Looking back at the yearly conference ThingsCon Amsterdam we organised November 30th & December 1st at Volkshotel.
We aimed for the conference to highlight ethics in practice. In 2016 we introduced our overall mission with ThingsCon to foster the creation of a responsible and human-centric IoT. This has become increasingly important throughout the last year with the developments in the world, both in tech as in society as a whole. More and more incidents with data breaches, discontinued companies breaking products, not speaking of politically developments. But also on a positive side with the announcement of GDPR, the IoT Mark initiative, and the follow-up discussions.
This year we wanted to combine a positive look on connected products with a critical design view. What does it mean in practice, from manufacturing to security, to ethics by design?
Read more on my thoughts in this Medium-post. I also share some thoughts on the plans for the coming year.
With great influence comes great responsibility. It may be a cheesy quote, but it is therefore no less true. We are at the point where the IoT is diffusing into everything and changing the character and behaviour of the things we use. This happens in ways we are not aware of and in ways that are not open and transparent. Currently, the drivers are often purely economic in nature resulting in a sneaky feeling that should make us all uncomfortable. That makes it even more important to have a stage like ThingsCon: we need a place to think about the state of IoT and take a stand together.
More on Medium
https://labsinfo.nl/thingscon-2017-looking-back-and-forward-an-elevating-community-2db6f3e6f176
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