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Very well put, William! I agree completely. I also LOVE your organization's name. :)
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Randy
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On April 6, 2014 at 11:58 AM William Macfarlane <wmacfarl@gmail.com> wrote:
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I think that many European Hackerspaces (I won't say "most" because, as a North American with a life that affords very little travel time, I haven't visited very many) have an explicitly political/activist self-definition, whereas many American spaces don't (this comes up every year or so on list n arguments about "Hackerspace" vs. "Makerspace".)
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This is , for one, not to say that there aren't explicitly political American spaces, but, more importantly, it's not to say that American Hacker/Maker spaces are apolitical. I think that there's a sense, even in the least explicitly political American hackerspaces, that the thing we are doing is, somehow, radical, even if this radicalism doesn't fall in any kind of traditional activist framework. Just creating public/semi-public community spaces is a huge achievement and an implicitly radical one in America (radical in the sense of being about individual/collective empowerment.)
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I'm usually the guy in my space who says "hey, let's use the FLOSS solution for this task." A lot of times, people are receptive, and where they aren't, it's usually because, either, the FLOSS version of the tool is significantly worse for the task at hand than the proprietary one, or because they already know how to use the proprietary one, have access to the proprietary one, and the workflow of the FLOSS version is significantly different.
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"Make a brochure for the space" and "learn to use Scribus to make a brochure for the space " (let alone "hack Scribus into something I can use") are distinctly different tasks, and while they both have value, the second one can feel like an artificial barrier between you and getting the task done.
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It's also true that there is a vast space of political/politicized ideals that you can focus on, and that you probably can't do them all well simultaneously. I, personally, have a sense that running a hackerspace and keeping it going -- having an open community space for people to learn about and use tech and tools -- is both a significant achievement and a significant challenge. While, in an ideal world, I would use FLOSS for everything, and hack it whenver it didn't meet my goals precisely, this is more-or-less equivalent to the ideal world in which I do all of our plumbing and building maintenance and fix our truck disaster of a pick-up truck when it breaks (which is all the time.) Sometimes things need to be easy in order to get done, and sometimes this means using proprietary software (and/or letting people use proprietary software.)
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There's also an issue of welcomingness/accessibility. A lot of people in the world have never thought about FLOSS principles, proprietary software, etc etc. It's incredibly uncomfortable to come into a space and find yourself told (implicitly or explicitly) that you're bad because you're Doing It Wrong in a context that's unfamiliar to you. This can accidentally play into a lot of bad tech-elitism dynamics (i.e. software people telling designer people that they are Bad for using Adobe products, and not acknowledging the knowledge/expertise that said design people have about what makes a tool a good one for their field.)
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Around piracy -- not making a case either direction (because I think it's complicated), I will say that a lot of people think that piracy is a perfectly reasonable and legitimate form of action against proprietaryt software, big copyright, etc etc. Maybe they're wrong, but they might not think so.
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I think that hackerspaces probably should run workshops teaching FLOSS tools, where possible. I want people to leave workshops more capable of accomplishing their goals, which means I want them to have easy access to the tools that they just learned how to use. The counterexample to this is where a particular proprietary tool is the industry standard. I think that teaching people the skills that they need to get jobs is a legitimate goal for a hackerspace to have (because I think that subverting traditional educational/credentialling systems is super-important and worth doing.) Learning KiCad might be really awesome for doing your own circuit board design, but learning Eagle might be more helpful if you want to get an engineering job. (or Blender vs. Maya, etc etc.)
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Since both of these things seem related to hackerspace goals of democratizing education, tech access, etc etc, running both sorts of classes seems legit.
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-Will
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<a href="http://www.partsandcrafts.org">www.partsandcrafts.org</a>
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On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 12:27 PM, Randall G. Arnold
<span><<a target="_blank" href="mailto:randall.arnold@texrat.net">randall.arnold@texrat.net</a>></span> wrote:
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To some extent I can agree, even though it's generalizing. My hacking friends in Finland approach the subjects you're polling on very differently than the hackers/makers in my area (Dallas-Fort Worth, TX). But then, my Finnish friends are not very different from those I'm familiar with in Boston, Northern California and other regions of the US. Kansas and Texas, in my experience, are generally more resistant to changing the status quo, to disruption, than those in the other areas I mentioned. But even then, I find it to be a consequence of corporate culture-- decades of working in cubes with a mandate to keep your eyeballs glued to your PC and a fear of sticking your neck out. Of course we should work to overcome that conditioning. My Finnish friends don't exhibit it at all. Very intelligent, very independent, very prone to questioning things.
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I've found in parts of Europe I've visited that, yes, there is generally more emphasis on FLOSS and related principles. Hell, Berlin runs their largest commercial airport on an open source air traffic control system. We're not ready for that here yet. On the other hand, the makers I know in this area develop on Arduinos and use Android phones. Some here are so hard core that they make a religion out of avoiding Microsoft products. So the situation isn't completely dire for FLOSS.
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Having said all that, I struggled with your poll. It's replete with questions couched in confirmation bias. I found myself faced with questions that required answers with caveats. "Hackerspaces are for using, creating and promoting Free/Libre Open Source Software" -- sure, but while I love Inkscape, nine times out of ten I'm going to get my work done with Adobe Illustrator and I'm not going to apologize for it. And don't get me started on Scribus vs InDesign.
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In principle we should be *encouraging* use of FLOSS, definitely. But I don't want to create an atmosphere where that's forced, and your poll seems to be on that path.
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Now excuse me, I have to set up some ThinkPads to run both Windows and Linux...
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Randall Arnold
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Tarrant Makers
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On April 6, 2014 at 9:26 AM Mike Dupont <
<a target="_blank" href="mailto:jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com">jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com</a>> wrote:
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Hello Fellow Hackers,
</div> I recently moved to Kansas and found hackerspaces that are not really what I would have expected from my experience with hackerspaces in Europe (cbase, matrax and others) . I find much less FLOSS and very little knowledge or awareness of any of the issues that I feel are important.
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</div> Of courseI don't want to dictate or tell people what to do, and I see hackerspaces and people as totally independent.
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<br />But what I would like to see is some guidelines or criteria for a FLOSS supporting hackerspace, something that is supported by many people. Ideally we can come up with a set of guiding principles that hackerspaces can freely adopt and identify with that will tell people that they support software freedom. If enough hackerspaces do this it would be attractive to new and budding hackerspaces as voluntary self identification.
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<br />So I made a short survey to get peoples opinion on this :
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<a target="_blank" href="https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9WYC6SY">https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9WYC6SY</a>
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<br />Thanks to wannabe1987, gmc, Wil5on, Otter on irc for debugging this and providing constructive feedback
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Also I wanted to say that I am starting a free software association for Kansas
<a target="_blank" href="http://flosokaks.thefr33.com/">http://flosokaks.thefr33.com/</a> and looking for support.
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</div> thanks,
<br />mike
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Randall (Randy) Arnold
<br />Developer and Enthusiast Advocate
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<a target="_blank" href="http://texrat.net">http://texrat.net</a>
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<a target="_blank" href="tel:%2B18177396806">+18177396806</a>
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<br />-Will
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<a href="http://www.partsandcrafts.org">www.partsandcrafts.org</a>
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Randall (Randy) Arnold
<br />Developer and Enthusiast Advocate
<br />http://texrat.net
<br />+18177396806
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