[Noisebridge-discuss] think bigger

Ronald Cotoni setient at gmail.com
Sat Apr 5 03:36:50 UTC 2014


+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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
>> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>>
>>
>
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