[hackerspaces] Is this a hackerspace?

[Steven Sutton]

Faruq from Hacker Hostel came into the weekly meeting at Freeside yesterday
to discuss this. First of all - the education is a program at HH, not the
entirety of the space. In other words, they're just starting up and so they
decided that was a good point to grow from. That is a perfectly reasonable
strategy for a for-profit organization. It's unfair to, based on a review
of their website, decide to exclude them without first having a
conversation with them. I think they should be added back.

I also invited Faruq to a monthly meeting that the
hacker/art/maker/inventor spaces in Atlanta have started to put together.
We are now 8 organizations in Atlanta that sit down and talk shop. It
became clear once we all started meeting together that every space has a
different culture, vision, objective, etc... By including everyone it
actually works out to be a better strategy because we are much more
effective as a collaborative force and more appealing to people who haven't
joined yet.

If the idea is that we don't want people to get overwhelmed or lost on the
page with active spaces, the why don't we just tag them (Bio, Software,
Electronics, Art, etc...) and they can list the ones that apply? For us,
there are 200,000 people in the metro Atlanta area that fit what MAKE found
in their survey to be the typical hackerspace demographic. Our mission
isn't to divide up the available people into competing spaces, it's to
bring some of those 200k into this community. We can do that much more
effectively by offering a variety of spaces for them to get involved in and
connecting them up so they can move between them more easily.

When we have an ecosystem of spaces we make a much stronger case for what
we're doing that just trying to do it all in isolation. We diversity
between them to make that work.

Please add Hacker Hostel back. These guys are on our script, they're just
approaching it from a different angle. We should welcome that.

Steven Sutton
President, Freeside Atlanta


On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Buddy Smith <buddy.smith at ieee.org> wrote:

>
> On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 3:19 PM, William Reyor <opticfiber at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Interesting read on New York Times
>>
>>
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/technology/at-hacker-hostels-living-on-the-cheap-and-dreaming-of-digital-glory.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
>>
>> its actually a pretty interesting idea. Maybe before just taking down the
>> page, you want to reach out to them and ask why they believe they're
>> connected to the hacker space movement?
>>
>>
> I've emailed the creator of the page and invited him to respond here, or
> to me directly.
>
> I don't necessarily think the page should be deleted, but it should be
> retemplated as something other than a hackerspace.
>
> If we want things cursorily related to hackerspaces on the wiki, that's
> fine. Let's just not call them hackerspaces.
>
> --buddy
>
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>
>
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