[Noisebridge-discuss] think bigger

Sat Apr 5 07:09:42 UTC 2014

Yeah.  Praveen's right, but people arguing that NB legally should not
allow sleeping are also right.

Ethics is hard.

*opens ice cream, eats it straight from the carton*

--Naomi

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 8:40 PM, Ronald Cotoni <setient at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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-- 
Naomi Theora Most
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