Yesterday I delivered a reasonably well-received talk at Open Tech NYC in which I introduced the crowd to their New York open tech neighbors. That is, I explained the four freedoms that define what make software truly free and open, and I gave examples of NYC people and institutions who make or use open culture and open knowledge, open data, open source software, open formats and open hardware.

Here are a bunch of links!

• Culture and knowledge: Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites -- check out Wikimedia NYC, which collaborates with libraries and other cultural institutions such as the New York Public Library. QuestionCopyright is a nonprofit org that educates artists about alternative licensing and advocates against copyright maximalism. And the Organization for Transformative Works "is a nonprofit organization run by and for fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures."
• Data: the municipal government open data sets are available, and are consumed by organizations like local nonprofit OpenPlans. In February, look for Open Data Day, which had a Code for NYC event this year. (And look at New York City in Wikidata!)
• Open formats: Aaron Swartz, honorary New Yorker, was one of the inventors of RSS.
• Software: I mentioned a few organizations that produce open source software. Socialbomb in Brooklyn helps work on the Tornado web server. Brooklyn-based OpenGeo makes the OpenGeo suite of geographic information systems software. 10Gen in Manhattan makes MongoDB. The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens is working on CollectionSpace, software to help run museums. ProPublica makes tools for data journalism (blog). OpenITP (the Open Internet Tools Project) in Manhattan "supports and incubates a collection of free and open source projects that enable anonymous, secure, reliable, and unrestricted communication on the Internet. Its goal is to enable people to talk directly to each other without being censored, surveilled or restricted." OpenITP is part of the Open Technology Institute, which helps make Tidepools (social wifi).

  I mentioned consumers and users of open source among our neighbors. Drupal and WordPress are pretty useful to consulting shops like Behavior. Google makes some open source software but also uses a bunch; for instance, their servers run on a slight variant of Ubuntu Linux. And an art installation in the New York Times lobby uses the Beautiful Soup screen-scraping library that my spouse wrote.

• Hardware: We have Makerbot in Brooklyn, including Thingiverse, and we have Shapeways in Long Island City. And NYC Resistor is a hacker collective in Brooklyn that has get-togethers all the time.
• Events and meetups: Gosh we have a lot. Python and Ruby and open source data analysis groups, for instance. The Drupal community's hosting a Drupal Ladder sprint on April 7th at Elephant Ventures in west midtown, helping new contributors get started. You can come to Techno-activism Third Mondays at OpenITP. Wikimedia NYC hosts events every few months. And for open hardware, check out Maker Faire in September, and the Shapeways meetup. I should have also mentioned Free Culture Conference 2013, April 20th and 21st at New York Law School, and the New York Linux Users Group.

I hope the people listening understood that I was just offering a sample of the organizations in the five boroughs that work on or use open stuff! I opened and ended my speech with some thoughts about love and sharing (and how being a free software person is like or unlike being a vegan), which I reused from "A Slightly Disjointed (Due To A Five-Day Cold) Musing On Open Source, Fear, Motivation, And Witnessing", where I discuss my experience with the open source GNOME desktop environment.

During the coffee breaks and lunch, I also spread the word about Outreach Program for Women and Google Summer of Code internships available this summer; application deadlines are around May 1st.

Thanks to the sponsors and organizers of Open Tech NYC 2013. I enjoyed it despite getting over a cold, and appreciated the chance to learn from and chat with a variety of people interested in open stuff.

Update: Video is up.