[hackerspaces] Spark 181 – Mitch Altman says hackers could raise $10mil

[Willow Brugh]

It seems to me the next steps are:
* interested spaces and individuals attempt to make some iteration of this
go, documenting all the way
** is this something we document on hackerspaces.org, or use AHA's starting
base, or does this warrent a new platform for specific discussion?
* 6 months to a year from now one person from each group gets together to
do fund raising for both increasing the breadth of what is done and to make
it easier for new spaces to join in

Willow Brugh // willowbl00 <http://blog.bl00cyb.org/>
Schedule a meeting with me <http://tungle.me/willowbl00>



On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Nils Hitze <nhitze at gmail.com> wrote:

> Wow - thanks for your insights and ideas.
>
> 2012/5/13 William Macfarlane <wmacfarl at gmail.com>:
> > I've been sitting on this email for a little while, and actually
> > stupidly sitting on a bunch of similar emails related to
> > kids+stem+hackerspaces that I write in response to every thread on
> > this topic  but usually don't send.  I'm travelling right now and
> > time/attention are resources that are in short supply.  This is dumb.
> > And even my tl;dr is too long.  Ugh.  Still.
> > tl; dr:  I want to keep this conversation going -- I have opinions
> > about what I think are the most reasonable and useful ways for
> > hackerspaces to engage with young folks' education, but I am more
> > interested in sharing experiences and resources and figuring out what
> > I/Parts and Crafts/youth-oriented hackish organizations can do to
> > smooth the path for other hackers/hackerspaces who want to be involved
> > with youth and education but don't know how...
> >
> > Content below:
> >
> >> BTW, all of this may cost way less money than $10 million.
> >>
> >> Mitch.
> >
> > Yes!
> >
> > This is the best-smartest thing yet said on this thread (which doesn't
> > have any shortage of good stuff being said at all).
> >
> > I co-run an hackerspace for kids.  We started out as a anarcho-techy
> > summer camp and this coming year are starting a
> > school-alternative/homeschooling resource center.  We have drop-in
> > open-shop hours, run classes and programs in our space, and work with
> > some folks in some of our local schools to run afterschool programs
> > there, as well.
> >
> > We started super-small and have grown steadily and quite quickly for
> > the last couple of years.  In addition to running our programs, we've
> > done some curriculum design for some folks looking to start a school
> > with some funding from NASA, and started and fallen woefully behind on
> > a kit-a-month subscription thingy that we called Community Supported
> > Education.
> >
> > For the latter, we got some money from the Awesome Foundation and also
> > used kickstarter -- this was reasonably effective.
> >
> > We get a few thousand dollars from MIT every year because our programs
> > give MIT undergrads a way to do community outreach.  We also get a
> > small amount of money from our local arts-funding grant organizations.
> >  We've applied for a grant or two with The Public Lab, and probably
> > will continue to do so.
> >
> > But most of our money comes from running programs -- classes, summer
> > camps, etc.  We charge folks on a sliding scale to come to our stuff,
> > and we let people come for free if they can't afford to pay.  This
> > works great as a funding-method, but doesn't actually work that well
> > as an outreach method -- it turns out that outreach to diverse
> > communities is super-hard, and having money to offer stuff for free
> > (and in multiple languages) is necessary but far from sufficient to
> > make this work.  More on that later.
> >
> > The main thing I'm getting at is that there is money out in the world
> > for people who are interested in doing stuff in STEM/tech/hackish
> > education for kids.  The fact is that we're a little bit ahead of the
> > curve -- the institutions that want to fund hackerspaces for kids
> > don't, by-and-large, exist yet.  Or, more accurately, they don't yet
> > know that hackerspaces for kids are what they really want to be
> > funding.  We need to show them that before we score the $5 million
> > Kresge foundation grant, or whatever.
> >
> > But that's OKAY, because there are lots and lots of people, parents
> > mostly, and educators, who know that this shit is vital, interesting,
> > creative, fun, important, etc etc.  And they're willing to give you
> > money to make it happen.
> >
> > I was talking with a friend of mine recently who does the Boston
> > Science Club for Girls, and she said that people were always asking
> > her if there were jobs in science/tech/STEM education.  And the answer
> > is "no, there aren't any already-existing jobs."  But the further
> > answer is, "but there is a huge amount of demand for this kind of
> > thing, and it's almost entirely unmet.  If you start an organization
> > that does interesting, hands-on STEM/tech education for kids, and you
> > don't fuck it up colossally, you can make yourself a job pretty
> > easily."
> >
> > If you want to start developing good CC-licensed educational material,
> > absolutely the best thing to do is to start running a class for kids,
> > and document your projects and your experience thoroughly.  If you can
> > find the right well-connected parent-or-educator types, it's trivially
> > easy to run an electronics, or computer-programming class that people
> > will pay you enough money for to make it worth-your-while both to do
> > the teaching and the documenting-and-sharing.  Without any outside
> > funding at all, hackerspaces could probably quite easily start
> > producing high-quality pedagogical material just by running classes
> > and documenting projects as well as communicating with each other
> > about how projects go.
> >
> > All of this communication/documentation work is the stuff that's hard
> > to actually manage to do, of course (as everyone involved in
> > open-source knows).  At Parts and Crafts, though everything I said
> > about money being out-there is true, as a small-and-growing
> > organization, we spend a fair amount of time and energy hustling for
> > money and consequently thinking about the-next-thing instead of
> > the-previous-thing, and so routinely drop the ball on the "document
> > your shit so other people can use it" front.  Or, even more
> > egregiously, we document it and then fail to post it anywhere publicly
> > accessible.
> >
> > This failure-mode is something that the creation of a hackerspace-ed
> > organization/website/repository/infrastructure would at least strongly
> > mitigate.  And if it could be "someone's job" to collect, collate, and
> > curate various streams of interesting course-materials, we could very
> > rapidly make a lot of progress on this endeavor.  It's also something
> > that money would actually be super-useful for -- saying we have this
> > (even relatively modest) amount of money for people to use on the
> > condition that they not only run their programs/classes/whatever, but
> > document them in an accessible fashion for wider community use
> >
> > We, Parts and Crafts, would certainly be psyched to participate in
> > such a group and provide what materials we have and create.
> >
> > I've also long-fantasized about having a Parts and Crafts fellowship
> > for hackers and artists interested in education, where we would
> > provide an environment for teaching-and-learning with some kids and
> > adults, room, board, tools, and materials, for you to work on an
> > education-related project (either specifically developing tools for
> > teaching, or just making something cool with an eye towards how
> > non-experts can participate in the making) under the conditions that
> > you document what you're doing and make it publicly available.
> >
> > -----
> >
> > All that said, I'm not sure that "producing high-quality pedagogical
> > material" is the problem-to-solve, here.  Maybe it is.  But it seems
> > to me that the real point of this organization would be to figure out
> > ways to get this material used, somehow.  There is so much great
> > information on the internet already, and it's, by and large, not hard
> > to find.  Certainly some work curating and collecting it would help
> > make it easier+better, but I think that, in addition to producing this
> > material, we need to be creating spaces where it's likely to get used.
> >  Your local hackerspace is one of these spaces, if you can all agree
> > that it would be cool to run a program for kids on Saturday or Sunday
> > mornings (pro-tip: weekend mornings, 10:00-12:00 are a wonderful
> > combination of kid-friendly and grumpy-adult-hacker-unfriendly, and so
> > make a great time for hackerspaces to run kid/family programs).
> >
> > Parts and Crafts is another example of a kind of space for doing this,
> > and it's a model that's entirely replicable.  If you look hard enough
> > you can probably find the hacker-friendly science teacher in your
> > school district and talk to him or her about running programs in
> > schools.  Most afterschool programs really really want to do more
> > hands-on STEM-themed stuff (because, in America at least, the
> > standardized testing in schools pushes most of the awesome out of
> > in-school science classes) -- I've found it to be really easy to
> > contact an afterschool program coordinator and tell them that I want
> > to teach kids electronics and have them give me (relatively small)
> > amounts of money to do so.
> >
> > I mention these things because it's really really hard to develop
> > pedagogical material/curriculum without actually having a venue for
> > testing it out and working with actual kids and figuring out ways to
> > do so, and to get materials to groups of kids is pretty vital.  There
> > are also organizations like boy and girl scouts -- most of these big
> > national organizations have local chapters which vary widely according
> > to whoever is running them, so mileage will certainly vary
> > commensurately.
> >
> > ---
> >
> > I've been sitting on this email for a little while, and actually
> > stupidly sitting on a bunch of similar emails related to
> > kids+stem+hackerspaces that I write in response to every thread on
> > this topic  but usually don't send.  I'm travelling right now and
> > time/attention are resources that are in short supply.  I want to keep
> > this conversation going -- I have opinions about what I think are the
> > most reasonable and useful ways for hackerspaces to engage with young
> > folks' education, but I am more interested in sharing experiences and
> > resources and figuring out what I/Parts and Crafts/youth-oriented
> > hackish organizations can do to smooth the path for other
> > hackers/hackerspaces who want to be involved with youth and education
> > but don't know how...
> >
> > sorry this email is too long.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Discuss mailing list
> > Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org
> > http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
>
>
> --
> Nils Hitze
>
> Email: nhitze at gmail.com
> Mobil: +49 179 9429701
>
> Blog: silberkind.de
> G+: silberkind.de/+
> Twitter: @kojote
> _______________________________________________
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> Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org
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>
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