Here's what it means to me. I need to get additional funds to hire more students to help me out in the lab. The lab's popularity is exploding and there is only so much one person can do. I need support and most of that support is going to be financial. So, I'm going to be asking the school's budget committee for the most difficult thing to get in any school, additional funds, and not just a little bit, a lot. In order to do that, I need to have a convincing argument. Ultimately, I'm not that hopeful.But that probably doesn't matter to you.So... what does it mean to you?If I remove myself from the situation and what I am hoping to gain, here is what it means to me. The open source hardware movement is succeeding. Hugely. Arduino has changed the landscape of what novices can do and there is an innate interest to learn it and use it. I have overheard students walking by critiques of 3D printers made by architecture students at CCA and hear them whisper to their friends, "I want to learn how to make robots!". And who doesn't? The amount of technology that we are surrounded by is increasing very rapidly. The amount of us that understand even the basics of how technology works is extremely limited. This is creating situations in which people feel victimized by technology because they have no control over it. Arduino is allowing people to use technology as it should be used, as a tool.Instead of feeling reliant on technology, we can now use technology to become more self reliant. This creates empowerment through technology. This should be the goal.I hate having a Pavlovian response to my cell phone each time it buzzes at me. "Is it a text?" Is it an email?" "Who is it from" "What if it is important?" It probably isn't. I don't feel like this is sustainable. The novelty of having technology constantly interrupting our lives to try and get our attention is going to wear off. Technology needs to become meaningful. Technology needs to learn how to respect us.I don't know if we can expect companies to determine and create this for us. That is why open source technology is important to me. That is why community driven technology development is important to me. We can collectively determine what the future is going to be. We can be a part of the worldwide conversation and it needs to be a worldwide conversation. A 24-year-old computer scientist who graduated from Stanford and lives in Silicon Valley doesn't know what technology a small scale farmer in Ottertail, MN needs. It probably wouldn't be profitable even if the computer scientist did. But the farmer still needs it.There was an article about employers starting to use wearable devices to monitor employees. The article makes it seem like the types of things they are monitoring aren't malicious but it is still terrifying to me. I find it to be a dehumanizing direction for technology to be heading towards. Open source technology is the best chance we have to globally help determine the direction.Maybe I'm just idealistic. That's fine with me. I felt the power of community based technology development when I realized I could create a wearable device to monitor my data to try and make my job more sufficient. That is the type of empowerment that you get when you use technology for self reliance.