[hackerspaces] Hackerspace drama, oh my!

[Naomi Most]

Hi Yar,

Really appreciate you chiming in here.

> Naomi Most wrote;
>> We're watching as Sudo Room, for example, gets into its 2nd year and
>> starts to have the same squatting problems we have.

> Our "squatting problem" was mostly caused by our previous landlord who
> was making an extra buck by letting people live in his vacant offices.
> We had many problems with this previous landlord.


That's actually very similar to the reasons we started having squatter
problems:  someone who spent a lot of time at NB let people think it
was OK to sleep there.

Then (simplifying a lot), some core culture makers at Noisebridge
shouted, "hey Occupy, Noisebridge is with you!" and didn't get how
hard it would be to hold down the fort after that.  In fact it became
so difficult for many good people to feel welcome at Noisebridge in
the face of the Occupy squatters that they left -- which made it even
harder to fend off this cultural flu.

What Sudo Room did right during the General Assembly was to keep an
eye on access control.  I don't know if you guys actually saw it that
way at the time, but you were doing it organically -- there was always
someone from the core culture at the space, and the door control was
invite-only if you didn't have an RFID fob.

I know you've just moved and everything is shiny and new again.  That
will buy you 1-2 years of peace at least.  :)

--Naomi



On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 10:44 AM, yar <yardenack at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi folks, this is my first time posting to this list! I'm a Sudoroom
> member and organizer, and I created a proper posting account so that I
> could reply to this thread. Nice to meet you all.
>
> Naomi Most wrote;
>>> We're watching as Sudo Room, for example, gets into its 2nd year and
>>> starts to have the same squatting problems we have.
>
> Our "squatting problem" was mostly caused by our previous landlord who
> was making an extra buck by letting people live in his vacant offices.
> We had many problems with this previous landlord.
>
> Al Billings wrote:
>> sudoroom has the same problems as noisebridge because it explicitly
>> modeled itself on noisebridge with consensus decision making, an
>> open door policy to the street,
>
> Are you all aware of what Sudoroom has been up to lately? Just this
> week we moved into a new space in a large building which we will be
> sharing with 10 other groups, including:
>
>    Bay Area Public School http://thepublicschool.org/bay-area
>    Counter Culture Labs https://counterculturelabs.org/
>    East Bay Food Not Bombs (your friendly anarchist "soup kitchen")
>    a film collective (Black Hole)
>    a feminist dance troupe (OMNIdance)
>    a bookstore/cafe (La Commune)
>    ... and more.
>
> We are open to members and guests, while preparing the whole building
> to be "open to the public" this fall. We are all working extremely
> hard, and proud of what we are building together. We hope it will be
> such an inspiring model of a "non-tragic" commons as to overshadow
> conversations such as this one.
>
> Noisebridge is part of our lineage. We do have a consensus model, and
> we did fork NB's bylaws. Just like at AMT, some of our members
> consider themselves "Noisebridge refugees" and have treated NB as an
> anti-pattern as much as anything else. But we also have deep respect
> for both NB and the people who work hard to keep it going. We believe
> hackerspaces are capable of reinventing themselves many times over. We
> believe in having strong, wide community ties. We are one of the
> founding members of the BACH (Bay Area Consortium of Hackerspaces).
> Many of us ARE members of other spaces, including AMT, Noisebridge,
> Double Union, LOLspace, HayHackers, and beyond. Naomi, I believe
> you're still on our board of directors. :)
>
> Naomi wrote:
>>> No Occupy required.
>
> And yet, for all that, we did proudly host a few General Assemblies
> during the cold winter months. Go figure.
>
> Al wrote:
>> and a political, social justice mission. They've gone as far as to
>> say a space isn't a real hackerspace if it isn't political.
>
> Who said that? Maybe they were sarcastically deflecting your rhetoric
> back at you. Remember all those times you said Sudoroom isn't a real
> hackerspace?
>
> In any case, I find it ironic to be shaming others for being
> "political" in a thread that began with a trans woman's story of being
> kicked out of her hackerspace by cis men who believe that hormones
> made her crazy. In fact, it seems in this case that the very
> iconography of "hackerspace drama" is their incapability of working
> respectfully alongside people different from them. Honoring the
> experiences of socially marginalized people happens to be one of the
> Sudo community's core values. If you think that's a bad thing, this
> may not be the best thread to make your case.
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-- 
Naomi Theora Most
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