[Noisebridge-discuss] stop pretending to be me

[Ever Falling]

Honestly if you have any ideas on how to herd these cats I'd love to hear
them. Noisebridge has a ton of potential but it's quagmired in a number of
things involving how such an open space should be managed and where we
should draw lines at what we find acceptable. Nerds are an interesting
breed because they come in all shapes and sizes and unfortunately that also
means that personalities, egos, world views, and (let's face it) mental and
social issues are all amplified and this causes a lot of head-butting which
i think is the reason for the vast majority of these problems. This is
just exacerbated with what seems to be a fairly loose tolerance (if not at
the very least ill-defined) on what's worth ejecting someone from the space
for. In that light I'm not sure how exactly anyone is supposed to 'cut it
out'. Maybe all this freedom is a hindrance in a way? I donno.

On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 1:09 AM, John Adams <jna at retina.net> wrote:

> We weren't close-knit when we started. We were loosely selective and made
> many friends along the way.
>
> -j
>
>
> On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 1:06 AM, Ever Falling <everfalling at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> my experience is that the mailing list is nothing like the actual space.
>> this is the dark place where drama thrives and i actively discourage people
>> i tell about noisebridge to keep the mailing list at a distance if they
>> find they like the space itself. That being said I think maybe (and i could
>> be wrong about this because i don't know the history of hackerspaces) it's
>> a bit unfair to compare a small close-knit group of people to a much larger
>> and open free space for which 'hacking' seems to have a very
>> loose definition and application.
>>
>> On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 12:49 AM, John Adams <jna at retina.net> wrote:
>>
>>>  From the outside, looking in...
>>>
>>> I was a founding member of one the earliest US hackerspaces, the l0pht,
>>> before we knew what the word was. This was when the words Open Source
>>> didn't exist and all we knew of was the League of Programming Freedom,
>>> which would later become the Free Software Foundation, thanks to RMS.
>>>
>>> It was when reverse engineering electronics wasn't much of a crime and
>>> most of the laws regarding "Cybersecurity" didn't exist yet. We started off
>>> because our girlfriends and wives (yes, some of us were that old) hated
>>> having all that technology littering our apartments and we all wanted some
>>> place to work.
>>>
>>> Women in our organization like Limor Fried (ladyada) and Window Snyder
>>> forged new ground for women in technology and rallied against male-driven
>>> engineering fields to create new opportunities to teach others engineering
>>> and security, for both men and women (and girls and boys.)
>>>
>>> If not for our ability to come together and share what we knew, none of
>>> us would have had Internet access or the chance to learn and work on Unix,
>>> which back then was extremely difficult to do (we had to cobble together
>>> Sun Sparcstations and Vax machines from junk). Even Slackware was in it's
>>> mere nascent phase of development and Linux was very, very unstable. These
>>> experiences, building these machines, built careers for people.
>>>
>>> What we did back then was more than likely illegal, and we had to work
>>> together to get access to technology. Our small group of people went on to
>>> do great things, from speaking in front of congress, to breaking RSA's
>>> SecurID, and forming great companies like @stake and VeraCode. All because
>>> we worked together on shared interests.
>>>
>>> What I do have to say is that the actions of some of the people on this
>>> list saddens me, and I am just responding to what I see here on the list.
>>> It keeps me from becoming an active member of Noisebridge. It keeps me from
>>> getting on my bicycle, riding to the mission and sharing what I know (and
>>> learning new things from) all of you because my perception of the actions
>>> of a few make it sound like a wonderful hackerspace has become overrun with
>>> drama and madness.
>>>
>>> It keeps me from donating money and certainly keeps me from helping out.
>>> You've got a permissive society here, perhaps too permissive to permit
>>> great things to happen.
>>>
>>> Cut it out. Convince me I'm wrong. I think all of you are smart enough
>>> to work through this and to realize the value in the resource that you have
>>> worked so hard to create and the insanity in allowing this to continue
>>> along the path you've chosen.
>>>
>>>
>>> --john
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
>>> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
>>> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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