[Noisebridge-discuss] think bigger

Ronald Cotoni setient at gmail.com
Sat Apr 5 03:40:28 UTC 2014


Let me explain more.   You are right Praveen but the rest of the planet
isn't quite there.  We are going to have to do it in a more incremental
way.  Maybe we should work towards buying a space.   I have no idea.  This
is why we are starting some working groups.
On Apr 4, 2014 8:36 PM, "Ronald Cotoni" <setient at gmail.com> wrote:

> +1
> On Apr 4, 2014 8:18 PM, "Curtis Gagliardi" <gagliardi.curtis at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I'm at a cafe with a friend right now because he didn't want to go to
>> noisebridge because "it's basically a homeless shelter".  I want to
>> experience that noisebridge you describe with people hacking within it, but
>> it hasn't really been my experience over the last year.
>>
>>  I wanted to meet other people hacked on software or hardware, not
>> sleep|food|housing (through sleeping, eating, and living at NB).  I'm
>> willing to accept that maybe what I think noisebridge should be isn't what
>> the rest of the community thinks it should be.  I would really like to
>> figure out what the rest of the community thinks noisebridge is suppossed
>> to be.
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 7:33 PM, Praveen Sinha <dmhomee at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> The idea of noisebridge as an entity being constrained by leases and
>>> zoning laws is one that is frequently bandied about.
>>>
>>> Indeed, in some amount of time, our lease will be up for re-negotiation,
>>> at which point we may have to make our own hard decisions of whether we can
>>> afford a rent increase, or be zoned for the next block of luxury housing in
>>> the mission.
>>>
>>> To me, a community is much more powerful than mere contracts or money -
>>> in fact, it is the community itself that defines both of these things.  To
>>> me, a community (and movements in general) is most powerful when everyone
>>> has an ability to participate.  A lot of my off-time work is trying to deal
>>> with circumstances of  people on the margins of participation:  often times
>>> people who have lived their whole lives with a world that expects to
>>> apologize for they are.  I'll write more on that later.  We are all
>>> experiencing the first hand pains and momentous task of forming and growing
>>> a community.
>>>
>>> We have options to take on both our lease and our zoning.  It would
>>> require landlord buy-in, and it would require pulling connections inside
>>> the city:  both of these are doable - as an example, many of you may know
>>> my housing collective has been working with the San Francisco Land Trust  (
>>> http://www.sfclt.org/ ) to save our house from getting converted into a
>>> condoplex (and I highly encourage other people living in large collectives
>>> to look into this).
>>>
>>> We in the tech community in the bay area are blessed with a lot of
>>> political power and influence: and this doesn't just mean twitter or
>>> google.  Not only do we have observers from around the world, but we have
>>> observers and friends in city hall watching from a distance.  As chaotic
>>> and disenfranchised we may think of ourselves, in reality we all wield a
>>> tremendous amount of influence as noisebridgers:  we just don't know it yet
>>> (and this pattern of internalized political disenfranchisement is common
>>> not just amongst nerds but across many communities).
>>>
>>> So what does all of this have to do with our tiny collective?  Our
>>> kitchen issues?  Our disorganized circuit equipment?  In the span that I've
>>> been at noisebridge, I've seen and participated in:  people adding new
>>> senses in their bodies, people writing the next generation machine
>>> recognition software, people making next generation low cost printable
>>> circuits, people making at home gene amplification technology, people grow
>>> mushrooms on a wall, people getting fucked on a table by a dildo and
>>> spanked by bondage clowns, having knock down intersectional fights of race
>>> and gender,  being  a technological staging ground for the occupy protests,
>>> having our hacker home double up as a shelter for years at a time and still
>>> function.   We are creating and challenging the bounds of what can be done
>>> and is possible and not just technologically but socially.
>>>
>>> In that, I submit that our pains have not to do with mismanagment, but
>>> that we need to grow into our next phase for an even larger and more
>>> dynamic community:  I don't know what it's going to look like or what the
>>> outcome will be, but as everyone is shuffling about in this latest re-org,
>>> I think it's important to think bigger and more radical and more creative
>>> and more inclusive.  As a hackerspace, we can go in directions no other
>>> space or collective on the planet is capable of at the moment.  Keep it
>>> mind as we fight our battles, whatever side of drama you wind up on.
>>>
>>> Love,
>>> Praveen
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
>>> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
>>> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>>>
>>>
>>
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>>
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