typo(s), tendency and text

What is a hackerspace?

Since I started to use Linux and have been working on my masters thesis about Indymedia Germany from a journalists perspective in 2005/6/7, I have discovered a fantastic culture of amazing people, calling themselves hackers, makers, tinkerers, geeks and other illustrous names. Soon after my thesis I traveled as a jounalist with the Hackers on a Plane tour 2007, and witnessed the preliminaries of a becoming worldwide Hackerspace movement. After those people from the U.S. and Canada traveled through Germany and Austria to visit the existing community driven spaces, weld friendships and learn how a space like this can be made, creativity and openness can be nurtured, great projects like NYCResistor, HackDC, Noisebridge and others were founded.

Edit: It has been a while since I have had a look at the Hackerspace Design Patterns, and they actually say something about documentation, discussion and realtime conversation (wiki, mailing list, irc) in the Community Pattern. But does this really cover all kinds of communication needs?

Whatever happened to HackBergen and what can be done about it?

When I moved to Bergen, I had the profound need to get to know people and hang out at a space that is not work, is not university or school, or home - to work with other creatively. During the 24c3 I started the HackBergen website and mailing list, put it on the Hackerspaces wiki (list), and found someone currently living in Bergen, too, who also wanted to work on this. To our knowledge, HackBergen was the first hackerspace group founded by women. (And its fine, if I am wrong there.:) )

We gathered some other people interested int the same purpose, but ran into problems actually financing and finding a space. As it turns out, real estate in Norway is really expensive - and so are rents. Also, there are few to none open community projects, and creativity seems to be measured by its success, and the D.I.Y. scene is individualized to a high degree.

To solve these problems, communicating better would help. Although we had a website and a wiki from the start, both weren*t used extensively. We got a facebook group, too. What was better used, was the mailing list. But since people are getting their information in so many different ways, using one channel sometimes, and another one at other times is confusing at best, if not really annoying with people who want to get a better impression first before they can decide if they like the idea or not.

Quite soon we were allowed to gather at the Piksel Hut, the office of the organizers for the Piksel Festival. That was great for meetings and ad hoc workshops, but we still really need our own space soon. So the purpose of communication is:

• to reach people who want to tinker,
• to build a member base and
• to gather donations

Why I think communication did not work in the past:

• People in the group are very informed of communication possibilities, have strong opinions and different channels they are preferring.
• People in the group don't like blogging?!
• The blog wasn't very good interconnected, so stuff could be posted there and at the same time spread to other places like facebook, twitter, mailing list...
• We as a group did not give people guidelines or even hints where they can find the information and updates they are looking for

Now, what do I think about this?

The group, every member should ideally be equally responsible to tell about things they are doing, thoughts they are having  in order to help others see what we are about, show diversity, share ideas and let them flourish and develop.

Wiki: wiki.hackbergen.org

The wiki is the groups main documentation tool, to gather iformation about past meetings, work on the legal documents of the HackBergen foundation. Its also the place to document projects in a handbook/tutorial kind of way. The strength of wikis compared to blogs is that wikis track changes a lot better, and make collaborating on texts easier. So meeting notes, documents to collaborate on should go there.

Blog: hackbergen.org

So far a wordpress driven blog with mostly old entries. Even though more people have user accounts, only one person blogs mostly. When people concerned about things happening in the group like workshops, classes and the trek for a sustaining space find things here, there actually are comments. Its important that different voices answer and talk. This can not be the responsibility of one person, because it would be exhausting and not very longlasting as an initiative. Also, building a community means, talking. A lot. By a lot of people. Building a geeky community means talking, too. On the interwebs.

Twitter: @hackbergen

The connection between the twitter account and the wordpress account is working. What is an important question, is if this is something that should be machine generated twittering solely, or if a person should be responsible for updates as well.

Facebook

A group has been existing for some time now, and a page has been made. However, at the time, facebook seem to have problems to connect to feeds or wordpress blogs. I have tried both ways today, but nothing worked. Connecting open source self controlled software to company made commercial apis can have its perks, as f.ex. with the latest change on twitter away from OAuth, where a lot of the many clients didn't work any longer. The group and the page have to be cared for, too. People have to get answers and we should have an eye on discussions there. This has not been working fully optimal in the past, and it would be important to find out why.

Other services:

Flattr, Kickstart, Eventbrite, Google Calendar

Flattr and kickstart can be helpful to gain awareness and fundraise for obtaining and sustaining a community driven space. In the case of flattr, awareness for smaller works and projects. Kickstart is a tool to fundraise money for certain goals and projects you have, where you try to find people with solidarity of your goals and maybe set aside something to give-away for especially generous people.

Eventbrite and Google Calendar can help to make our events wider known, and to keep track of people attending. To build a membership base we want to get to know people, and we want to become a bigger group. After all, we want to share knowledge and make something new and creative out of it.

Other services and technologies we could look at come to mind, like github for social development and versioning of code, the thingiverse for object design for 3dprinting and laser cutting.

Adjustments to further development

As the group grows, as the hackerspace gets found, equipped and filled with activities, shared and individual property, better communication structures will be needed. Already now having only one person holding all the passwords to all the official accounts is a problem, but with time it will probably become a bigger problem. So we should have an eye on the changing needs we have towards our communication infrastructure, and find creative architectures and flows that w can adapt to our needs, while still keeping the group and news about it accessible and open. The challenge here is to use a codebase and connections that is both easy to overview, maintain and upgrade, as well as easy to adapt to our needs.

What will also become more important is keeping contact to other hackerspaces in the region, and internationally. It is important that we are part not only of the local community, but also of an international community. We can learn a lot of how others do what they do, and they can learn from us, too. But only if we talk about what we do.

To Do - right now

• A short questionnaire of what people feel they need to participate more actively in the conversation. Evaluation of the answers.
• Write five texts: One about how people can contribute to hackbergen with donating some of their time and hold workshops and classes, one about where hackbergen currently stands. One about the state of the international movement, and one about my next class about LaTeX. And finally: One about what communication channels can be used how by the members.
• Be more available, and make my role clearly about enabling conversation, not steering it.
• Make a direct posting method from blog to facebook page.

Last weekend I attended the SIGINT conference in Cologne, and moderated the panel "Women and geek culture. Whats the problem, guys?". The idea was to explain and show what situations and settings manifest parts of geek culture as excluding women. Although the four panelists and I did come from different feminisms, or at least draw different conclusions, we did not want to give a theoretical overview over feminisms, nor did we intend to discuss them scholarly. The women* on the panel wanted to contribute with what they encounter and wanted to give an idea of how spaces and groups can be inclusive. Of course, it would have been difficult to cover all areas of geekery, so we focused on gaming, education, workplace, conferences and hackerspaces. We thought 105 minutes would be a lot, but in the end we only had 15 minutes for discussion.

While the video that has been recorded will not be ready for next weeks as we heard, I would like to reply on some points of criticism, and react on some very stereotypical antifeminist "criticism".

The discussion during Q&A was very well on the topic, and positively interested. While we got questions, we were informed that the discussion on twitter that had been going on while we were talking, was mixed at best. In a recap of the twitter search for #SIGINT for the time of the panel, I got the impression, that some people have accidentally or because of bias not heard what we said. At least as I recall it, we gave lots of disclaimers, like saying that we come with different experiences, have different angles and are in different communities. That we would like to talk about sexists, which can be male and female, and that there are men who can be feminists. That we have different feminist theories and practices. We still wanted to talk about problems we meet when interacting in geek groups and spaces. While having in mind that woman* is not the only potentially excluding factor, and that there is a set of "others" aka non-white, non-male, non-ablebodied, not-young, non-rich people that can be excluded from groups such as in geek culture.

Something, that went very wrong, was someone sending this tweet, and it being retweeted several times. It says: "So. Now 10 breasts are talking about feminism... #Sigint" by fussl.

This was unneccessary at best. It objectified the people on the panel, reduced us to our body parts. The only explanation I got from the guy who retweeted this from his friend fussl, was that it was an accurate thing to say. I especially called him on his panel-related tweeting, because it was not only resentful and wrong, but also because he had been one of the people who initiated the process to get a talk or action on gender (in)equality and feminism on the SIGINT. After initiating he never got really verbose about what he wanted and how it would be achievable. All in all the mailing list conversation was uffering from all the people being undermotivated or having little time to put some effort into getting something handed in to the organizers of the conference. Close to the deadline of the CfP, Svenja and I handed something in, all the time informing the list and giving people time to react. Noone cared.

So, after the panel, I was wondering if I should confront the guy, or if I should just ignore him. I less decided, than acted on an impulse and asked him to tell me that stuff he twittered again, and face to face. Here is what he came up with (said in my words, from memory:

1. It was not wrong to tweet the breast-tweet. Because the panelists all have breasts, because women have them.

WRONG. In which universe is it okay to objectify people and reduce them, and what they say to their body parts. Even if the inital tweet was not meant like that, a slip, the multiple retweets of it made it impossible for us to feel like what we say is taken seriously. Also, breasts can't talk. Also, in which universe do most men not have breasts? And nipples? How so is having breasts significant when talking about feminism? I could go on, but I won't and I didn't.

2. He does not give square about gender or gender roles and we did too little explaining and acted as women so we didn't deconstruct our gender enough.

WRONG. Obviously he does not give up his gender role (how would one, this is difficult and you would at least need to make an attempt). And for making a statement like that, you would have to know people on the panel better. How the frakk could we who were sitting up there show our non-binary gender identity to people, who obviously can do nothing but define us into the binaries? Before we even start talking? Also, why in hell are we obliged to give a freakshow? And since when is "femme" not a valid play on gender roles? So, I beg you pardon, but we really don't have to strip our personalities and our innards or outwards to you just to prove you that we really are circus freaks. Period.

The main problem with gender binaries is, that you are constantly being thrown back to them, whether you want to or not. And if you come into spaces or groups, that are (mostly) by tradition, society or self-defined male spaces (because they deal with science, machines and computers). So, if we are treated as women there, and women are treated in specific ways, we have all rights in the world to talk about it. Actually, more than half of the people on stage are defining as queer, if we choose to participate in a panel like that, and we choose the topic and what we want to say, we have our reasons. And the right to do so. You can actually not think any part of queer theories or debates without the existence of feminism, antisexist and antiracist theories and practice.

3. Putting pictures of naked, beauty standard women in ASCII art on the wall of the hackcenter (or any other temporary or permanent hackerspace) was a display of art, and should not be critisized. Also, think about how huge the porn collections on the guys' computers are, this is nothing. This is an act of consent, and for some magic reason consent means majority vote as soon as there is no consent anymore.

WRONG. Even though it might be art, showing it in a place where a minority of women* come, is potentially excluding them. Saying this was an act of consent means there is a democratic poll every minute another person walks in. If someone disagrees, and is not listened to, they are being defined out of the group. So, if a woman disagrees, she is not part of the group anymore. This is excluding and sexist. Now, to me the ASCII naked woman was not particularly excluding, though I liked the "looong cat" better. But someone did not feel comfortable, and so the picture should be taken down. Because it is not a "boys room", but a room for everybody.

Also, calling me on naivety, really? Of course, you boys are all supposed to have huge pr0n collections, and I am supposed to be a "sex-positive" feminist, and if not, to shut up. I don't think, feminism has ever been "sex-negative". And being called for naive is certainly not a first for feminists. Any feminist, actually. This would actually be a rant in itself. However, watching pr0n does not make you a hacker. Hacking does. Critical thinking does. Listening to others and learning from them, and applying knowledge to form something new spectacular, does. Inspiring each other to reach new aims, does make you a hacker. So why don't you try to read up a little on feminist criticism on the topic (aka RTFM), and try not to make a hackerspace exclude less-privileged (by society and groups) "other-than-you's"? What you watch in private on your computer is your deal, while what you show in public or semi-public spaces concerns everyone who enters. Is that so hard to understand?

I feel like I could go on and on. I'll leave it at that, and maybe contribute in comments or write more posts if I feel like it.

Let me just once more thank the volunteer group organizing this community-driven event to give us the stage to talk about this topic. Special thanks to Nika, who really supported us contentwise and with practicalities. I hear there have been lots of thinking about and discussions on the panel afterwards, and that makes me really happy we did this. Also thanks to Heather, Ella, Leena and Svenja to get up there together with me and talk about the F-word. More blogging about this at I heart digital life.

Two pictures and a tweet by p4ula made me go to HAR, anyway. Planning of my vacation was very difficult this year. Or, not knowing which kind of vacation I would need, and a family member getting very sick just before my days off, made it difficult. Then I decided to travel to Germany, anyway, and some of my friends, planning and packing, approaching Vierhouten, made me wonder if I made the right decision, not going there.

My grandma got miraculously better, and p4ula sent a "Request for @r4gni", so I had to follow. And I did. I was badly prepared, I got to sleep in my friends tent and I spent most of the time having a good time, and hanging with good people and friends. But I regret not having done two things:

• Spending time in the fablab
• Attending the silent party
• making my own shirt in the c-base-dome

Ah, well. But the awesome laughs I had make up for it.