[sudoroom] Important Note

[Matthew Senate]

Hey all,

I had the pleasure of chatting with Eddie Tejeda on Sunday, and he brought
up a substantial point. This concerns the immediate future of Sudo Room.

We have a responsibility to our donors, not to perform their individual
visions or present some monetary return or service, but to act in good
faith of their donations, a manifestation of their support for our general
vision.

We held a fundraiser, we had an amazing time, converged the community, and
(almost mystically) raised our exact goal of $1500. We expanded and have
seen more faces now than before our kickoff. The reason it was so
successful was because many of us put our energy into it and reached out to
our friends, coworkers, organizations, and the public at large who then
offered us cash to help us reach closer to our goal of opening a physical
location, a real hacker space.

This raises a critical question. One of the most tangible opportunities for
opening our space is to get working with the EBALC folks and collaborate
with Anca at Techliminal to move in to 1825 San Pablo. In an ideal world,
with all the best intentions, decisions, and preparation, it is very much
possible that by November (techliminal's deadline), this deal may not be
ready, or may not work out at all. In that case, we will have postponed a
substantive result of our group for quite some time after May. It seems
that as a group, which has received much from its community already, and
which will inevitably reach out to this community again to support it in
times of great change or great need, we cannot afford to wait such a long
time before putting forward, constructively, a result that justifies these
initial donations.

We should definitely remain seriously engaged in the potential to move in
to 1825 San Pablo with Techliminal, but we should also consider an interim
solution, an initial room.

We have cleverly for some time separated our immediate goal of an
acceptable room, an initial launchpad, from a longer-term goal of a larger,
more configurable space (Sudo Room => Sudo Space). What Eddie pointed out
to me is that now more than ever this concept should be heeded, and not
only because it is a reasonable, gradual approach to grow into new modes
and new responsibilities, but also because as a group entrusted by many
already, we should hope to one day convince them yet again to trust us with
a small investment (or baba ghanoush or a giant inflated marshmallow man or
24 bottles of homebrew) to go wildly and boldly toward a space and platform
for hacking everything, our sudo room.

// Matt
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