[Noisebridge-discuss] First Ever International Tahoe-LAFS Summit (can we host it at Noisebridge?)

[Nathan]

On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 3:12 PM, Zooko O'Whielacronx <zooko at zooko.com> wrote:
> Dear people of Noisebridge:
>
> You may have heard of Tahoe-LAFS before -- http://tahoe-lafs.org .
>

Indeed, I have.  (Sly wink.)

> It is a secure, decentralized storage system.

[snip ...]

> So, the Tahoe-LAFS open source project is planning to have our first
> ever International Tahoe-LAFS Summit at the end of this month. The
> four most prolific coders on the open source project will be there,
> plus a few other people who contribute to the project in various ways
> (newbie coders, documentation, security auditing). Can we use
> Noisebridge space for our meetup? We're going to be going at it most
> or all of Monday the 27th through Thursday the 30th.

As a Conscientious Non-Member of Noisebridge and secret inside agent
for the LAFS project, I heartily invite the summit to use NB for its
purposes, provided all attendees fill out a 27b-6 and pledge to uphold
and defend our constitution:

Information about form 27b-6:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eosrujtjJHA

The Noisebridge constitution:

http://is.gd/NXnj3G

>
> I've looked at the agenda and while there are always other events
> going on at Noisebridge, I suspect that we could find space there, and
> hopefully also a whiteboard, to do our design work and our coding
> sprints.

As Andy implied, the likelihood of finding a space depends on the
summit's size and how many other meetings require the same resources
(which sound like seats and a whiteboard, right?).

If there are < 15 people, seating should be easy, and I'll make sure
to get a mobile whiteboard, should the class rooms be taken.  If there
are > 15 people, we should probably start negotiating with other
planned events now, or look into one of Andy's proposed alternative
venues.

> Also if there is interest I would like to organize a community
> tutorial on how to set up your own secure distributed storage grid. I
> imagined Noisebridge is home to enough folks who have an interest in
> this that we could set up a storage grid to share.

My impression is that there would definitely be interest in such a
tutorial.  I can think of 4 people right off the bat who'd probably
want to attend, and given that I'm not a NB social hub, I expect there
could be a large number of interested people.  This may be slightly
harder to plan.

One option is to have a very "dispersed" install-fest where there are
clumps of 3-5 people spread around the space.  We could organize this
if people who have experience in installation/configuration volunteer
to spread out to groups of people with less experience but interest.

>
> Please let me know:
>
> a) Is this the sort of thing the Noisebridge space can be used for in principle?
>

Yes.  In principle and practice.

> b) Will it be too crowded or busy those mornings/days/evenings/nights?
>

I'm not sure.

My ~15 people threshold above is based on my infrequent sampling of
the business of the space, and I've heard there's been a recent surge
in population (perhaps from the Make Live show?).  I'll start hanging
out there this week to get a feel.

For the install fest, there could be perhaps 50 people in *addition*
to the "ground level" population and I believe it would still work.
If there were another popular event, it might get chaotic, though.

For the focused developer summit work, if the group is ~15 people in
size and noisebridge becomes untenable, we could migrate to several
nearby coffeeshops that can probably house that many people, or we
could plan a more certain contingency venue.

> c) Anybody want to set up a Noisebridge storage grid and/or host a
> tutorial for the community: "How to run your own secure cloud storage
> system" ?

I'd like to!  I am not sure about the hardware infrastructure at
noisebridge, but I have some older (maybe power-heavy) rackmount
servers.  I could donate one to server as an introducer.

Or, it might make more sense to run an introducer on an existing
server in the NB infrastructure.  I'll poke around.  (I wouldn't be
surprised if NB machines already are on LAFS grids.)

>
> Thank you!
>
> Regards,
>
> Zooko


Nathan