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>> Welcome to our fireside chat tonight with our guests, Africa and Mitch Altman. I'm your moderator, Scotty Allen.
Tonight we'll be discussing hack spaces and make spaces. Maybe to get started, I'll have each of you introduce yourself. Africa, would you please start?
>> Sure. So I'm Africa, known as Africa in the chaos family. My name is Sandra also. And yeah, where to start? I'm in chaos family since 2010, actively at the events, but also part of working group against data retention, for example, starting in 2007 when we worked against state surveillance in Europe.
And in Germany. And I was running Republic program. So that is something really inspiring and great to do. So got to know a lot of amazing people through that also.
And since 2018, I'm part of a global network of hackers, makers, social innovators that's called global innovation gathering. So I'm working for this also as my day job, which is an amazing privilege to have as a day job.
So to bring together like 170 people from all over the world, African countries, South American countries, Asian countries mostly, but we also have quite a few members nowadays in Europe.
And working in anything around open hardware, around openness and sharing of all kinds of patterns and knowledge and like things we learn throughout creating hackerspaces, creating innovation hubs, creating social change in communities.
So that's the thing I'm doing day to day. So that's just really nice. Fantastic. Mitch, would you like to introduce yourself? Sure.
My name is Mitch Altman and regarding like hackerspaces, makerspaces, etc.
The intro to me was being invited to my first hacker conference in 2006 to give a talk about TV be gone, which is one of my inventions that I became internet famous for.
Turns off televisions in public places. I've made a living on that since 2004. Kind of crazy.
And in the audience in this, yeah, it was actually HOPE conference, Hackers on Planet Earth in 2006 was my first hacker conference.
In the audience there when I gave my talk was Constanza from CCC who invited me to come to the following Congress 23C3 to give basically the same talk.
And I did and the first hacker conference changed my life tremendously. I met so many people I'm still close friends with and I've been helping organize with HOPE ever since.
And then coming to Berlin where I fell in love with Berlin and met so many people there who I'm still close friends with and just opened up this whole network that I had no clue existed before.
And the community I felt was so incredibly positive where everyone's teaching and sharing and learning together and I couldn't wait till the next one.
And the next one was Camp 2007 not too far from here.
And there were people, German hackers who were researching and near the end of their research for what would become the hacker space design patterns.
And they through that encouraged everyone who was there to start their own hacker space to learn from what's worked and what hasn't worked from hacker spaces around the world which was pretty much mostly just Germany and one in Austria.
And because of that me and Brie Pettis and Nick Farr started three of the early hacker spaces in the US.
Noisebridge, NYC Resistor, HackDC.
- Luckily all around the same time, right?
Yeah, same time 2007-2008. And we had a lot of help. We helped each other. Other people were excited about it. Everyone's watching.
And it turned out to be huge success for everyone. And wow, there was a lot of work. There was a lot of ups and downs. But overall it felt really great to be doing that.
And as a result all of that plus the hacker spaces that exist here along with the hacker space design patterns which by then were published online.
It became examples and people helping each other to form new hacker spaces and encouraging more and more of this. And soon there were several hundred and then thousands around the world of hacker spaces.
So I've been involved with helping hacker spaces ever since and sharing what I've seen work for Noisebridge.
The one I helped start and then learning from other ones and see what problems they have and how they solve them and sort of cross-pollinating and helping people overcome problems and also grow better as a result.
So yeah, that's probably a good enough intro for now.
Fantastic. A quick introduction for me. I'm Scotty Allen. I run a YouTube channel called Strange Parts.
And it's actually really a great honor to do this because Mitch, you're a huge part of the reason I'm here today and doing what I'm doing.
And your work in encouraging hack spaces and make spaces across the world has pretty fundamentally changed my life.
We met originally through Noisebridge in San Francisco and I later became a member of Noisebridge and was very active and that led to me going to Hope and going to Congress and coming to camp in 2015.
And then that led to me going on a hacker trip to China with you to go visit a whole bunch of hacker spaces there.
And I immediately fell in love with China, which then later led to me wanting to make videos to share with people back home at Noisebridge, which led to me somewhat accidentally starting a YouTube channel and becoming my full-time preoccupation and occupation.
So this conversation is near and dear to my heart.
Well, professional hackers.
Yeah, kind of. Which is a weird thing to say.
I wanted to start with, you know, I think the audience that's watching this knows broadly what a hacker space is.
And initially I thought I wouldn't ask this question.
But based on conversations with both of you today, I think it's worth asking, which is what are we talking about?
What is a hack space? What is a make space? And maybe what else can we fit in this category that wouldn't call itself a make space or a hack space, but is this same type of space or community or has similar intentions?
Yeah, I'll put it up to either one of you.
Yeah, we always define it, of course, as in some way volunteer run. So where you can do all the different things community led so that you're creating things that you want to use yourself.
Like you create the workshops, you create the living room situation and all the things that you want to create yourself and for the people around you that maybe don't have the capacity to create it themselves.
And yeah, we have many people in the network who are running also like we would see it as like we from the chaos family would see it as commercial spaces like labeled as innovation hubs or labeled as like spaces where startups are incubated or where you can create products with the hardware.
And so those may not be entirely volunteer run, right?
Yeah, totally. They are like they have business models and we think business models could be something. Yeah, we look at it.
But I wouldn't call those hacker spaces, but I think in many regions, it's super important to say these still qualify. They do the same cool things that we do here, but they need some kind of substance to run so they can't run purely on the donations from the members, for example.
So in some ways, I would even include them sometimes.
Yeah, certainly there's overlap. And back back in the earlier days of these sort of startup incubator things. There was one in China called hacks or hacks elevator, which became hacks.
Excuse me. The dust here and my lungs are hurting. Sorry, but it's worth it. And the hacks elevator started off being pretty interesting. I think it's start bringing people from the outside in to be part of this infrastructure of China for developing so easily with all of the infrastructure there just readily available at your fingertips.
And you could do so much magic that way. But there were so few back then of Chinese people doing that. And the idea at the beginning anyways was to have outsiders come and then have that be a setup for people within China to start growing into so they can make a living doing meaningful projects near and dear to their heart.
And so it was very much that the name hacks elevator was appropriate. It nowadays is more of just your run of the mill kind of VCs venture capitalist investors coming in and with the promise of we're all going to get rich and and just manipulating people into doing startups so that these investors can sell stock and get out before everyone else realizes how little value he's shares of stock.
Pump and dump or pyramid scams. Anyways, that's not the people I'm talking about. Exactly. That's what things have become. And you know we live under capitalism we probably all noticed and wherever money can be made it will and it doesn't matter what the other consequences are.
And so anything we do will be used by some people for this. But that doesn't mean that we can't use what we have to do things that continue to be meaningful for us personally for those around us.
And at Hacker Spaces that's kind of what it's about these physical spaces where people come together in community to support one another to encourage each other to learn and I like encouraging people to find projects that other people might also find meaningful and if that's the case then that's exactly what other people might pay you to offer.
And then you can share that and make a living on a project you love just like I do from TVB gone and gives me the time to go around giving all the workshops and everything that I do to be a professional hacker whatever them.
And like I'm doing here just doing all these workshops and being totally exhausted and loving it. And yeah so these physical spaces are about in my view the community is the main thing.
And then we have tools that people within the community feel are important that they can get the resources to acquire to allow the people to do the projects they think are totally fucking cool and awesome and hopefully that some people at least can make a living on to support themselves and other people around them hiring some people whatever to grow some local economy that can help so many people and who knows what happens from there.
So but that's kind of my my personal thing.
Hacker spaces don't have to have have to have that.
I like it when they do.
But yeah so the tools that the hacker spaces maker spaces fab labs all these different names.
Even accelerators if they share that mindset. It's just sharing that mindset in the community aspects of encouraging teaching sharing learning with one another that I think is the most important thing and that's for me what defines these kind of spaces.
Yeah, I agree that this kind of openness this like also welcoming new people and being inclusive of different kinds of like perspectives and new people is super important.
Yeah, no one and then I mean the design patterns apply right.
Yes, absolutely.
So yes, we just a word about design patterns. If any of you out there listening watching don't know about the design patterns look that up.
Yes, please.
Yeah, there's there's a website that we started in 2008 to encourage people to come together and support each other for hacker spaces maker spaces etc. Hacker spaces.org. And we all know about here we talked about it earlier.
But on there is the original design patterns plus a whole bunch that people have added before. And this is what's worked and well and not so well for hacker spaces around the world. And it's way worth reading for pretty much any kind of community group, because there's great, great advice there.
It doesn't mean that just because it works here you should do it or it didn't work there so you shouldn't. But just think about these things and learn from it we can learn and help one another this way, hopefully a way of passing on lessons that other spaces have learned the hard way.
And, and hopefully, providing patterns and templates of how to avoid that yourself and and not having to necessarily learn every pitfall or potential challenge through first principles, but rather hard knocks experience.
Yeah, yeah, that's very hard like some, some failures to have to do yourself to really learn what's important for community.
Absolutely. Yeah, you can you can read about it and then you have already been warned and you don't need to bring it until like the last minute, or maybe at least can identify when you're starting to hit one of the one of the pitfalls and and know to go sort of look at what other people have done to get around it.
Yeah, like, oh, this is what they meant.
Yeah, yes, yes, exactly. One of the things that I wanted to touch on and ask is, I think when a lot of people think of hacker spaces they think very specific types of activities they think of electronics they think of computers they think of 3D printing.
And I think, I think we all somewhat implicitly are talking about a lot more but I'd like to make it explicit for the audience what what types of spaces. Are you thinking are you each thinking of when you think of this broader community whether it be hack spaces make spaces
centers. You know, fab labs. What are we talking about and what what potentially maybe should we be including in this that we as a hack space community don't currently.
So much that maybe it's not in the traditional sense of the word but for like for the German hacker community there are many many things also the political hacking that was already there in the 80s so that's something when I joined chaos that more and more talks at the Congresses
and camps became like political and some people were criticizing this, but it's like inherent in the whole mindset I would say about that why, why is it inherent.
Because you're repurposing at all levels, like you're hacking politics, trying to take all technologies and also apply them to new things and I was thinking also about things like more and more people in the last 10 years or 15 years started to also to do bio hacking for example and also like body hacking all these kind of different things and everywhere and all like things there's always hacking as a term
also in like buzzwords and major.
Yeah, public discussions so it's not. It's not a term anymore that we have exclusively for us maybe it never was.
But, yeah, all these kind of things that are super interesting to look at that happened 200 years ago or 500 years ago like fermentation, how did we create our food traditionally so that it served our bodies.
The last 2000 years maybe and then only in the past 100 or 80 or I don't know how long since after World War Two maybe we started to have this kind of industrialized food system where we don't prepare the grains, the wheat or the maize anymore like we should with fermentation.
So more and more people get this kind of health issues. And this is all knowledge that is resurfacing slowly and with bio hacking with food hacking is also, yeah, rediscovered in this kind of community which I find so so cool and it's so important to refine and also this connection with nature.
Like Dynacon as a concept of bringing together environmentalism and making and hacking is super cool.
Yeah, it's super like evolving.
You probably have more.
We all know a lot. So, there's a couple things there that make me a couple points I want to make from what you said. So, politics is, I also agree inherently a part of this whole scene in the country that I used to live in politics is kind of something people are allergic to.
And bringing the concept of politics up directly makes people very uncomfortable especially lately, where things are so polarized over there, and all over the world to varying degrees.
So when we started noise bridge, it was explicitly political. We were a whole bunch of people who kind of identified in our own brands of anarchist hippie weirdo punk queer whatever. And we saw that everything we did had an effect in the technologies that we use whether it's biology or food or tech of various sorts have consequences.
And throughout my life and throughout all the lives of people involved. We saw how these consequences were not always positive, because again we live under capitalism that surrounds us and everything we put out into the world will be used for whatever out of our control, and people will use it just to make profit regardless of the other consequences which almost guarantees that it will be negative consequences.
So how do we create things and put it out into the world, so that it creates more good than harm. And that's an open question ongoing and it keeps changing as the technologies change is what we do and what we put out in the world, whether it's electronics whether it's biology, whether it's art.
Art so often by people in these groups goes out into the world and it just gets turned into an effective marketing scam. And we're all manipulated very easily by that and that's why I made TVB gone so I'm just as easily manipulated as everyone else even if I intellectually know it, it still harms me.
And so I didn't want to be exposed more than necessary so I can turn that shit off, but and make it available to others. So, but that that's sort of another point. The, the mindset, along with the community is really important.
And so whether people are explicitly thinking that politics is something we should avoid, which still is kind of mind boggling to me because everything we do has effects outside of us. But, you know, if the community comes together and they want to do art.
Fantastic noise bridge what grew out of this one group that still exists in San Francisco dork bot. And that was before hackerspaces this international thing and big cities mostly where people get together and they have speakers and presentations.
And it's also very social and friendly way for geeks to come together and sort of broaden their horizons and have fun doing so in San Francisco the dark bot was quite often an intersection of art and tech of various sorts.
It was fascinating and so noise bridge growing out of that community in a big way. We had a lot of visual arts a lot of craft. And that's something people don't usually think of when they first hear the word hackerspace or makerspace.
And, but I think it's really really important, because it's all about creativity and not just tech, I can make money. How am I going to make money.
I'll do a startup. Yeah, what will the startup be about. I don't know we can sell stock, whatever. So, but it's really about the creativity and just to harp harken back to what I said earlier, if we can have a space that encourages people to explore whatever realms it doesn't matter if it's tech, bio, food, art, craft, whatever, whatever the community is into or individuals in the community are into people could be encouraging each other to explore and find things they didn't necessarily necessarily even know.
They were interested in until they came to a hackerspace and saw these people doing some cool things on a sewing machine or whatever. And that can change their life. And some people will find projects that maybe they end up making a living from or change the course of their life in a positive way.
And so, the exact realm doesn't have to be tech or whatever, but it's still changing the world around them and then more people and all of us in some way. And that's politics.
We've all traveled a fair amount internationally and I assume you've traveled and visited some of your tiny place, tiny bit. You're connected with many hack spaces and make spaces around the world and as are Mitch and I and we've visited some.
I'd love to talk a little bit about what what is happening at hack spaces, make spaces, innovation centers outside of the West. So, Europe and North America.
What what types of things are happening in, you know, the hack spaces make spaces in developing countries in the global south. What, how does it differ from what we think of, you know, traditionally as, you know, German or American hack spaces.
There's so much. One of the really cool examples I would want to share is like in Brazil. We did a project that was about open hardware in health care and we worked together with Institute of Procurement in Brazil, which is an amazing like creative, like cultural commons oriented space.
And also with some other people in Brazil and they were like, oh yeah, we're doing aromatic pillows. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. I would never like have thought of aromatic pillows in this area.
And they were like, oh yeah, and then that we take the indigenous knowledge from the people in our community of which aroma, aromatic oils are useful and we're suing a pattern that we're publishing open source later.
And this kind of, yeah, work was super interesting. But the, the space that I definitely would like to highlight as well is one hacker space in Togo that's just serving the one kilometer radius around the space.
And they made it their specific mission to really include in their activities and serve with their activities, each person in this one kilometer radius, which is just an amazing concept and they're doing it through like involving people who are like collecting trash, for example, to recycle the trash.
And they're giving like tiny volunteer, volunteer fee amounts to the people participating in the space also sometimes if they have the potential to do that.
But yeah, just thinking of projects that you can just create in this one kilometer radius is super exciting. That's an ambitious mission. I think about, you know, our concept of radical inclusivity at NoiseBridge and this feels like such a radically higher bar than I think what I had envisioned at NoiseBridge.
And a kilometer is a lot of people there. So, yeah, also probably many people know Sa Chin Noi, who's running the salvage garden makerspace in Singapore, where during the pandemic, there was this laptop need for each child to have a laptop to be able to follow the school and like, like in many other parts of the world.
And so they were asking for donations for laptops to maybe give a few out, like refurbish them and give them then out, donate them to the kids in need.
But then they had these thousands of laptops suddenly because they're really good in like activating the community around them.
And then they were like making it. It was really tough because they had so many laptops. So they had a good sorting mechanism of getting all the spare parts in different kinds of shelves and many of the laptops were not in the stage of repair anymore, but they were still good salvage material where they could do something with it.
And then they started to create new things out of the spare parts that they didn't need. Like if the loudspeaker was still usable, they created like a cardboard box and together with the kids, they would solder a new loudspeaker like an external loudspeaker for the kids or take the old laptop battery and then build it together so that it's an external battery for like loading your phone or something.
Like all these kind of things. And so salvaging from all the spare parts they had from these thousands of laptops, they made new educational and like useful projects out of that.
And yeah, that's just something everyone can do everywhere, but it's just so nice how they did it.
Yeah. Yeah, thinking back, yeah, hackerspaces when there's a disaster have filled in, just stepped up to the plate and filled in with their know-how skills experience or lack thereof and learning quickly because the community is set up to be able to do that.
Back when Fukushima was first exploding, yeah, the collaboration between crash space, hackerspace in LA and Tokyo hackerspace in Tokyo created a means, the government was being very not forthcoming about what's going on and people were very worried about being radiated to death.
So they came up with a very inexpensive open source radiation measuring device.
And that turned into actually a company that still exists called Safecast.
And of course during the pandemic there were hackerspaces all over the world in the US and Europe, but also in India and all over the world.
And they made lots and lots of face masks, low tech stuff like that, just with textiles and also the shields.
And then trying to make open source versions of ventilators which were in short supply, especially at the beginning of the pandemic.
So lots of interesting things in that regard.
Yeah, and seeing also hackerspaces in, I don't have much experience in the Middle East.
I've been to two hackerspaces there. I was a hacker in residence in Tel Aviv.
That's pretty much more wealthy people, although there are a lot of people who have almost nothing who were totally welcome to make use of the resources there.
If you ever want to do a tour, go to Science Camp in Basra. They're doing amazing work.
I'd love to.
The other one I went to was through Bilal, who you know, who's part of GIG as well, Global Innovation Gathering.
He organized a trip to Cairo when the first Maker Faire in all of Africa happened there in 2011.
And he found out about these three people who are starting a hackerspace in Cairo.
That would have been the first, at least as far as we knew, hackerspace in all of Africa who is sort of connected to the global scene anyways.
And we did a crowd source funding and got a bunch of money more than we needed.
So we had someone come along to document it, and that turned into some pretty interesting stuff that people can look at to learn from.
But we got donations from hackerspaces from Europe and the US, which people shipped to us and then we brought to Cairo.
And MakerBot donated one of their early kits in 2011.
Back in 2011, not all that long ago, even though it was kind of a long time ago for human life.
But 3D printers weren't really a thing yet. They were just sort of starting.
So these people made one, partly at their forming hackerspace and then later finished it with a huge group of people helping at the Maker Faire.
And it was really wonderful. And then seeing all of these people who found out about this because we did these hackerspace meetups where we just facilitated people who were interested in the idea of coming together in the community
to explore the various things that they could benefit from hackerspaces, making a living, helping the community, using the garbage basically as resources to make all sorts of cool things.
That's so common. Like in Kenya, there's AB3D or something similar is the name.
They just took all the spare parts that were also garbage and created like e-waste and created a new 3D printer out of it.
And one of them he brought also to Republica one day and then was still, I think it's still in the Technik Museum, like in the Museum of Technology or somewhere in Berlin.
Cool. We need to find that out. But also in Ghana, for example, they're doing so much. And I wouldn't call KumasiHive, for example, a hackerspace because they're full blown like a tech educational institution
where they're basically also replacing parts of the tech education that is not very practical in the universities. But then they're doing it in the Hive, in the Hub.
So, hubs itself are so crucial. And then they created like Hub in the Box back then in Cairo, right?
Which is basically also a tiny bit like hackerspace design patterns, but adapted. So, yeah, we're currently recreating that with the project that we're running. So that's really cool.
It is cool. You know, and the thing is like in what we call developing countries, and the US is like dipping down below that level, whatever that might be.
But, you know, people, so many people have so little and there is so much garbage, which, you know, that's the hacker thing.
There's resources in the world. We can make use of them. And it doesn't have to be intended, used in the way intended.
And garbage is intended to be thrown away, whatever that means. But there's valuable stuff there that we can use.
And for people who have very few resources otherwise, they can make use of that. And by necessity in these places, people make use of them.
And that's also a political issue in the sense that so much of importing is impossible.
So there's a lot of innovation laws that are prohibiting imports and that make it super, super hard to get the parts that are in the bill of materials or get the proper whatever machine that you want to have.
And so creating it yourself is, I think, the better option. We should also do it here.
We should. We can learn from what these people in other places in the world, maybe they're doing it from what we might call necessity.
But we can, it's important for all of us, there's so few resources that we've been digging out of the ground.
And we might as well make use of what's available rather than digging up new resources.
As the US spirals downward, there will be more and more people who probably need to do this as well. You know, just as one example of where it would be very useful.
But here in Europe...
I would say even that it's even more important nowadays that resources are depleted and we need to scale down.
We need to have less of everything, but also less of the super high tech and create things with the least possible resource use and the least possible electricity use.
Be it with hardware hacking, but also in software. Writing less lines of code, as many people know, is hard, but it's also better.
So removing things again and making it polished is super important also for energy usage, for example.
And I think that's one of the things, like I think in the introduction they said, like past, present, future of hackerspaces.
And I think that's so much of the future of being mindful of all the good that hackers, makers can do in the world in the sense that we are like creating technology that then will at some point maybe become mainstream.
And that is influencing how people are seeing technology.
Absolutely.
And also repair, for example, repair culture is so crucial and like having textiles and having other kind of more repair oriented things in the hackerspaces is so useful.
Indeed.
So many more.
Oh, there's so much to talk about there. But yeah, if hackerspaces could continue to exist and explore and find cool things and cool ways of looking at stuff that can be beneficial to society at large, as has already happened in lots of ways, but it can happen in so many ways.
There's lots to learn from what we've experienced in hackerspaces.
There's, especially in the Western world, but all over them in the modern world.
There's so little community, you know, functional community in our lives.
And we as geeks have found this one way of creating community, even if it's very broad in its in its themes.
And it works. It's really, really hard work, as we all know.
It's really hard work and sometimes it's can be even traumatic emotionally for all of us.
But, but we need it. It's so important.
And by what we learn, we can share that with others so that other kinds of communities can form, which are so necessary for all of us.
You know, right now the world's becoming more polarized.
Fascism is on the rise, which causes more polarization and people are freaking out more and more.
But we need community more as a result of that, even as that makes it more difficult, more challenging.
So we've already been through this since like 2005.
The hacker space has been in its same place since then as the oldest hacker space in the same place.
That's a long time now. You know, 18 years plus.
And that's a lot of experience to learn from.
So how do we get that information out in the world in a form that other people can easily digest and then want to digest?
Because we need the fun because other aspects are so difficult and challenging, even as they're rewarding.
Well, I'd love to dive into that here.
I mean, I think that's a great transition into some of the things I'd love to discuss of, you know,
what are some of those learnings that we as a community have have, you know,
or we as individuals within these communities have learned, you know,
either firsthand or through others about how to create healthy communities,
about how to create resilient communities in the face of both, I think,
internal challenges within our communities, but also external challenges.
And those end up being kind of the same thing, but with very different, through different lenses anyway.
Yeah, that's very broad. But I can ask more questions to dig into it.
But yeah, the most obvious answer is for me always the trust building within the community.
It's not community if you're not having at least this kind of basic trust with each other.
And it doesn't come without work.
So there's a lot of work of organizing the community, of actually having the space
and meeting in the space without just sitting next to each other and only looking into the computer,
which is important as well. I mean, that's also why we found these spaces, right?
But to have events together, to organize events together, to have cooking parties,
to have like all these different kinds of activities that make you talk to each other
and that help you to really connect also on this kind of personal level,
which is usually the case. Like people who are part of the same space are usually also like friends
with each other at some point, or at least partially.
And this kind of trust works on all levels. Like it works in our global community
because we meet like at least once a year with at least part of the people.
And like the pandemic showed that it's super difficult to recreate this online.
So of course everybody did and tried, but there were so many spaces that were like really having a hard time
and only like rebooting very slowly to normal levels of connection and trust and activity thereof.
And yeah, I think that's just the most important part.
And that's why I'm part of a housing community now where we meet each month for one weekend
to create community together even before we are living together.
And that's a lot of work as well. And I'm learning so many techniques that housing communities use
and that other kinds of communities use that I didn't know from our community yet,
which is super exciting, like these very deep conversations you have with someone.
What are some examples of what's working in the housing community that you don't see in the hackerspace community?
I like this kind of openness for these methodologies.
Like we have, for example, we look at Scott Pack and the community building patterns that he's working with
and even kind of something like communication that communicates needs and wishes more from the eye perspective,
which is also super crucial. Like how do we talk to each other in a community?
Do we criticize a person immediately for doing something if they are active?
And we say "Wer macht hat recht", so who's doing something is on the right side,
but that's maybe not always possible and not always right actually.
So that's creating a lot of conflicts also because the person who's doing something
needs to also speak with the others sometimes or most of the times.
But then also things like just sitting with one other person and really listening to what they're saying
and then speaking yourself and what you're saying.
I think I was often regarding these kind of techniques as something,
"Oh, we don't need this, we're functioning", right?
But no, it's really useful to learn these kind of things.
Effective communication strategies.
I mean there's science behind it, right?
So there's lots of neurobiology, social science, social psychology,
and all these things that you can study and you can be a nerd in.
And then you can share this knowledge again in your hacker space, so that's super cool.
But other people need to be kind of a tiny bit open for that.
You also need to have a discussion in your space around your patterns of how you work together
and how you be together and some kind of openness for also learning these kind of things.
Yeah, absolutely.
Nerds tend to not...
Yeah, and I think there is, you touched on there can be this kind of resistance
to what some people view as too squishy.
That's for other people to talk about.
That's for psychology majors or whatever.
And I think that we as a hacker space commuter desperately need that knowledge and that practice.
I think it's part of the work that we did together at NoiseBridge was really trying to help catalyze some discussions
about how do we have difficult conversations?
What frameworks can we use for talking about sensitive topics, about difficult topics?
It was definitely a learning process, often a hard-fought learning process.
I joined NoiseBridge shortly before the great reboot, which was a time around Occupy Wall Street
where through NoiseBridge's collaboration with Occupy Wall Street and supporting them,
it led to a bunch of people coming into the space who really saw NoiseBridge as a place to have a roof over their head
and cook food in the kitchen and maybe play video games and do drugs in the bathroom.
And that led to a decline in the community where it was a negative feedback loop where more...
The NoiseBridge community that had preceded that, many people said, "I don't want to be part of this environment.
This is an uncomfortable environment for me to be in. This isn't the reason I come to NoiseBridge."
And at the same time made it a more and more comfortable environment for people who did want to do those things.
The space went through a decline and rebirth that we dubbed the NoiseBridge reboot.
So I think we ended up having to really figure out how are we as a community going to learn from this?
And one of the, I think, hard things was figuring out, okay, how do we talk about these topics?
How do we talk about these topics in a way in which it's effective,
that we're not immediately diving into a very heated conflict about something?
And I think also defining who do we want to have as part of our community?
How do we, you know, I think NoiseBridge from its inception had a very strong ethic of radical inclusivity, right?
That was always a key point of being very open and inclusive to whoever wanted to be there.
And I think we really had to face, what does that mean?
And are there people maybe we do want to exclude or are there types of behaviors we want to exclude?
And I think the hackerspace patterns touches on that, but I think we learned in a much deeper way, how do we need to wrestle with that?
Yeah, especially in the United States and especially in San Francisco,
which is getting worse in this regard all the time because there's no social safety net
and there's no services for people who can really benefit from them.
And there are a lot of very hurting people out on the street who have no way to take care of themselves.
And many of these people are mentally ill, many are drug addicted.
There are some resources in San Francisco available for this and not enough.
So some people tried to fill in that void by coming to NoiseBridge.
And NoiseBridge just is not a space that exists for those particular social ills.
And as heart wrenchingly difficult as it was, asking people who are there who really don't belong,
who aren't there for the values and the activities of NoiseBridge,
I became really good at sort of playing the bad guy.
But respectfully following NoiseBridge's one and only one rule, which is be excellent to each other,
respectfully showing people, we actually printed up lists of resources,
like this isn't really the place that's appropriate for this,
but these people can help you check this out and even sometimes taking them there.
And some people though were violent and they just had to be told to leave and not come back.
And just coming up with a scheme moving forward, the reboot was shutting the whole thing down.
Because it was full of garbage, there were five tons of broken useless things that we had to get rid of.
And I know that because we had to weigh it in order to bring it to the dump.
Such a waste of stuff.
And then shutting it down, only people for six months who were building up and reorganizing,
cleaning up, fixing up, talking about how to move forward were there.
And then we opened up slowly and then rapidly and within a year it was back to a thriving community again,
which was such magic and we had no idea if it would work.
It was our last desperate attempt. We called it the reboot.
If your operating system doesn't work, turn it off and on again.
So that worked.
And so what we learned through that experience is some hackerspaces,
from talking to people around the world, I've been to hundreds of hackerspaces,
and they're all different and different organizations, different visions and missions.
Some of them will not exclude anybody.
And they see that as their mission because if you exclude someone, they have no chance of benefiting from you.
So these people are willing to put that time and effort into every single person.
But for a place like Noisebridge that proved to be too draining,
people, once it's too draining, people have to be shown that the community as a whole is hurting too much from this individual's process.
And again, I could play the bad guy and respectfully show people that there are better places for them.
And wow, that's so difficult and it never gets easy.
But we saw that what happened slowly is kind of like you were saying, through the pandemic,
people would lose track just by seeing each other on a screen.
Things would slide and there'd be less connection and therefore a bit less trust and a bit less knowing.
And as more and more new people come, more and more of those people knew less and less about what Noisebridge really was about.
And so the message for new people wasn't communicated after them as effectively about what Noisebridge is about.
And so people had these diffusing, more diffuse and more diffuse notions.
And so what we decided after the reboot was we won't have the door open all the time.
There were thousands and thousands of keys for the door.
So it didn't matter if it was open or not anyways. And I gave away about a thousand or two thousand myself.
And other people made copies. And that was by design.
But after that, the door was locked. And anyone, though, could ring the doorbell at any time.
And if you let someone in, and that was encouraged, you didn't have to, but if you let someone in,
then it was your personal responsibility to give them a tour, the new person.
And if they seemed to be sketchy or violent or like they wanted to steal stuff, they're checking the piece out.
Or if they're saying, I know the owner here.
There's no owner here. It's a panic cassette.
An immediate red flag.
And then we came up with the notion of red flag. So red flag didn't mean a person wasn't appropriate.
It just meant, let's keep an eye on this and talk about it with each other and let them know, too, that, you know,
we're looking out for each other and you're part of this whole thing, too.
And like these behaviors can change if you want to stay here. Cool.
You know, just fit in a little better.
But anyways, people are given a tour. What Noisemakers is about, it's about community, not the tools.
And we're anarchist, hacker space. There's no leaders. Doocracy.
Just do it, but be excellent when you do it and be ready to undo it if people object, if you...
And et cetera, et cetera.
So then that new person, if they want to, the next time someone rings the doorbell,
two minutes later, they can give a tour in their own words.
And that reinforces in them.
And so now everyone coming in has a notion of what they're getting involved with.
And if it's something they want to keep being involved with, and many did, some became super involved.
And yeah, but there is this notion very much that there are some people that unfortunately, for many people,
they're just not a good match for this particular community.
Or not at that point in time. Right?
We had people in our community who, you know, either started out as not a good fit or started out as a good fit
and became not a good fit. And some people went through that cycle multiple times.
That's true. And some people who were very problematic after seeing...
Like they didn't want people to not like them. They weren't like psychopaths or whatever.
And so just seeing that there was problematic behavior as people, various individuals in the community saw,
and just individuals one on one talking, the person was like, "Yeah, you know, I don't want to have these patterns continue."
And there's a few people I can think of who became really wonderful members of the community just because of that kind of talk.
And a lot of people at NoiseBridge had been through training, like official training even, for nonviolent communication is one form,
I think, of what you were talking about earlier.
Yeah, I didn't come up with a name.
And so there's a lot of really great tools for how to talk with people who might otherwise be very untrusting
and there'd be a chance of extreme friction.
But you can... A lot of tools for getting people to feel more open as you become more vulnerable slowly
so that you don't get attacked as well.
And it opens up communications channels to make possible things that seem almost impossible otherwise.
Even on a country level like Ireland voting for a vast majority for abortion rights.
Who would have thought that? Not even all that many years ago.
And if a whole country can do that, certainly a hackerspace can do that.
It gets more challenging when there's housing involved because that's a basic human need.
And when people feel a basic need being threatened, people usually don't behave at their best.
But that doesn't mean it's not possible.
And as you're experiencing it sounds not only possible but wonderful even going through the challenges that are difficult.
I wanted to touch on inclusivity and accessibility of hackerspaces.
I think... And maybe a starting point is why.
Like why make... You know, if you're making a new hackerspace with a few of your friends,
why consider making it more inclusive and more accessible to others?
What are the... Sort of selfishly, what are the benefits to having an inclusive and open hackerspace?
Because we've certainly touched on some of the problems.
I think most of the problems come from not having an inclusive space.
Like not having a diverse space is bringing so many problems because you're not seeing all the perspectives.
Like if you're talking, for example, about being inclusive for age, if you're collaborating with schools,
if you're collaborating with senior citizens, there's so many interesting and very inspiring parts of life that you can get as a result.
Many people in a hackerspace would identify maybe as I don't have so much to do with kids
or I don't have to do so much with elderly people because I don't live in my village anymore or in my small city
where my parents live and where my grandparents live.
And so having this kind of age diversity, for example, brings in this human need of connection
also with different kinds of life stages, I would say.
So that's super interesting.
Diversity of ideas and approaches.
Yeah, totally. And also of knowledge.
Like I can learn so much from a younger person or an older person, for example.
And yeah, I think that's just so good.
And I mean, why would you want to have more people in the space?
It's usually also that you want to sustain the space in some way that it runs longer
because not every person who's starting the space or who's currently running the space will be available in 10 years from now.
I think that's a great point.
And if you want to then come back to the space, like I'm a member of C-Base and I was active many years ago,
more than I am now, but if I come back a few times a year or more than that,
then I can always see what's happening and I can always use the space still.
I can still run an event there or something like that.
I think we as hackers and geeks tend to think about when we're designing systems, we think of them as static.
We think if only I come up with the perfect design and I do it perfect and I polish it just right,
it will never need to be touched again.
And I think we do the same thing when we're designing our communities.
Often we have the tendency to say, okay, based on the group that I start with,
if I make the perfect community around these people, then it will be self-sustaining and it will last forever.
And we forget to acknowledge that people's lives change, that people move, people get new jobs,
people have families, and their involvement with the community shifts over time and that inherently changes the community.
And so I think maybe one of the things that we can talk about is this idea of planning for change,
planning for things to shift over time.
And I think an inherent part of that is you constantly need new people coming into your community
if your community is going to stay healthy and sustain itself.
That's one of the design patterns from 2007-8.
Interesting. I didn't realize that was in there.
And they explicitly say younger people, but I don't think it necessarily has to be younger people.
I think it's good that it's younger people.
But new people, and this is why San Francisco is now dead.
New people have come in, but they're not really there because they're working all the time
to just make enough money to pay for rent and food and expenses.
So new energy is not being put into community there.
And so things have devolved.
The only things that are there are things that are still there, like Noise Bridge and a bunch of other things,
that are coming from older people rather than new people starting new things.
And the same thing in hackerspace is we must have a constant influx of people,
and the more diverse, I think, the better.
And of course we don't want Nazis coming in.
We have limits on our diversity.
You have to have good patterns.
Good code of conduct.
People who fit into our values, and the values need to be explicitly articulated.
So a vision, a mission, people coming in have to know what they're becoming a part of.
And to be aware that there are now trolls in the world who totally love mucking things up purposefully just because they can.
And this is becoming more problematic now.
So how do you get rid of people who are really masterful at weaseling their way in and gratiating themselves
even over a period of years and then revealing that what they really wanted was power in this situation?
Or who knows what?
And there are governments around the world with powerful people who feel threatened by communities they don't have control over,
and some governments pay people to do this or encourage them by getting them, "You're in trouble, boy,
but maybe if you do a couple things for us you could be a little less trouble. Maybe. Let's see what you do."
Whatever, I'm just making this up off the top of my head. I don't know.
But it would really surprise me if there weren't, for example, in Noisbridge people who were there because they were told to be there,
whether they're paid or not.
But my point of view is it almost doesn't matter.
If they learn some cool things that they take forward in the rest of their life, wonderful.
They're human as well.
But their role as an agent, which we have to look out for because that can be harmful to the functional, healthy community.
And same, you know, of course, here there's people who are told to come here to chaos camp or chaos congress,
just like DEFCON, probably even more so there, but who knows?
So, yeah, having a diversity of people who fit in with the community, who will help it grow and evolve and change over time
in a manageable way that's good for the community.
And for that, I think the more diverse the better.
Yeah, we were just running a research project around this in critical making where we just published some tiny handbook
based also on the experience of some people there, like how to create the more inclusive space.
Like what do you need to have good patterns?
Maybe we should add it to the hacker space design patterns at some point.
Of what you should communicate, for example, like have on your website that your wheelchair accessible or not.
If the toilet, for example, is not wheelchair accessible, that's not always a problem.
But you just need to communicate it before and maybe have like a partnership with a nearby shop or nearby restaurant
where people can go to the bathroom and like be just aware of these things.
And just having this checklist hopefully helps some people to be more aware of some parts of what they don't do at the moment.
Or maybe they find, oh, I do something different that is not there yet.
So hopefully they contribute.
But yeah, just I think this kind of process for new people that you described for like having some kind of buddy or mentor for the new ones is so helpful.
Also to see who are actually fitting in and who are not and seeing like which ones of those that currently don't fit in.
Do we want to have anyway?
Like who of those who don't have really much time, which is often like also an issue, who maybe don't have money to contribute to the membership fee or something like these things.
It's always good to reflect on how can we do things differently.
Like many of the hacker spaces nowadays have this kind of model where you can choose what you pay from like even zero euros to be a member of the space.
That's what we did with Ridge.
There was no monetary requirement for any amount of participation in the space.
And then just to publish, hey, in the month we need so and so much money to cover our rent and costs.
And in the end it evens out because some people will have the means to contribute more and they see, oh, we are like not making the full amount that we need each month.
And so then they can give a little bit more and others without shame can say, hey, I'm currently running really low on money.
I'm just giving one euro a month.
And that's so cool just as a concept.
And money is only one way to contribute to the community and the space.
There are many other valuable ways to contribute.
Let's talk a little bit about sort of inclusivity.
I think there are a lot of people out there probably watching right now who have had or are having an experience that I had when I first came into the community,
which is that they're intrigued about hacker spaces, but they're also intimidated by them.
I think when I first heard about NoiseBridge, I was very intimidated of is this a place that I belong?
How are people going to react to me there?
Can I really just show up and ring the doorbell?
What's that going to be like?
And that experience lasted for a long time.
That experience of feeling like an outsider and feeling like maybe I shouldn't be there and maybe I didn't belong there lasted for six or 12 months.
And I've heard that from a bunch of people of sort of feeling like maybe this isn't for me, maybe I'm an outsider, maybe this is an in-club,
maybe this is not a safe place for me to be, maybe this is not an accessible place to be.
I think I would ask both of you, what would you say to someone like that who had yet to visit a hacker space?
And then I'm going to ask you again, what would you say to someone who said that who had been to a hacker space, been to the same hacker space ten times?
Want to start?
Sure.
You know, we all have imposter syndrome, right?
All of us.
No matter how accomplished we've been in our lives or how little accomplished we've been in our lives,
we all think like, oh yeah, all these other people have done this stuff, but I've only taught 100,000 people how to solve it.
But I still suffer from this.
Me too.
How can we not?
But we grew up, most of us, as introverted geeks.
And it was probably worse being the oldest here, growing up as a kid as a geek, being beaten up every day for being queer as well,
but being an introverted geek as well.
And yeah, it's difficult.
And then being part of a group, for me that meant getting beaten up in school while the teachers...
Yeah, that was not a familiar experience for me.
And then...
Being part of any in-group was a foreign experience.
No, I mean, we are not the cool kids, right?
And so going to a place where you see people getting along and it seems safe, but is it really safe?
Can we really trust this?
No, yeah, maybe, I don't know.
And going to my first hacker conference and no one even teased me.
It's just like, what the...
Is this real?
What's going on?
And then going to the first CCC event for me, 23C3, it was even more warm and welcoming.
And these people know so much about internet security, the things I knew back then nothing about.
And the hardware people I met knew way more than me about so much.
And yet people were wanting me to share what I know.
And then these people sharing with me felt so wonderful.
But yeah, it takes time.
We bring ourselves with us wherever we go, of course, right?
And even if things feel really wonderful, those patterns from, for me, decades, aren't going to go away really quickly.
But the one thing that I would tell myself as I'm going to more and more of these events and then starting NoiseBridge eventually with other people is...
You know, I've been through all this stuff and it really is just a bunch of introverted geeks.
And everyone has imposter syndrome.
And we all go through it in our each individual unique ways.
But that's what I share with people when I talk about, you know, like if I meet someone who's at all geeky in whatever realm, this camp, it's my favorite event.
You might really like it and it's worth spending the money and going way out of your way, whatever you need to do to go there.
And same with going to hackerspaces or whatever events that they seem interested in.
Go and sit with that uncomfortable feeling.
But the first camp that I went to, 2007, like everyone's having this great time from my perspective and I'm just like, "Oh, this isn't for me. Why am I here?"
But something always clicks.
And then I go from being an observer to a participant.
And that transition happened every time.
It took a while every time because of my sort of unconscious reluctance to feel trustful and okay in a group.
You know, and I still have that in many ways, but I have now so much experience where it just always works out.
I just have to trust that it will and it does.
And I share that with other people as well.
So that's what I do.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think for me it was mostly being connected online already to so many people, like from, I don't know, 2007 to 2010.
And how did you get connected to them initially?
Like just following people, like back then on Twitter, but nowadays I would do it on Macedon, of course.
And to find nice people that I was interacting with, like writing each other, like answering, and all these kind of things.
And then I was already feeling like we know each other when I met people.
And so when I now meet someone that I follow in Macedon and that I have conversations with, then I can like, "Oh, hey, I'm this one."
We know each other from the Internet and we see each other soon on the Internet again.
So you don't feel like it's a totally cold interaction.
Yeah, totally.
And it's so much easier for me to just write a short text instead of like, "Hey, Mitch, how are you?"
Yeah.
So that's so much easier for me.
And then also being active, like you said, participant, and that's like organized participation in your hackerspace, I would say, is something to really do.
Like here, you would be an angel and it's your first CCC event, but you can still be like immediately active.
Which are the volunteers here that help run the camp.
Yeah, volunteers are called angels.
And when I was at my first Congress 2010, I was also immediately like registering as an angel because that's what you do.
And then you do like, I don't know, bottle collection shifts or whatever other shift is available.
And you meet people, you do something together.
That's super important.
And I think that's also possible in any like hackerspace.
That's also done in most of the hackerspaces, I would say, that you can have like events where you do something together with people.
You have this kind of open days where people can come and they could try out something like Solider for five minutes.
That's what I was going to add on to that is Mitch for a very long time ran Circuit Hacking Mondays where every Monday night he would teach people to solder.
And I think that was the event that I started once I became fully comfortable at NoiseBridge and felt a part of it.
And people would ask me, how can I get involved in NoiseBridge?
One of my suggestions was go to Circuit Hacking Mondays because it was an organized event at a specific time, regardless of where I was in the world.
Regular?
Who I was sending there.
I knew that it would happen, right?
Even if Mitch wasn't in town, somebody else would run it.
It would always happen.
And it was, it had enough structure to it that it started at a specific time.
There was a specific activity.
Somebody led it.
As open as NoiseBridge is, I think its openness can be intimidating as well.
And so having more of a set time and a set destination and some structure to it gives you, gives someone who doesn't know how the community works a set role to play.
So that they kind of know what they're supposed to do for their first, and then they can sit in the space for a couple hours and see how other people are interacting with each other and use that as an on-ramp.
And see the sewing next door.
Exactly.
And then the cleaning over there, the bio stuff over there, and get, "Oh, I should come back."
Yeah, and then you would have people leading these workshops in a diverse set of people.
So you would have all different kinds of workshops maybe that are run so that it's representative of who you want to attract.
Yes.
Because it's easier to come back again and be less intimidated.
For me, for example, if a workshop is led by a woman, then it's easier for me to join it and to be more open for it.
And it's the same if you're running something for young people.
It's maybe easier if it's a younger person running it, or running it together with somebody else.
You can see someone like you in the space.
Yeah.
So you're coming back more easier.
Yeah.
And I think also, and that would be the less tiny contribution, but a bigger one, making something that makes sense in the space.
Contributing something to the community, creating something that is helping your surroundings, but also in the more general sense.
Like there's humanitarian hacking with CADOS here in Berlin, but probably also with many other organizations.
You can create, for example, humanitarian aid equipment.
You have something where we really have a project that is making a difference in the world.
Where you can then see, oh, the thing that I soldered helps someone else to be like...
I wanted to touch on codes of conduct.
It was something that you and I mentioned when we were talking earlier today.
And I know, Mitch, you've been involved in creating codes of conduct and discussions around that.
I guess I was thinking about it in the context of, you know, we were talking about communication earlier in the context of accessibility.
And that doing work to make your space accessible is important.
But it doesn't end there.
It's important, but it's not actually always necessary to do all of the accessibility things.
The more important thing is to communicate what does exist so that when people are considering going to a hackerspace,
that they know what to expect and know based on their needs.
And I think maybe code of conduct falls into a similar category in terms of being inclusive,
is that it helps to signal to people what kind of space should I expect, you know,
and what should I expect is considered acceptable behavior and what's unacceptable,
and what kind of level of safety can I expect out of a space.
Totally. And you don't even need to label it code of conduct if you don't like it.
That's part of your culture in the hackerspace.
You can also say, like, this is how we are excellent to each other, and this is how we act as a team.
It's not obvious for everyone. Sometimes in a space for science education kids,
they are writing guidelines for parents on the wall.
Oh, your mic. So maybe repeat what you just said.
Sometimes in this tiny science education space where they put guidelines for the parents on the wall
where don't tell your kid what they are doing there, don't explain to the kid what they are just currently experimenting with,
but let them explore themselves. And that's such an important rule,
and it's not so obvious because as parents you always explain things.
And I think also as the person who knows something, also in a hackerspace, you often explain things,
and maybe, yeah, you asked before, and this is something that you can write in your code of conduct
or in your guidelines, like, ask people before you want to explain something,
because that feels so much more comfortable.
And then people are really happy to hear the explanation, right?
Yeah, as I see it, code of conduct or whatever it would be called,
having an awareness team is more the common way to saying it now,
is really a part of conflict resolution as I see it, as well as having, just saying that you have,
you're welcoming to all of these people, no matter who you are, race, gender, etc., etc., etc.
Everyone's welcome, and just saying that is a really good thing,
because then someone who's like, "Oh, I've always been an outsider,
and I've been beaten up for being queer, trans, whatever,"
knowing that this place is explicitly saying it, "I belong there," is really helpful.
So from my experience, the more minimal a code of conduct or whatever to call it,
the more minimal it is, the better.
And have it be so that everyone should be encouraged, if possible,
and it's not always possible because of lots of different reasons,
to work things out one-on-one, if possible,
and if not, to have people who volunteer to be mediators
and have a bunch of people, if possible, so that everyone involved
can know that someone that they think they can trust is listening to them,
so that they know they're being heard.
And that's the hugest part of conflict resolution,
that each person feels heard, listened to, respected,
and from there, having some maybe not totally explicit,
depends on the organization.
Like at Noisebridge, we found that if we were very explicit,
that there would be people who would do what we called "lawyering,"
you know, gaming the rules, just to get their way,
and that drains so much energy from the community.
So we had a more anarchist approach, case by case,
as problems arose and many problems arise in any community,
and just coming up with creative ways, sometimes involving that person directly,
sometimes more like through a mediator,
we would rarely bring people in conflict who couldn't work things out one-on-one together,
sometimes with the consent of both that seemed appropriate,
but anyways, there's all these different possibilities,
and doing things case by case, we found at Noisebridge,
with that particular kind of community, to be the best approach.
But just having the COC, or whatever to call it, as part of conflict resolution,
I think is the main thing, because we need conflict resolution,
and you have to think about that before there's a conflict,
otherwise you're just dealing with crisis after crisis.
Oh yes, but I think it's important to really discuss these kind of guidelines,
this kind of code of conducts with the whole community in some way,
because it doesn't help if you just copy a code of conduct from some other place,
and then you just impose it, and you write it somewhere.
And it's not a one-size-fits-all.
Again, it's that there's no perfect design here, it really has to be specific to the community.
And I think one of the things that I learned through my involvement with Noisebridge is that
a really key part of a code of conduct,
or we had our one rule, be excellent to each other at Noisebridge,
was that it is important for that to be a dialogue,
and an ongoing dialogue that lasts the entire lifetime of the community.
That when Noisebridge had its most unhealthy moments was often when that dialogue stopped
or was blocked in some way, that actually having the discussion over and over and over again
of what are our values, how does this match our values, how do we interpret our values,
was the key piece, having that discussion constantly asking ourselves over and over again,
rather than viewing it as a design problem that can be solved once up front and then never touched again.
Yeah, this is critical.
So there's this one concept that might be appropriate to bring up here.
So I started a commune in 1993 in rural America, and I learned so much from that,
and I learned from trauma, not from joy.
But I learned, and so much of my community organizing since then is from what I learned there.
There were three key takeaways from that experience.
The initial group of people who start a community should choose themselves explicitly,
meaning it's not just three or four or whatever random people who happen to have the time.
It's fine if they're random people and they talk about it and they realize,
"Oh, we do jive and this is really good," and then they can choose to be the people who start it.
That's a really important starting point.
Because otherwise there's going to be all these conflicts and resentments that build up,
and then it's going to be really difficult sooner rather than later.
The other thing is to explicitly have a means for rejecting and accepting new people
and how to do conflict resolution and, unfortunately, part of any community,
almost any community, to kick out people who just aren't working out for whatever reasons
and have all that be explicit.
So that's key things, and both of those were fatal flaws in the commune I started.
Those weren't there.
The third one is a little bit more difficult to explain, but it's so important.
All cultures have built into them, all communities have built into them checks and balances
that encourage just automatically, subconsciously, with the way the culture is.
They encourage what the community thinks is good in people
and discourage what they think are bad in people.
And we're all, you, me, all of us, are capable of all sorts of goods and bads
given the wrong circumstances and the right circumstances.
So what do we do to encourage what we believe collectively is the best and good
and discourage what we feel is not so good or terrible?
And at Noisebridge, we're a bunch of, like I mentioned earlier, anarchists, hippie, punk, weirdo, queer, whatever, people,
and we wanted no leaders except when appropriate and dissolve,
when whatever the project goes away or whatever, anarchists with as few rules as possible.
And so after talking about all this and with all of our talks, every Tuesday meeting,
every week for a year before we got our first space, forming a really strong culture,
we came up with this brilliant idea of having one and only one rule that is subjective.
And because it's subjective, what does it mean?
We are required to continually have an ongoing conversation about it.
And that is our checks and balances.
So, you know, like, you took that pile of resistors that had been sitting there for a month
and put them all in bins in the right place. That is incredibly excellent. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
You know, like, last night you made this incredibly yummy food. Thank you for that. That was excellent.
But no one cleaned up. And the rats came again. And the noise rats.
And that kind of wasn't excellent. So, you know, can you ask for help for cleaning or whatever?
You know, and you have to be excellent when you're talking about what's excellent and what isn't.
But it's an ongoing evolving, slowly evolving what this one rule actually means.
And this checks and balances worked for NoiseBridge. And that's not necessarily good,
that particular one, for all hackerspaces by any means.
And it's not easy to come up with artificially starting a group, how do you build in the checks and balances.
But they are there. Like, it's not socially acceptable for me to go out here after we're done
and scream at someone just because they walked in front of me or something. Right?
It happens just in the workshop. I just had some, there were two people yelling at each other.
I had to step in and I actually had to yell at someone to stop yelling.
And it worked out. And after we had a great workshop. But because it's not socially acceptable, it's built into this culture.
I lived in Boston where it is culturally acceptable and encouraged for people to yell at each other on the sidewalk.
And it happens as a result. Right? So, but whatever. How do you build that in?
And there's no easy answer. And there's no one size fits all.
But it's really, really important to build a resilient culture that can persist and overcome even serious problems.
I think that's actually the topic I'd like to close on here.
We've touched on several times throughout this conversation is this idea of resiliency.
How do we build resilient communities? And Mitch, I think you talked a little bit earlier
that we live in a really challenging time for building and maintaining resilient communities.
You know, we have a rise of fascism. We have an increasingly polarized political landscape and culture.
What are you both seeing that's working and not working in terms of building more resilient communities in, say, in the past five years?
Right? Because I think things are rapidly changing in this regard.
Well, that's just such a big question. And so I think we touched upon quite a few parts that also help a community become more resilient.
And I think I would repeat the trust of the trust answer, because I think that's super crucial.
Which seems to paraphrase what I heard you say earlier, correct me if I heard this wrong,
but it really seems like that's rooted in building personal relationships within the community and using those as the foundation for trust. Is that?
Yeah, I think so. And also doing something together like shared experience.
That's also crucial. But also having a goal together. I think that's also very, very helpful.
And talking about that. What is the mission? What are you creating together that then brings the right people also into the community?
Because if you're going for a goal, then there's more drive. So creating this kind of camp here, that's a big effort that people bring together.
And I think that's something you can circle back to in the toughest of times and the hardest of conflicts to say,
"Well, we may disagree and we may be at odds right now and this may feel very black and white,
but at the end of the day we both have this shared underlying goal, this shared underlying mission."
Yeah, and the values also. If the values are in line and if people are about this kind of open culture or about the duocracy or about these kind of things,
if this doesn't match my values, then I'm less inclined to actually talk to each other.
Yeah, you know, one sort of way that I've thought about things a lot in various groups I've been a part of and many I've left as well is personally,
I have to feel sort of metaphysically that I'm getting more out, more energy out than I put in.
And so that has to be the case if it's going to work for me. But it's required that everyone involved is feeling that way.
Because if I'm the only one feeling that way or if there's a whole bunch of people who are feeling like they're going to be burning out
and I don't feel good benefiting from their burning out, I want everyone in an organization ideally to feel that overall,
if not in this particular moment or even this week, that they're getting more out than they put in.
And if that's happening, then the community is working super well.
Definitely. But that also like this kind of burning out brings me to another part where it's just in so many communities and spaces,
it's the case that there are just a few super active people who are like always on the edge of burning out, which is so problematic.
And if you like take them out of the community, then like, yeah, either space shuts down or other people come in
and they manage to reorganize and they manage to create a better working structure.
And so realizing that yourself, that you're like running too much of the space maybe and taking a step back
and trying to get new people in, which adds to your own load because you need to educate them first about what they can be doing maybe.
But generally that's super important just to realize.
And I think we need to come back to that taking change given that if you're reliant on just a few really active members
that that doesn't allow for change. It doesn't assume that at some point that's going to be different.
Yeah, and we need to look out for each other.
And we've had times at NoiseBridge and other groups I've been a part of where people are looking out for each other
and just saying, I really appreciate everything you've been doing and I hate to say this,
but I think you're doing too much and you need to do less because I'm afraid of what's going to happen.
Yeah, but other people can fill in. You don't have to feel responsible for everything.
And saying that in the light of both you stepping back is good for you as a person, but also is necessary for the community.
It's on both sides.
Indeed. And so in starting NoiseBridge, I have been the person burning out and taking all this stuff on
and being afraid of if I don't do it, no one else will and no one will do it well or whatever, being a control freak about it.
And when I was like a teenager, that was exclusively what I did. But I kind of learned over time.
And when I was part of the group starting NoiseBridge, I insisted on it being an anarchist hackerspace
because I knew that otherwise I might slip into that role again, which I could do too easily.
But if it's an anarchist space and everyone takes responsibility and that works, great.
I'm pretty willing to put tons of energy in as long as I'm getting more out than I put in.
And other people, if they step up and make that happen, wow, cool.
And if it doesn't, well, it was an experiment that was worth trying.
Unfortunately, I think we're pretty much at the end of our time here. This has been a marvelous conversation.
I like to talk for a lot longer.
I'd like to close with where can people find out more information and more resources?
Where should people go if they have never been to a hackerspace and they want to go visit one or become involved with one?
I would say hackerspaces.org is the first address.
Like a few years ago, many people helped to bring more life into this again.
And also everybody can do that still to update if they find a space is not running anymore in their city,
that they can just update the pages.
That's a list of all of the hackerspaces in the world that are not.
If they have been added, so you can add your own as well.
So that's super important.
And also to get the hackerspace design patterns, for example.
And other resources, there are a bunch of articles written for hackerspaces.org about starting, running, solving problems at hackerspaces and other communities.
There's also links to lots of other articles written elsewhere that are online.
It's a wiki, so anyone can add content there.
And there's a lot of really good content there.
It's not as active as it was, say, six, seven, eight years ago, but it's still a really good resource.
There's also an email list that anyone can sign up for, whether they're running a hackerspace or wanting to or having problems,
ask questions of many people who have ideas.
Many have perhaps been through problems that you're having, and you can ask questions and get really good answers.
Yeah, and depending on the location, if you're in Germany, of course, the list of CCC-connected hackerspaces is very long.
There's also the network of open workshops, which is an amazing resource as well.
So not all of these open workshops in Germany are like hackerspaces, but they are just also...
Where can you find that?
It's called Verbund offener Werkstätten, and they have a map also of all the kind of open workshops all over the German-speaking region.
And it would be amazing to have this also globally or in other countries, so people should fork this, definitely.
And then on globalinnovationgathering.org, for example, we have a list of the members,
or of most of the members who volunteered to put themselves in the database.
And what I find super interesting is also what we're mapping currently with Open Nowhere.
So from the Internet of Production Alliance, there's this new standard created to find out where you can produce things.
And so you could also add machines and knowledge to this kind of map,
and also profit from this map, of course, to find out where you can produce or create things.
So that's also super nice to check out.
Fantastic. Well, Aprika and Mitch, thank you so much for joining me for this chat.
This was fantastic.
You're very welcome. Thanks.
And thank you all at home for watching, and have a good night.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.