Good things
2011-Mar-19, Saturday 10:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chebeLimor "Ladyada" Fried; of ladyada.net, on the cover of WIRED magazine. Limor's general awesomeness being recognised shows that things are changing, and all you have to do is tirelessly pursue your interests, and be brilliant. Makezine article.
Leigh Honeywell; co-founder and president HackLab.to; gives a keynote talk on hackerspaces at SCALE. Uploaded here. Leigh's keynote is full of enthusiasm, and I'm struck by how easy it seems to get involved with projects at hacklab.to. She acknowledges that not everyone will fit your group, that having other spaces and groups is a good thing; increasing the chance of there being a place for everyone. And of the good things that can happen when you're open to greater diversity.
Mitch Altman; co-founder of Noisebridge (man has his own wikipedia page) gave a talk on hackerspaces at MakerFaire UK.
It started with Mitch's talk. He does this really awesome thing; at the end of the talk he offered keys to Noisebridge. A symbol of the openness of the space. (It is an actual key, that works, but there is another door on the space that is locked when no-one else is there, and rightfully so.) He talked about diversity, and being welcoming, and open. There's that word again.
It turns out I'm not the right person to point out where things could be better, what doesn't work, or to debate on the direction of things. So I'm just going to leave it here; Openness. We need more of it.
*edit* And here's one fantastic way we can start: http://www.jpichon.net/blog/2011/03/dexy-documentation-workshop-tog/
Leigh Honeywell; co-founder and president HackLab.to; gives a keynote talk on hackerspaces at SCALE. Uploaded here. Leigh's keynote is full of enthusiasm, and I'm struck by how easy it seems to get involved with projects at hacklab.to. She acknowledges that not everyone will fit your group, that having other spaces and groups is a good thing; increasing the chance of there being a place for everyone. And of the good things that can happen when you're open to greater diversity.
Mitch Altman; co-founder of Noisebridge (man has his own wikipedia page) gave a talk on hackerspaces at MakerFaire UK.
It started with Mitch's talk. He does this really awesome thing; at the end of the talk he offered keys to Noisebridge. A symbol of the openness of the space. (It is an actual key, that works, but there is another door on the space that is locked when no-one else is there, and rightfully so.) He talked about diversity, and being welcoming, and open. There's that word again.
It turns out I'm not the right person to point out where things could be better, what doesn't work, or to debate on the direction of things. So I'm just going to leave it here; Openness. We need more of it.
*edit* And here's one fantastic way we can start: http://www.jpichon.net/blog/2011/03/dexy-documentation-workshop-tog/
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Date: 2011-03-20 01:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-20 09:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-20 10:26 pm (UTC)HacDC, the hackerspace in Washington, DC has more Ph.D.s. They tend to take themselves more seriously and do a lot of excellent projects, but they are not as social or as inviting. I feel like
A group of us from the Baltimore Node went to visit HackPittsburgh, but I haven't interacted with them enough to get a good feel for those folks. They helped with the Art and Code conference at CMU, and that was excellent event. One of their members moved to Baltimore and has been a great addition to our space.
There is also a hackerspace a little further north of Baltimore called the Harford Hackerspace. The relationship between their group and our group was somewhat contentious because we started up around the same time and were considering forming a joint group when we realized it would be bad for all involved. Then we had a member who was loud who created this weird vibe between our space and Harford. But once he left, the relationship between the two spaces improved. Harford is interesting because the members are a little bit older, rooted in the local community, and more family oriented.
As I understand it, HackMiami is full of black hats and asked to visit the local hackerspaces. They sent an email from hushmail to a bunch of the local spaces. When they arrived, they said a lot of derogatory things and offended people at some of the local spaces, but this is one of the cases where the lack of organization at our space saved us. No one from our space replied to their email offering them the opportunity to visit.
However, we have had interesting visitors on occasion including Mitch Altman who taught a workshop, Cory Doctorow who was on his book tour, and someone from the Vancouver Hackerspace (which has the best acronym ((VHS)) who was making a documentary on hackerspaces.
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Date: 2011-03-21 02:33 am (UTC)Mitch gets everywhere! I'm in awe of his lifestyle. He said at the talk that he's very good at talking people into leaving jobs they don't like :)
I'd love to see that documentary. Better yet, screen it in the space. I'm fairly new to all this, and stuck in a small corner of the world, I'm constantly amazed how many spaces there are; all with their own stories and histories! Makes me wish for an annual gathering of some sort, outside of MakerFaire and Berlin.
If the UK/Ireland(/Europe possibly) spaces-crawl ever happens I'll have information to share in return. Thank you, you're right, getting to know the other spaces is interesting!