End of the beginning of an era

[rezendi]

One of the weirder jobs I've had has been, over the last few years, directing an attempt to archive the world's open-source software for the next thousand years or so. (It's ambitious. I know.) Well, while further archiving initiatives are in the planning stage, version 1.0 of that project is finally complete. It included, in no particular order:

• agglomerating the work of literally millions of people worldwide, and writing many terabytes of it to a durable physical form
  
• commissioning, shipping, and installing a 3,000-pound steel vault adorned with AI-generated art
  
• negotiating partnerships with elements of the governments of Egypt and Norway
  
• assembling a list of hundreds of books and other data sources that might possibly somehow explain the deeper context of the world and its technologies today to 1,000 years from now
  
• negotiating with publishers for the right to make single microfilm copies of those books, which was much trickier than all the other negotiations combined
  
• a scouting mission featuring sled dogs, polar bear rifles, and a private jet
  
• recruiting an all-star advisory team, including a historian / Hugo nomineee, MacArthur genius grant recipient, prominent linguist, prominent Egyptologist, and cosmologist / security researcher / JPL interplanetary photographer
  
• partnering with / paying / donating to a proud French nonprofit, a hippie California nonprofit, a Norwegian startup, the Long Now Foundation, Microsoft Research, and the Library of Alexandria, among others
  
• bringing all those partners together to speak to a thousand people at a launch event
  
• four 3D-printed domes (the first of which was misprinted)
  
• a tiny glass platter etched with polarized femtosecond lasers for Oxford's Bodleian Library
  
• scripting, commissioning, and appearing in an announcement video
  
• dealing with the tensions between that video shoot team and that of Bloomberg, who were there to shoot a parallel video as part of the Businessweek cover story on the project
  
• dealing with the fact that GitHub's then-CEO's house burned down while we were all on Svalbard (and, darkly hilariously, the Bloomberg video was edited such that it looks like I promptly started making mocking jokes about this.)
  
• writing a guide for the archive's inheritors, possibly centuries from now with no understanding of today, and having that professionally translated into several other languages
  
• doing all this on a budget that would probably surprise you greatly with its smallness
  

On the one hand, it has been, as you might imagine, an insanely cool thing to work on, and I'm proud of the results. On the other ... it's good to finally have it in the (not-so-proverbial) can.

Comments

[digitalsidhe]

Congratulations on a successful version 1.0!

[rezendi]

Thanks!

[foms]

Well done. Now, do it again? What will you do next?

[rezendi]

"Watch this space." :)

[juli]

It's been very cool to watch from afar, and I had no idea you were pulling those strings behind the scenes. Congratulations on a truly awesome accomplishment!

[rezendi]

Thank you!

[splanky]

Wow, I've just been reading articles people have been sharing on FaceBook about this! It made me think of the GoH speech Gregory Benford gave at Aussiecon 3, which was all about the difficulties of making archives like this, and I think storing things like nuclear waste for similar amounts of time. Including things like cows rubbing up against the location markers and moving them. Congratulations on the achievement!

[rezendi]

Thanks very much!

[rdi]

That's is quite an achievement and one to be proud of. Beer on me when next we meet.

[rezendi]

Noted with interest. :)

[hitchhiker]

that was a mighty cool project indeed!

[valdelane]

The mother of all time capsules!

[ivy]

Hah, I know that sense of satisfied exhausted completion. Congrats!