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The Open Source conversation is reborn at the Watson Institute at
Brown University.

Thomas Watson of IBM fame, who’d been Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to
Moscow, founded the Institute in 1981 to address the most urgent
global risks of the time: nuclear hazards of the Cold War. Today the
mission of the Watson Institute encompasses poverty, hunger, war and
culture. My fellowship here commits me to keep exploring and
innovating in the interactive new media – at the intersection of pod- and broad- casting where the new discourse of a global age is taking
shape.

Brown and Watson overflow with blessings for Open Source, starting
with the brilliant Rafael Vinoly building that both nestles and goads
us to think anew. Nikita Khrushchev’s son Sergei is upstairs writing,
as is the exiled Zimbabwean novelist Chenjeria Hove, and former
presidents Ricardo Lagos Escobar of Chile and Fernando Henrique
Cardoso of Brazil. Geoffrey Kirkman of the Watson Institute was
right when he told me years ago: the same swath of visiting stars that
pass through New York and Harvard come also to Brown, but here they
stay longer and they talk more. Brown students keep knocking on my
door – this new rainbow generation of “millennials,” most of them with
digital media skills and native confidence in the expanding universe
of the Web.

Not least, my Watson fellowship and the combination of avid Brown
students and first-class recording facilities have let us cut
radically into the “nut” cost of producing Open Source. So, not for
the first time in human history, adversity has forced us into a
precious opportunity to get lean, cheap and experimental again.

“An American conversation with global attitude” could be the motto of
the revived Open Source. As always, we need your partnership here to
locate the topics, guests and angles that will keep it richly
distinctive. All we want to be, as we keep growing up, is – as many of
you suggested, and producer Mary McGrath distilled the message – “the
best damn podcast” on your computer or your Nano. But how long should
the conversation run? And how often? What new features do you want
on the site? How do we keep making it more interactive with “the
people formerly known as the audience” and with the world beyond our
shores?

What we learned in two years on the last round is that “open source”
works as well for public conversation as well as it works for
advancing software. We announced a “conspiracy of the curious,” and
people joined it – with an unending flow of show suggestions and
witty, critical, often impassioned extensions of the on-air
conversation.

We learned also that podcasting works. The proto-blogger Dave Winer
and I claim together to have done the first podcast in human history
just a little more than four years ago. Between us, at Harvard’s
Berkman Center, we were the Neil Armstrong of the podcast moon, and
now everyone’s going there. For good reason. Podcasting is the
cheap, democratic, speedy, listener-friendly universal means of
sharing and archiving original sound files of every kind. Can we keep
it new, or newish?

To begin, we’ve fired up the podcast feed of our summer gab which went
from the Oscar Wao novelist Junot Diaz to the late John Coltrane, from
the cyber prophet William Gibson to the unheeded prophets of our
quagmire in Iraq. And there is tasty talk ahead with another of the
“global” novelists, Ha Jin, on his first fiction set in America, with
“The War” documentarian Ken Burns, and with the canonical critic
Harold Bloom at Yale, among many others.

Let us end by saying again: Thank you. We couldn’t and wouldn’t be
embarking on these Open Source conversations without the community of
you — that is, without the yeasty, resilient, generous, hungry,
faithful, world-wide community that built and sustained Open Source
from the beginning.

As always, coming and going, Emerson speaks to a great deal of what
we’re feeling. This comes from the end of his marvelous essay
“Circles.”

“Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No
love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher
love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light
of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are
unsettled is there any hope for them.”

Thank you for passionate, engaged, listenership and commentary these
last two years. Now let us all together keep this “community of the
curious” alive and growing.

So send us your dreams and expectations, please, for the next ride on
Open Source and reload your podcast here: www.radioopensource.org.

In the spirit of Emerson: Onward, ever onward!