What's on the O'Reilly Radar this year? In this OSCON keynote Tim O'Reilly, co-founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media Inc., peers into the crystal ball to foretell a future of sensor driven interfaces combining with co-operating cloud databases; the unlikely emergence of Government as an ally of open data platforms; and a rethinking of Gov 2.0 as a platform and means for collective action.

However O'Reilly doesn't stop at merely predicting. He goes onto examine the implications and opportunities of these emerging trends. Cloud databases get smarter the more people use them but there's a natural tendency towards monopoly - a big concern for the open source community.  So who owns these databases? Should they be centralized or federated?

Washington's focus on open data, transparency and collaboration is a huge shift in policy and offers unprecedented opportunities for open data platforms. So how do we build an economy around it? And what happens when we move from thinking of government as a 'vending machine' in which taxes go in and roads, schools and fire departments come out, to a platform or set of tools that give us the means to 'do it ourselves' -  a thinking more along the lines of the original GNU ethos.

Interspersed with shoutouts and calls to actions, O'Reilly's take on the future offers the promise of change and opportunity if the open source community is willing to take on the challenge.