[Noisebridge-discuss] Transcript of panel on DARPA and hacker spaces

[David Molnar]

I used www.speakertext.com to transcribe the panel Mitch organized on DARPA
funding for hacker spaces, which came up a while back.
You can view the original video here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3HGUqR4o1M&feature=player_embedded#!

I've attached the plain text transcript.

Speakertext also has a nifty synchronized "captionbox" that lets you scroll
through the transcript, then click on a sentence to jump the video to that
location. Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to share or host that. If
someone happens to know how to do that, please contact me.

David Molnar
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I think diversity of opinion in thought and feeling and all this is what makes our community so amazing. We all do so many things and we're willing to share it with one another and that's what makes for really wonderful community. And this panel is a bunch of people who have thought a lot about DARPA funding for their projects or their hackerspaces and their lives. We all come from a very different place in all of this and so if we are all gonna share our thoughts, feelings, opinions and, in a respectful way of course, and I hope everyone in the audience can respect people for their differing opinions because that's what, as I said, makes for a strong community. 

Myself, I do have pretty strong 
opinions on this probably as most of you know. I'm totally biased, even though I'm a moderator, I am biased, but I don't want to use this panel to push for my point of view. I really do want this panel to present issues around DARPA funding and other funding sources that may or may not fit in with your goals, and see, does that matter? For me it does, for other people maybe, maybe not, we'll find out. 

Yeah, so just a 
brief word about my background in this subject. 

In April, I made a public statement on Facebook and Google, various social networks all exactly the same message and I'll just read it. It's very simple. It's official. I'm greatly saddened that I won't be able to help with this year's US Maker Faires after they applied for and accepted a grant from DARPA. I look forward to working and playing at Maker Faire again after they are no longer associated DARPA. 

That was my entire statement. It caused quite a flurry in various sectors of the Internet, some respectful, some not and it was not easy to deal with for me, personally, but I'm really glad I made that statement because it got a lot of dialogue happening around this subject where there really are no simple, easy rights and wrongs. And it's actually quite complex if you try to think about it. 

Just for me, Maker Faire has been an incredible, unambiguously wonderful part of my life since the first one in 2006. I never imagined I would have to think about difficult issues surrounding my involvement with them. And I don't really wanna go into my reasons for this, but it was way not easy choice for me to come to to not help because I miss it greatly. 

So DARPA, for people who don't know, is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And according to their website, their mission is to maintain the technological superiority of the US military, and prevent technological surprise from harming our national security by sponsoring revolutionary, high-payoff research, bridging the gap between fundamental discoveries and their military use. 

That's from their website. From the Wikipedia page, the current budget is 3.2 billion dollars this year. DARPA grants are becoming more and more available. The one for Maker Faire uses for their mentor program is 10 million dollars for renewable over a number of years, and for putting a thousand hackerspaces in high schools, essentially. 

 And they are making grants available through someone from our community who calls himself Mudge, who I don't believe I've ever met. I asked him to be on the panel, but he didn't want to take a public position, so unfortunately he won't be here. But, the panel we have I think is really representative of a lot of really cool points of view. 

So, just some ground rules just to keep things cool. Again, we don't all need to agree with each other, but we certainly can all respect each other for our differences. And I would request that people in the audience, please don't applaud during the panel. After the panel, go crazy, but that just can be kind of disruptive for expressing differening points of view. So, rather than me introduce people, why don't each of you introduce yourselves and you know, just briefly, and say, you know, what you've done in the hacker community that got you here. 

So, I'm Psytech with Alfa 1 Labs, co-founded about three years ago, and the reason I'm on this panel today is because we were one of the hackerspaces that is part of the hackerspace space program that is getting a five hundred thousand dollar grant to work on space projects at hackerspaces and that's that. I'm Willow Blue. I co-founded Jigsaw Renaissance and I work now with an organization called Geeks Without Bounds which links together hacker and maker, and developer communities' humanitarian response organizations. 

So, I have to interact with military day-to-day because they're really good at moving stuff in disaster. And I also think that hackerspaces are not only, or as a completely separate viewpoint, I think that hackerspaces are places of education and also a good indicator of resiliency in a community, as we care about talking to each other and surviving the zombie apocalypse. 

I too am afraid of the zombie apocalypse. My name is Matt Joyce. I was a member at NYC resistor until I took a contract gig out at NASA Ames research center two years ago, which has just recently ended. I am still in San Francisco and doing start up work now. My name is C. Coden and I'm a librarian form Ontario and for the last three or four years I've been traveling around to library conferences and Hackerspaces and trying to actually bring hackerspaces into libraries basically. My interest in the DARPA make case is really, I just wrote some blog entries about something quite popular. I did what librarians do and did research, and looked at stuff like military recruitment, etc. etc. and that was, I think, why Mitch brought me here. 

Yeah, thanks everyone. So let me just start off with, just generally, why does this particular topic interest you and anyone wanna just say that? You go for it Willow. Okay, I think it's important to talk about this because our lives, the military in general, is a fact. It's out there. And we have to figure out how we're going to interact with it. 

I am very much on the fence constantly of where I stand on this. I wish that we were the sort of community that we would all stand together and decide that we don't need them and that we're going to build our new society and very staunchly state that and move forward with it. We're not, and so, I'm up to do the best that we can and be as loving and supportive of each other as we can be in the meantime. 

So, I really wanna hear what everyone is up to, and that's why I'm here. 

 
So, the fundamental reason that I wanted to be on this panel was to focus on what I believe is the real issue at hand here which is ethics as it relates specifically to STEM initiatives and engineering in particular. The things that we do at hackerspaces and in the open source community, are by and large released out into the world without much guidance. 

We create things and we let them loose on the world and they will be co-opted by other people and made to be used. So, I think it's important that people sit down and have a conversation with the people that they know and with themselves about what it is that you're working on and whether or not you're able to accept what will come of it.

Yeah, my main interest was the make DARPA partnership and again for reasons very similar to that was problems of ethics and there was very little discussion about this online really, and it was the reason why I wanted to be here was to have more face to face discussion and kind of continue the discussion about what's really a very complex issue. 

So yeah, we are part of the hackerspace space program and I also am on the fence. And we are going to, the way we're going to structure the program at Alfa 1 Labs is that the DARPA funding is going to the hackerspace space program, which is a group at Alfa 1 Labs, sort of like a meetup, so it's a separate entity. That's going to enable everyone to participate in a way that's good I think. 

Yeah, and it is kind of interesting, you know, from our various points of views, it's still not obvious to us here, and I think anyone who's tried to think through these for themselves, that it's not an easy set of issues to balance off with one another. There's pluses, there's minuses and some of the pluses and minuses are hard to balance off like a plus for the Maker Faire associated program mentors, a thousand hackerspaces in high schools. I mean, anyone here I think would think that's an amazingly cool thing. The minuses are going to be different for different people. 

From my point of view, the people at DARPA are doing it to enhance their goals and, from my point of view, those aren't my goals. So, I'm somehow helping them if I'm helping that program. How do you balance that? So, for that I really don't know. I do the best at the time, the best of my ability to come up with my choice. Is that the right one? I don't know. So, you want to address that in like, Psytech for the space program, like address the pluses and the minuses. 

Sure, one of the things that I'm kind of concerned about is that, you know, if you grow a piece of celery in red water it's gonna be red. If you're at Google and you get 30% of your time to work on a project it's going to be related to Google. I'm just wondering how this DARPA defense contract's money is going to influence these projects. So yeah, I want to bring that to the table.

Actually, someone 
from the DOD once told me that sometimes the worst thing that can happen is that your project gets funded, not just from them, but in general. One of the things that this community is so fantastic at is doing stuff with a popsicle stick and a shoe string that we found in the couch. We make do with what we can and that's what makes us incredible. We open source things, we're awesome at that. And so, it's vital to me that we ask what do we need money for? 

How much do we need? Is it absolutely necessary? And then, what are all of the sources that we might gain funding for it from? And if you've done all of that research, then I think you're good to go, in whatever you decide, I think you're an adult. You can do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt the evolution of an idea, whatever or de-evolution of an idea. Yeah I'll leave it there.

I guess 
I'm supposed to come up with positives and negatives. I think the positive is obvious, money. Money provides the capacity to do things. It is the lubricant to the engine of ideas. DARPA in and of itself as stated in its mission has a military goal, a very specific military goal. That means that anything that you do in relation to them is in effect furthering the military prowess of the United States, which means you are in effect a secondary supporter of a machine that does exist for the functional purpose of military conflict, in short killing people, or defending people. The positive is is that STEM initiatives are good. It's one of the biggest problems that we have today in America is our educational system is, in many places, failing. And children need a better outreach for kinetic learning. They need wood shops again. They need to be able to get access to C&amp;amp;amp;C equipment, to programming, to technical resources like First. Something like this helps provide that.

Yeah as far as the pluses 
the thousand hackerspaces, and that's not only in North America, that's actually gonna be worldwide in three years. It's not just the US, cause people keep saying it's the US, it's not, it's going to be worldwide. So, you're looking at huge, like it's basically PR for hackerspaces and hacker culture, like that's enormous right? A thousand worldwide. One of the minuses, and a main one for me, is the problems with military recruitment and STEM education in high schools. Again DARPA does not recruit that, it's not their concern. And people have said that to me and I am well aware of that. 

However, US Army recruiters do recruit and they're extremely interested in STEM projects. There's actually a very interesting article I have here called What's all the Talk about STEM? From the January 2012 issue of the army recruiter magazine. You can just get this stuff online. Basically, encouraging amateur recruiters to go into STEM classrooms. 

So you have your STEM, that sounds a lot like, you know, the DARPA make project, right? Sort of kind of encouraging recruiters to go in there. And there's actually a great ACLU report called Soldiers of Misfortune that looks at problems with military recruitment in high schools, and also the legality of military recruitments in high schools. In 2002 the Senate ratified what's called the Optional Protocol. 

It's called the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. This makes it illegal in the US to try and recruit any child under the age of 17, involuntarily. If you look at the ACLU report, involuntary recruitment of children as young as 11 is very common in the US. We know army recruiters go after minorities and people from the working class, for example, tend to be targets for recruiters. 

So again, as a minus for me, that's a really big one. You have basically hackerspaces in high schools being used to facilitate military recruitment and in this case, which may be illegal. So, I have a follow up to that. I went to school in the Midwest, in a very rural area. There are already recruiters that are there all the time. And my personal opinion is that the best thing you can ever give anyone is more knowledge. 

And so, they're already there and we can keep pushing them out and trying to push them out, but I don't understand how that, it's a confounded argument in that the factors are, they're all tangled up together. 

I just - oh sorry, go ahead. 
I just wanted to add a positive note to that response to that. Do you want to respond to that quickly, and then I'll add on to it? No, no go ahead. Go ahead. So, I, positive aspect of it is that it is going to be PR it is going to be bringing money to hackerspaces. And the thing that goes on in hackerspaces a lot of is hardware hacking. And hardware hacking takes money. It's not like software hacking, where you can just download a library, and incorporate it and finish your project in a few hours. 

You have to have money to make things happen. And I think this is going to innovate more funding for hackerspaces and one of the ways that we're going to do it, is we're going to take projects and put them through a crowd funding site and that crowd funding site has agreed to match the funding. And what we're gonna do is match that also. 

So, we'll have triple vetting of projects going through these crowd funding sites. So, we'll know which ones are gonna be good to make happen.
 
It's quite funny actually, when I spoke about this to people in New York about this, they actually thought I was joking when I said about the level of US military recruitment in US high schools they actually thought I was making this stuff up. 

The thing is that I don't how a lot of people feel about this in the hacker community, but do you think that what you are basically doing is giving a gateway, and if you've massive public PR right, you're looking at a thousand worldwide and the connection is gonna be in people's minds, this military hacker recruitment connection. 

This is not the first STEM project. There's one called DOD Starbase, that one some people in here might be familiar with. And already it's quite, and this explicitly, if you go look, they're quite explicit about they do use this for recruitment, they're very interested in it. And actually someone gave testimony at Senna and just basically out right said, yeah we love DOD Starbase because it's a great way to recruit high school kids to military just, you know, blatantly. So, just this problem about do you want that connect to be made? Yeah, and it is going to be made. Like, that is a problem and you can already see them. When you see articles like this, they're sharpening te knives going, can't wait to get in there. You know, to get to these kids to start recruiting them. 

And when you read the Army recruiting manual, the stuff that's in there is shocking about you know the school, the SRP program, the School Recruiting Program, is you know, target them as young as you can. Like, get them young because by the time they're seventeen it's too late. 

Yeah. So 
there's a lot of things that recruit in schools not just the DOD, there's religious organizations, there is corporate interest, capitalist organizations. 

You go out to a high school in Silicon Valley, and I assure you the kids are running around, trying to get into GitHub Hackathons, and things like that. All of those have corporate sponsorships, and so on and so forth. I think it's important to remember that the DOD's existence, and the military that exists today is a reflection of ourselves. 

In so much, as Google is a reflection of ourselves or any religion in your community is a reflection of your community and hackerspaces are in effect communities and we will be a reflection of the people that are around us. I think it's important to remember that when someone is recruiting in a community, they're not alone, and there's a reason they're recruiting. 

It's because there's money invested in this. We invested that money, all of us. 

So, that's what it goes back 
to for me, is that, I think that it's an absolutely necessity to have these - that source of education for kids and for adults. I think that we should all have access to hackerspaces and the things that they bring. 

I would prefer it if it wasn't the military. I would prefer if it were this community doing that. I think that we absolutely need to be teachers, we need to have the the attention span to stick with a kid over the course of an entire semester, hopefully over several years. I would love to see us do this, but right now this is a route, and it's basically the only one. 

The reason for our, the reason why I do go to librarians and say, you know, and to hackerspaces saying please come to the library, you know, there are other ways of doing this, right? Like one concern for me really with this, is there's very few neutral spaces left in the world. You know, if you think about the public library, you know very good, anyone can come to the library and pretty much do, read whatever the hell you read, do whatever you wanna do, look up whatever you want on the computer. Right? We are completely neutral and we will defend your right to read and look at whatever you want to the bitter end. 

You know, that's kind of where we're there. To a large extent that was my original interest in hackerspaces. 
The model is very, very much, there is a neutral space where you come in and you can destroy whatever the hell you want, set it on fire, we don't care. As long as you clean up after yourself. Yes. Unfortunately in public libraries we don't make them clean up after themselves and they're like peeing themselves and stuff. Oh, it's terrible. People can ask me stories later on, it's like we, you guys, I always laugh when you talk about dealing with the public. We deal with the public! 

And do they wet themselves, but that's fair enough. And the thing, like a main concern is talking about like, who's gonna do, like the idea of this education? You know, Dale Daugherty, and there might be, sorry but I have the Lucky Charms accent. Sorry I'm actually Irish. So, I try to keep it at a 2 and sometimes it goes up to an 8 when I get excited. So if I say something, someone please warn me. And they like go yeah, you're no longer even moderately, you know, you're crazy, right? 

It's now all lucky and no charming is going on. One of my main concerns actually, and Dale Daughtery when he does the PR for this thing, is the example of the high school in Sebastapol. Which, I think actually Dale Daughtery's kids go to that high school. I actually think that's why it's, one of the reasons why it was chosen. And very much right now, just is a jewel in a crown for the DARPA make program. 

But the high school is like, I think it's an award winning high school, and this is a high school for quite wealthy people people, you know, send their kids there. How is this going to pan out when we get to 100? To 200 to 400 to 1,000? You know, this model, I really do believe is going to like that. 

Right? It's going to be like substitute teachers getting paid a couple of dollars an hour stuck into in this class going, "You just teach what's on this sheet of paper and shut your face." And then it's going to be recruiters going, yeah I can do that for you. I can do a much better job than you can. And also even, there's large parts that are being left out of the discussion about the DARPA make thing. And one of that is the actual model that DARPA wants. 

It's got 3 parts. The first is the digital fabrication, the second is using social media to allow kids to cooperate online. And the third is design challenges. The design challenges are quite interesting because they want them to do robots, go-carts, and unmanned aircraft, which is drones. Drones anyone?And so basically, that's what the design challenges will revolve around. 

So right now, you know, the discussion in no, it's all going to be quite open. 
The kids are going to be let do whatever they want to do. Their going to have total freedom which is in Sabastopol. What you will see as these start to develop. No, there is actually a mission plan here. You know, I can actually read, it's quite funny. The mission plan, this is actually a quote from the two people that are managing the mentor project. It's 

Lt Col. Nathan Weiderman and Paul Ermencol. And this is a quote from the presentation they gave when originally they were looking for people to actually bid on funding, to bid for the event. I think this slide was removed actually when they actually gave it. But you can still find the presentation online, it's quite funny. And it says the goal of it is to, "inculcate adaptive vehicle make type design methods such that they become pervasive in subsequent generations of engineers." 

So, basically the goal for DARPA is to inculcate a military design methodology into high school kids. 

Let me interject something. 
You've been saying a bunch of interesting points. There's probably other people who want to say. So Psytech, you've been wanting to talk.

Yeah, I think every contract is different, and one aspect of our contract is that we won't be able to collect names and I think that touches on the recruiting aspect, and there's not going to be any names involved. So, yeah I was talking with Jerry Isdale earlier with Psytech and he mentioned that there are specific clauses about recruiting not being allowed. 

And I think that ties back into the legality arguments. They recognize that the benefit here is in the STEM initiatives, as you're discussing, with the implementing that engineering approach and design approach for kids, is more important to them than their recruitment, because down the line, DARPA doesn't generally bring in engineering talent. 

What they do is they reach out to a company like Raytheon or CSC and they say, hey we need you to build something for us, would you like to bid on the contract? So the reality is, many of the kids who would benefit from the DARPA STEM initiatives aren't going to be recruited into the military. What they're going to be doing is, they're going to go out and get a job with a defense contractor or, maybe with Intel, maybe with, some cooking manufacturing company, you never know. But, I think that there is am you're now at odds with yourself on your mission statement. I don't think that they can actively recruit while being an education initiative because of the laws around recruiting in schools.
 

So as far as the quadrocopters and unmanned vehicles in general, those are some of the best puzzles out there and I like quadcopters. I would much prefer that we also learn that because it exists now. We can't just ignore it and it will go away. It's not like your ex, or what we hope happens. 

I had a very nice quadrocopter deliver me beer the other day. Like, we can do amazing things with this. And so, and also that that is already at the state that it is, the state of the art that it is. Introducing school children to how to build robots is not going to help the military right now. And as far as their methodology, they get shit done! 

Like, we need more rigor in what we do. We need more documentation. While I don't agree with inundating the ethics of it, I do agree with getting more of those values of just process. I think that's good! 

Do you think it's possible to separate those two?

 I think if we have enough conversations around it and continue calling each other out on what is ethical and what is not; I think it's definitely possible to separate those things out. 

Let's say from a military 
standpoint, you'll look at a line soldier. What they're taught is they have to obey the chain of command. 

When you join the United States military, you're given a gun, you're pointed in a direction, and you're told that you're allowed to shoot certain people and you're not allowed to shoot certain people. There's something of a suspension of morality that occurs there. You're allowing somebody the opportunity, not even opportunity, they're being told that it's okay, and you should. 

You are now a hero. You should go out and kill people. It's something that nobody wants to do. No one wakes up in the morning and wants to go out and shoot someone. In fact, many soldiers fire high when they first start combat. The reality is is that the way the military exists today is that the people running around on the field have suspended their morality and they are following command's regulations on what they're allowed to shoot at, when they're allowed to shoot, and they're expecting their leadership and their elected representatives to provide guidance in what is ethical, what is right. 

So, I would say that to a certain extent you do have to recognize that some of the process that exists inside the logistics of the United States military is built around that mechanism. And yes, some of it's probably difficult to disassociate.

Those chains 
of command are starting to be flattened, in some ways though, where now it's not quite to the individual yet, but they are working on it moving where it's just, here is your objective. The unit figures out how to do it. And, I know that the military does some horrible things that are unacceptable and that it ties very deeply to what our politicians think are the best routes, and again, take on some responsibility. Figure out how to interact with that, or how to actively tear it down. But, it's moving away from that and that adaptation is also going to allow disaster response to happen in a much more effective way. Most of the time people will try to solve, which is a false word, a situation without harming anyone. 

Now, well, let me go 
off a little bit different direction. So, one of the things I totally love about this whole scene, the hacker movement as I see it, and Maker Faires is people are doing what they're doing because they love it, whether or not it makes money. And that's one of the reasons that it was such an incredibly high experience for me the first time I went to a Maker Faire. 

There were 20,000 introverted geeks all wanting to share enthusiastically the project that they love and learn from other people doing the same. You know, like here. This is what makes this place, you know, here are 2,000 of our closest friends all sharing what they love. Money can change that. We're surrounded by the United States, and the rest of the world, or modern world, it seems to be more and more about money than anything else, even if money doesn't particularly make people happy. So, I wonder if you can address that? So in particular the grant for the Maker Faire, it's 10 million dollars, is my understanding, to be given possibly over a period of years, renewable each year. 

What are people willing to do or not do in order to make that funding more likely, and does that change things? So, that was kind of a leading question, but you know, seriously what do you think of all that? I think the HSP Program is prepared for a wild ride here. Hackerspace - Hackerspace Space Program, and yeah I just hope that we're going to see some amazing, awesome innovation and inventions and things come out of it. 

But, I definitely know it's going to be a wild ride.

 
Do you want to go? I will say that grant initiatvies are something that many hackerspaces have looked into. I know many hackerspaces have attempted to get grants. And if you've ever gotten a grant, or work in research, you know that getting your first grant is the hardest. 

If you have no back history, or no one on your board that's had or worked in large grants before, you're almost immediately shot down. So, the DARPA proposals that are coming into hackerspaces are providing an avenue for future grant money to come into hackerspaces, providing greater legitimacy and a capacity for your local hackerspace to reach out to local community colleges and local government on a more equal footing. 

I think there's certainly a huge amount of benefit outside of just the monetary value. Ten million dollars is not that much on a national scale. It's effectively being able to give like a penny to every kid in the country. It's not much. So I think the real benefits are in the future. 

So, how many people here 
pay dues to a hackerspace? 

Okay, how many do it with any regularity? Okay, so as someone who has had to make sure that the bills can get paid, it's really stressful, especially because the hackerspace that I co-founded was not backed by wealthy people. We didn't have someone who could swoop in if we couldn't make rent, and just pay it. 

And if we really wanted to make it happen we had to figure out how. This ties very much into just general maintenance of things, that goes to the cleaning up after yourself. It goes to the amount of social responsibility that you take on, that includes taking out the trash sometimes and doing the dishes, not just your own but also the extra cup that was left there, that allows things to continue in a sustainable fashion. And sometimes looking at a very large chunk of money and seeing that you could just focus on the things that you love for a while and see them come to full fruition is incredibly, incredibly alluring. And so, if we're all able to contribute a little bit more, consistently, these sorts of things are less alluring. 

Yeah, it connects quite nicely to that. It's one of my biggest disappointments actually with the DARPA Make thing was I really didn't feel that Tim O'Reilly and Make had to go to Darpa for 10 million dollars. That's not a lot of money and I really do believe there was plenty like, it's Tim O'Reilly for God's sake! If the guy wants 10 million dollars, I'm pretty sure people would be more than willing to do that for him. I think it could be done. 

And you'd have basically none of these issues at all. And you think when William Benny, I don't want to be unkind here I'm not trying to, but when William Benny talked about government feeding, I think that might be a little, you know, again, you can never tell, but I get the feeling that might be kind of why that route was taken of, we can get 10 million and if we can get 10 we can get a lot more for something similar or whatever.

I 
think it's important that this community remembers that Make is not in the business of helping our community, they're in the business of helping every community and getting out beyond this community means getting big names involved that everyone can be aware of and have some level of respect for. 

For better or for worse, DARPA is a big name. They are well respected throughout academia and against a large corporation so I think that is where the fundamental value was beyond just the money. 

So noone really addressed the point I was trying or attempting to make about does the money change what people are willing to do or not to do in order to get more money? And then in that way it becomes less about doing what we love. That's one of the things that worries me. Do you have concerns like that? Or does that, is that just like my point of view, and you have a different one? 

What uh, anyone?

 
That's sort of like what I mentioned before of like Google giving 20% of, like, your own time to do whatever you want. However, it ends up being like Google stuff. So, I feel like this DARPA money is going to end up being like DARPA stuff. I think it absolutely depends on the person. There are people out there who see the value in money, ha! 

Pun? Yes? Ice breaker? No? Okay, I'm trying. So, but for someone like me. I've been poor for most of my life, pretty incredibly poor, especially if we were to look at the demographics of this room. Because no one could pay me enough to not do what I love; like to take time out of my day to go and do something else. 

So, when people have offered money for things that I didn't care about, I'm fine eating Ramen. That's cool. There are other people who don't want to do that, who see other ways of having a fulfilling life. So, it absolutely depends on the individual and the group. I think the way I see it is it's a difference between you looking at one homeless guy walking down the street and going, I'm going to help this guy out. His name is Ted. He wants to get a hamburger. I'm gonna sit down and buy dinner for him. And being the guy who says I'm gonna help all the homeless in the city, which means I can't help Ted, because Ted's no longer a person, he's a number. I think when something becomes a business or becomes a 10 million dollar grant project it stops being very personal. It becomes I have to go by the numbers, I have to reach the greatest level of efficiency. I have to start doing this in an analytical fashion. I have to suspend the absolute morality and make it about the ends justify the means, to a certain extent. And I think that there is a definite switch in most people. To what extent they choose to go in either direction, I think that's probably what I would see as the difference. 

Yeah actually, that pretty much is exactly public libraries is that huge problem, right? Of you have a, your library might exist in a community, but you might be one library in a system of 40 where now have to answer to; the systems are different in the US I know they all vary, but you may have to answer to your municipality and board about what you do. 

So it no longer becomes, you know, you'll go to a library, and the people in that library will know every single person that comes in. But, at the end of the day, if there's a certain day they come in for a program or whatever and that needs to be cut, it's gone. It doesn't really matter how passionate librarians are about it or how important it is. 

So, yeah it does have a huge impact.

So that ties into me, why it's important that your spaces be community based, because then it's the members who decide how it goes. If a library were supported by the individuals who are apart of it, then they have much more say. Which is good and bad, right? Sometimes you have a community with really awful viewpoints like we were just takling about in the hackerspace panel that nationalists that didn't want to go to the third hackerspace in the city because they were right next to the LGBT comunity and the center of culture, because they didn't want to be near those people. We don't want these people in our community, we don't want them to, to have a space. At least I don't, I don't think they deserve one. But, so that balance of having someone. Yes. I think you all get what I'm saying. Okay. 

It's quite interesting that the only reason that libraries function the way they do is because they, in general all librarians agree to a set of ethics that are laid down by ALA, Ontario Library Association, stuff like that. They are not binding. It's completely voluntary. And so all library now, again there's laws that libraries have to be completely neutral, there are like legal aspects, especially in Canada it's that. But the thing is, that doesn't map on to hackerspaces, at all and so you know, I've had terrible experiences in hackerspaces, and amazing wonderful ones. 

So, even though it might be, yes it is a community, because there's no over-arching ethics in the space itself, that is like written down and we all agree, like things about sex, race, and gender, you know if you make sexist jokes, you know if you make jokes about sexual assault you will be kicked out of the space. I was just speaking to somebody about this, an incident that happened to them actually. 

So again, I think that would be, certainly, if hackerspaces were looking for a model, to look to libraries to how to actually handle issues around neutrality. I think it's a really good one to look at. We've been doing it for so long. 

Yeah, I think that was an excellent point 
that the money is just going to be distributed and everyone is going to become numbers. 

And I think the responsibility of the program at the hackerspace should be to bring it back down to a personal level, and treat these projects individually and I also personally don't want to see these being tainted in the DARPA direction. I want them to be moving towards innovation and actually not defense and that's just my personal opinion. 

Yeah so, we're, we got like 10 minutes left, so I was thinking it would be cool for people in the audience if you have questions to ask and line up and maybe a couple questions. Most questions at hope. Might be curious to have answered. Be nice to each other. Don't hurt anybody out there. Also, be succinct in your questions or comments, and we will try to do the same. 

So, go for it. Thanks great panel, very insightful. So, the problems of receiving funding ethically are not new. So, there's sort of organizations, 501C3s that decide that they're only going to receive money in amounts that don't make them beholden to the organization giving them money. So, I was sort of wondering if you could possibly speak to someone like that when receiving funding from something like DARPA right? 

Anyone want to? I think, we actually do have to have a non-profit set up to collect the money for the DARPA Hackerspace Space Program. I would say I would like to see more of the spaces discussing things like that and actually providing some analytical feedback. I'd like to see a real research paper written on that. 

Show me the numbers. I've never seen any. I would like to see that every project that receives money include not just padding, but also an end point, so that it's not based on continuation of funding, so that they don't have to keep going back to see the end of it, but it's done at the end. Thanks. 

I've been thinking about this issue for a little while. I'm not going to be that succinct. Sorry. I work for a company that contracts to the USGS mostly, earthquake monitoring software. We were doing some work and there was going to be some work for geothermal monitoring and it was going to be at China lake and it was going to be at the Navy and I wouldn't do it. 

I said I didn't want to do that work. And my left liberal colleagues got really angry at me, they were like look, you have see it's geothermal, it's good, it's the only way this technology is going to get out there. If we don't advance it here the military has the money to make this happen and you know that it's not going to happen otherwise. 

Here's your chance to make something really good happen. And who cares who's paying the bills. This is a good thing. 

And I guess, I come from the point of view where, you know, you look at the website for what DARPA stands for, it specifically is for defense and killing people. And, I don't wanna do that, but how much will I do. 

I'll be a little piece of that, maybe or not, you know, will I kill people? No, will I make software that might kill people, well no, but or will I just help this, you know, it's a geothermal plant it's just energy. And we vote with our taxes for the military and we have more control maybe over the military than we do over corporations, because the government says something about what the military does. 

So, I guess, I don't know, all that is just running around in my head and always just trying to figure out where you can go with it. Yeah, the point I think you're making is one I've thought of too. It's like, where do you draw the line? All of us in this room probably pay some taxes or have at some point in our lives, that means we're in someways supporting things that we don't agree with. 

Will you go out and build nuclear weapons that are targeted to civilians? Probably no one in this room will do that.

Will you work on a program that, well works on some, creates something that might be used by the military? You know, there's all these gradations, like you were saying. So, where do you draw the line? Do people want to address that? I would like to say this. Technology isn't inherently a, it's something that increases our capabilities and what we individually are capable of is greatness or great evil. 

It's like Spider Man. With great power comes great responsibility, but it's not just for me, it's also for all of you. If I open source something, now I have to trust every single person in this room, and obviously we're not all nice people. There was a guy outside who was running around, you know I'm showing my cock to people five minutes ago. The reality is you have to have a fundamental faith in the decency of mankind to be in engineering. You have to be able to say that I believe that my technology is not gonna be by and large used to do horrible things, otherwise you're just gonna end up like the uni-bomber living in a shack sending bombs to people who work in computer science, because the reality is technology is going to keep advancing and it's going to keep getting more and more dangerous and you have to believe in us otherwise you may as well just hide your head in a hole. 

Technology, just like any other tool, will only extrapolate human ability and intent. We can build things that get out of the way of people being good, good being a relative term and subject to change. And we can also build things that make it difficult to be awful. But it's going to change, and as my dear friend Kevin says, any tool is a weapon if you hold it right, including language, it's all grey area.

I actually have a, there's actually a R.J. Lore quote as well that, you know, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. And I think there's kind of a danger sometimes especially with the DARPA Make that it is, it could be perceived as this is just the master's tools trying to dismantle the master's house. This could be perceived as business as usual. So, I think that's just another way of looking at it again. 

There are lots of sources of money and all of them are corrupters. It could be DARPA, it could be DHS, it could be NSF. Any which way you'll end up, it could be some rich person on your board of a non-profit. No matter what happens, you'll find yourself in a position of conflict where you might be beholden to those people who pay your money. 

And I agree with the first speaker who suggests that the extent to which you find yourself beholden is the key question in whether to accept money or not. 

Perhaps if you agree with the funder fundamentally or not as well. I think sources of funding can also be enablers. Like crowd funding, so. Jerry, Jerry is a founder of Maui makerspace and what you created the Hackerspace Space Program?

No, I got my name put on as the lead of the Hackerspace Space Program because I had a DARPA background. Most of the people who put in the program proposal were not US people. There are only three US citizens in it. It is intended to be an international program, but aside from HSP I wanted to mention that there is a NSF proposal program that's been announced to study project based learning, a multi-year thing for several different tracks with several millions of dollars involved. 

People who don't want to take DARPA money but are willing to take NSF money should go chase that and make it happen. And it's written for makerspaces, hackerspaces, so we need to get some people involved in doing that from this community and not just the academians. See this man if you have any ideas. 

If you want to find out about that one. Tell me about that one. I'll tell you about that. I'll also tell you about HSP. But one of the things I wanted to mention about both HSP and the Make effort is, you had mentioned the military suspension of ethics and morality and passing it off to the higher ups and the politicians and so forth. It's the oversight that makes the direction that happens. 

The people at Make are very ethical. They have their very strong beliefs in bringing up people and making all this, the education. It's the people here that need to be involved in those programs and in our program to keep it ethical, to keep it moving in the direction you wanna say. So, our mission of the HSP is to enhance humanity's survivability. There's nothing in it about military. 

It has to do with humanity and surviving everything. Keep us moving in that direction, get involved. Get involved in the a makerspace and keep them moving along and call out the recruiters when they show up, because that's illegal for them to be there. It's against their contract to be there.

Thank you.

I would like to say Thomas Aquinas once famously said, silence is consent. And that kind of feeds on it's also go further, you know, communication, open lines of communication is the only way we keep ourselves from being ignorant towards each other.

One of the reasons, I think, we're even having this debate is because all of the other organizations that you used to be able to get grants from and support from have been stripped of everything. And that's a cultural issue of people not being willing to pay taxes or not seeing that as a way of making that happen and we've been silent that entire time. 

At the last panel there was someone talking about how hackerspaces are intrinsically political and how we don't see them that way in America. And I think that's because we haven't been paying attention. We absolutely need to. 

It seems to me that as long as you're not going after the money you could actually use getting funding as a method of subverting things, because you already want to build these classrooms and spread this education. And if DARPA's funding it, that means they now can't put those funds towards making bullets that explode in midair so they do more damage, and if someone wants to send recruiters to that, well they probably already have those recruiters and now they can't send them somewhere else. And now they have to share a space with someone who is going to be trying to instill more ethics and someone who's going to try and mitigate that, which decreases their effectiveness. So, could that be making it more ethical? 

Everyone here has thought of this and it's unfortunately not as easy as all that, but I won't say my opinion. 

I would say I would love to see a soldier building a house, rather then blowing it up any given day of the week, and I think that's true of most people. Yes, I totally agree with you, but I also agree with the concerns that Mitch has expressed and that then those funds are tainted, and then the community, or the group giving those funds is seen as legitamized. 

Also, they have a budget this year of 3.2 billion dollars and it can be increased in a second. I would like to point out that the TSA budget is about 20, well, it's about 40 billion, NASA budget is about 20. And I think that the R.J. Lore quote is a good one to remember, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's hose. 

I think you always want to be very, very careful that precisely put some serious thought into exactly what the end goals are, and what this can lead to, no matter what benefits you might see at the time. 

I think that's an excellent point and that's what we're going to do. We have time for more questions. Just one more. 

Okay, so this is the last question. So on education, I totally agree that classrooms need more soldering irons and CNC machines, and you know, etc. And what I'm kind of worried about is that a lot of the kids today are going to get, you know, these great, you know, engineering and problem solving skills but not critical thinking skills, and your response to that or ideas of how that applies. 

I can totally take this one. Oh, man, okay. So, the last few years I've been a part of something called School Factory and Space Federation, we care about hackerspaces, becoming schools the future. You might be able to tell from some of the things that I said earlier. Even just putting shop classes back in schools is not going to solve the problem. 

Because you used a drill press does not mean you suddenly have the ability to even build a chair. So, for me, it's awesome because suddenly people have access to tools and equipment, and hopefully say, oh wow and this other person came in from, apparently they do this outside of school and I kind of don't like being in school. 

So, I'll go hang out there instead. I care about corrupting them and pulling them out of that system, because the education system is just as broken as our military system, perhaps more dangerously so actually. Yes. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I'm just happy to hear whatever thoughts are out there. 

Okay. For the most part I'd like to say, I think that's absolutely true, more kids need to be brought up in a stronger STEM environment. But I think that the real problem there is that you have to reach out to the parents as well. And I think hackerspaces and communities are the ways to do that. So I think DARPA was right in getting hackerspaces involved. 

It's a person to person thing. 

Yeah, I think we should definitely instill critical thinking in the educational programs. Yes, please come and invade the library, if you have 5 minutes during the week. We have space. We sometimes have money allegedly, and we are basically all about critical thinking and really if you want a truly neutral space to do hacker stuff, the library's pretty much it, if you want to. 

Did you hear about what they did in Texas? Like you can't even bring up critical thinking in any class because it might undermine the beliefs that parents are trying to instill in their children. It's awful, let's fix it. The problems with the education system are many and huge, and perhaps insurmountable and this is one of the great reasons why hackerspaces are flourishing in our country, cause it fills some of that horrible void. So, I hope this panel has been informative for people in seeing that these issues really are important to think through because this affects the future of us individually and collectively as a community, and the whole hackerspace movement. So, and there's no rights and wrongs. So, please keep talking about this, and let's see where we are in a few years as a result of the thinking and talking and discussion in our community in the future.