---
layout: post
title: 'SeaGL speaker Q&A: Benjamin Mako Hill'
status: publish
type: post
published: true
categories: news
tags: '2015'
---

Benjamin Mako Hill shares some thoughts with SeaGL:

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?

I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication
at the University of Washington and a faculty affiliate at the Berkman
Center for Internet and Society and an affiliate at the Institute for
Quantitative Social Science — both at Harvard.

By night, I've been a hacker and contributor to a bunch of different
free software communities over more than a decade. Most visibly, I've
contributed to the Debian and Ubuntu projects. I've written several
best-selling technical books, I'm a member of the Free Software
Foundation board of directors, and I'm an advisor to the Wikimedia
Foundation.

Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?

The free software movement has twin goals: promoting access to
software through users' freedom to share, and empowering users by
giving them control over their technology. For all our movement's
success, we have been much more successful at the former. I will use
data from free software and from several related movements to explain
why promoting empowerment is systematically more difficult than
promoting access and I will explore how our movement might address the
second challenge in the future.

Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations? If
not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

I attended last year's conference and I had a fantastic time. I love
that it's a real community driven conference. Back when I first
started playing in the free software world in the nineties, GNU/Linux
conferences (like the Atlanta Linux Showcase) were places for excited
newcomers to get together with other likeminded folks. Between then
and now, most have become big corporate affairs. SeaGL reminds me of
why I loved going to conferences in the first place.
