner. Dean Kamen gesticulates wildly and talks about watching beautiful women who bend down to pick things up ... [Bjorn Lomborg] has been giving copies of his new book to everyone within throwing distance."
The diversity of invitees - Stewart is the homemaker extraordinaire who turned her expertise into an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars (and spent several months in jail for financial indiscretions), Kamen is the inventor of the Segway personal transporter and Lomborg the world's most famous climate change sceptic - ensures discussion ranges far and wide.
For Olliver, the most stimulating session was an analysis of global warming by a pair of engineers. "They broke it down to basic engineering - energy in, energy out."
Their equations showed the futility of hoping that wind might become a main form of electricity generation and how much of the earth would need to be covered by solar generation systems to take the place of existing power plants. Not that global warming was a preoccupation of the event, Olliver said.
Science-fiction writers were also well represented, among them Greg Bear, author of dozens of books. Sci-fi writers have the freedom of being able to conjure up futuristic technologies without the necessity of making them real.
Sometimes, though, their imaginings spark the interest of technologists who operate in the real world, as did Bear's "LitVid" multimedia system, which he wrote about in his 1990 book Queen of Angels, and that caught the eye of Microsoft. It's precisely the sort of outcome Sci Foo is intended to encourage.
Will Olliver and Lipson be able to claim a similar meeting of minds? Following their Sci Foo encounter, the RepRap and Fab@Home groups have agreed to jointly develop a file format for 3D objects made from multiple materials and to exchange printing heads for their respective devices.
Now in his new job, Olliver has a day a week to dedicate to the RepRap project. "I'm sure amazing things are going to come out of what happened at Sci Foo," he says.
* Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland-based technology journalist.
Build it yourself
* RepRap stands for self-replicating rapid prototyper.
* It's a robot that works like a 3D printer, building whatever a linked computer tells it to - initially out of extruded plastics.
* In theory, it could build a copy of itself.
* Similar commercial machines already exist but enthusiasts are working on a low-cost version.
