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January 13, 2007 - On the Flat Road to STeP-IN

I'm in London right now, on my way to Bangalore where I'll be speaking at the STeP-IN Summit 2007 on Improving Quality Assurance through Developer Testing.

On the strong recommendation of Eddie Correia (editor of ST&P) I picked up Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat. That makes it his fault that I didn't sleep on my SFO-LHR flight! I'm not sure everyone would find is as compelling as I did, but for me it could almost be a companion book to my professional memoirs, or at least my memories.

I remember a long conversation the day Roger showed me NCSA Mosaic for the first time. It was the first time I heard the word Netscape (Flattener #2), and then we talked for hours about how the web was going to change everything! A few years later Jayson convinced me that there were some really big ideas there in Open Source (Flattener #4) and we started OpenAvenue, where we hoped to create a collaborative platform for Outsourcing (Flattener #5) and Offshoring (Flattener #6).

And as a parent who has watched the world change I've often felt The Quiet Crisis and wondered if I'm doing the right thing to prepare my children for the future. It is a question that I return to again and again. I'm living in the flat world and I know how to navigate it for myself. But as I hang up from calling my family via Skype on my way to "Asia Pacific's Largest Testing Conference" I don't know what to think about their future.


Posted by Jeffrey Fredrick at January 13, 2007 09:27 AM


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Comments

If you were awed by Friedman...
please consider reading The World is Flat?

www.mkpress.com/flat
watch the overview
www.mkpress.com/flatoverview.html

Posted by: scottie on January 13, 2007 01:12 PM

I let Scottie's spam in because at least it is on topic. Also, it gives me a chance to respond to the claim made in the mkpress description:

"In The World is Flat? Aronica and Ramdoo show that the world isn't flat; it's tilted in favor of unfettered global corporations that exploit cheap labor in China, India and beyond."

This is actually covered extensively in Friedman's book: flat doesn't mean fair or equal, and Friedman considers the unequal power yielded by multinationals head-on and, I felt, thoughtfully.

Posted by: Jeffrey Fredrick [TypeKey Profile Page] on January 13, 2007 05:20 PM

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