[Noisebridge-discuss] A modest proposal.

rachel lyra hospodar rachelyra at gmail.com
Thu Feb 9 21:06:05 UTC 2012


I would categorically block any proposal to make noisebridge members
only after hours. I (like many people) would not be here without the
openness to awesome people who are not paying money.  I would not have
finished any of my hardware interface projects without being able to
hack all night.  No I am not bad at time management.  I like digging in
deep for a long time, you know, hacking?  I eventually became a member
so I could block ideas like this that i thought were bad for NB.

I don't have a problem with the door being more difficult to open after
certain hours.

We need to hack our own system, not give up on it.  I think I threw up
in my mouth a little when Matt wrote "the risk here far outweighs the
reward...You can have a place to solder at 4 am.  Or you can have a
place that is universally accepting and open to the public.  You cannot
have both without tempting fate...Stop tempting fate for no good reason."

The risk of what?  All night hacker dens being overcome by hordes of
tweaking oogles?  AS FUCKING IF, PEOPLE.  Is this the revenge of the
nerds or not?  Is this a hackerspace or not?  Do we jettison our ideals
and run away because people got into our system that we didn't like?  Or
do we come up with a better authentication protocol?

I still maintain the most likely epic bad thing to happen to noisebridge
is the fire marshal finding us.  We can't solve that problem with
liability insurance.

R.

On 2/9/2012 12:25 PM, Danny O'Brien wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:51 AM, Will Sargent <will.sargent at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>> Like many proposals currently being kicked around, this is perfectly
>>> reasonable one, which has been somewhat discussed to death in previous
>>> rounds. A lot of NB members really like it being open late, and it's one of
>>> the things that a lot of people want to keep that there's somewhere in San
>>> Francisco where you can hold a soldering class at 4AM.
>>>
>>> It, and the related one of it being members-only after hours gets
>>> discussed a lot in meeting, carefully considered, and then rejected.
>>>
>>> I know, we is crazy. But we're very picky in what craziness we want.
>>
>>
>> I don't remember anyone rejecting or moving to block it, and I don't see
>> anything in the notes about it.  There was a "well, the community wouldn't
>> go for it" -- but that's a self fulfilling prophecy in that it shuts down
>> discussion of "unacceptable" topics.  Case in point -- no-one thought we
>> could get consensus on banning Patrick at the time, but I saw over 30 people
>> in the room that night and everyone was on-board -- philosophically
>> disgusted, maybe, but on-board.
> 
> I wasn't actually referring specifically to last night, but this as an
> ongoing proposal that gets brought up from time to time, and has done
> since time immemorial.
> 
> The last time that really stuck in my mind for obvious reasons, was
> when *I* proposed it, at least in its "members after hours" version.
> After circuiting it around then, my conclusion then was that it wasn't
> likely to pass consensus.
> 
> The Patrick case felt very different -- a lot of people had concerns
> that would have led to them blocking, and we spent a long time
> addressing those concerns so that they felt better. My belief is that
> people would object to a proposal to close NB after hours on
> principle. I might be wrong though, and you can easily proposal this
> for discussion next week. It would at least, as you say, bring the
> objections out to the fore.
> 
> I'll say here that I wouldn't block, but I'd want a lot more detail
> about how to do this. I don't think there's anything basic about
> Noisebridge that requires it to be open 24/7. I think it would be
> logistically hard to achieve (previous objections: how and who closes
> the space? If it's members after hours, how do we enforce or even know
> that), but sorting out those logistics could conceivably be better for
> the community as a whole. I'd want to spend a lot of time listening to
> people who work at Noisebridge after hours, who are generally poorly
> represented in our system.
> 
> I might even suggest that if this goes up to consensus, we should have
> at least one meeting (maybe not *the* meeting) at 1AM in the space.
> For all people have an image of NB-at-night as being a den of
> iniquity, it has its own constituency, and they should organize.
> 
> d.
> 
>>
>> Noisebridge may be crazy, but it does act in the furtherance of having a
>> good time.
>>
>> Will.
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