Tag Archives: Hacker Clubs & Spaces

Rule 0

I note one of you has his hand and wants to ask a question. Go ahead. “What is our hackerspace’s philosophy?” you ask. Well I’m glad you asked that question as I was struggling to come up with an un-contrived way to work this into a blog post. You really saved my bacon.  Well our hackspace can been summed up with three sayings.

0) Don’t be on fire.

This embodies our essential and fundamental philosophical belief that each individual human should strive not to combust in an oxygen rich atmosphere. The rules of thermodynamics are against us, but with care we have so far managed to maintain this rule. We have enshrined this philosophy as our hackspaces rule 0, showing the reverence that we hold this axiom.

1) Well volunteered.

We believe in self-empowerment and also spreading out power among our members. So whenever someone suggests a project or problem that needs fixing they become responsible for implementing it.

2) Let me show you this neat thing.

We enjoy sharing our knowledge and projects with other people, this extends to young hackdays where we teach young kids about technology and how to make things.

I stumbled on this gem from London Hackspace while judging entries to the 2011 Great Global Hackerspace Challenge.

The five finalists from the ~30 hackerspaces that entered (not all listed here) will be announced soon!

 

The Last HOPE

This past weekend, I attended The Last HOPE at the Hotel Pennsylvania in NYC.  The con was awesome and I had a great time.  This was my first HOPE, and I noticed a few strong themes this year, including:

  • Hardware hacking is getting a lot of attention and there is a lot of interest in microcontrollers including new design and reverse engineering off the shelf hardware like RFID.
  • Local community based physical spaces for hacking are booming.  Hackerspaces like NYC Resistor and the Hacktory are becoming a very big part of the scene, and new hackerspaces are popping up all over the world.  Each space has their own unique interests, but common themes seem to be microcontroller hacking (especially Arduino), fabrication (like Reprap and Fab@Home) and other more physical projects instead of just writing code.  There was even a new wiki announced at the show that is devoted to tracking hackerspaces and helping start new ones at hackerspaces.org.
  • There was an awesome talk about Biohacking by Chris Seidel (I wish I could find a link) that makes me wonder if we will see more of this in the future as Bioengineering becomes more accessible to the masses.  The parallels Chris identified between biological processes and electrical circuits were spooky.

It was announced during the closing ceremonies that the Hotel Pennsylvania will not be demolished as was previously announced, and that there will indeed be another HOPE in 2010.

NYC Resistor has some info about the 3D Wiremap demo, one of my favorite exhibits, shown below.

3D Volume Renderer