I first met Greg Newby at the HOPE conference in 2000. H2K was my first time attending HOPE, and I was overwhelmed with the new experience and the chance to connect with all sorts of fascinating folks, Greg among them. I was instantly hooked, and became a regular HOPE attendee and participant thereafter.

As Greg took on more of an organizational role at HOPE over the years, doing more behind the scenes than anyone can compute, and as I eventually joined him and the rest of the staff in helping make the event happen, I had the immense privilege of his friendship and support. He was always encouraging, calming, and could make the biggest and most frightening problems seem perfectly manageable.

Screenshots from HOPE videos posted by Channel2600, ©2600.

I can’t begin to scratch the surface of what Greg meant to me. He was HOPE family, he appeared at various times on our radio show Off the Hook, he helped us with various other things, and we developed a great friendship outside of HOPE and hacker stuff. Greg was always one of those people you could just reach out to at any time about anything. In our interactions he exuded brilliance, stability, curiosity, humor, empathy, and joy, all of which are among my favorite things a person can exude.

When work was going on behind the scenes of this year’s HOPE conference, it was made known privately that Greg had fallen ill. This would be the first in-person HOPE since his first that Greg would find himself unable to attend physically, but just as always he determinedly kept doing a ridiculous amount of the work leading up to the event which took place in August. We’re hackers and we adapt, but his physical absence was keenly felt by all. When it came time for this year’s closing ceremonies, an event he would normally have led as he had for decades, the reason for his absence was made publicly known. Through the efforts of many he was able to remote in to the closing ceremonies for a bit, and he got to speak to and receive his accolades and cheers from the HOPE crowd for the final time.

In late September it was made known that Greg had entered hospice care as his health took its final turn, and we were given permission to share that information on social media and on the radio. Many of us who shared the privilege of having Greg in our lives took the opportunity to say final goodbyes, in-person and remotely.

Greg passed away on October 21st. He is a personal loss, our community’s loss, and the world’s loss.

In our October 22nd editions of Off the Hook and its after-show, Off the Hook Overtime, we played some of the final messages folks had recorded for Greg and spoke about our memories of him. One of the things I told Greg in my own final message to him was that I’d write a strongly-worded blog post directed toward whoever made the decisions leading to his having to go through what he was going through. That was mostly in jest, of course; I was more focused on amusing my friend than whether any entity which might have had control of his fate reads my blog. However, I will say this:

Fuck cancer. Also, fuck any and all human beings who interfere in any way with access to or provision of medical care for all who need it, the progress of medical research, and the spread of science-based medical information and education.

I’m really going to miss Greg. I’ll keep the memories of my time with him as the blessings they are, as will so many others.

You can read more about Greg’s life and work at his Wikipedia entry and, if you know and can cite sources for things which aren’t there yet, contribute them yourself. The preservation of and addition to the sum total of freely-available human knowledge was a particular passion of Greg’s, and his own legacy deserves no less.