hack meeting and seeing the light

Yesterday Jonty and Russ, founders of the recently founded Hackspace Foundation, made the journey up to Brum to check out what was going on with the start-up of an organisation for hackers around here.

Antonio Roberts (aka hellocatfood) is marshalling our efforts to gather a community of people interested in tinkering with code, electronics or any other manner of stuff for the sake of innovation, problem solving or just finding out what “happens if you do this…?”.

If you think this community might include you, please join the google group and make yourself known.

The group is currently in a very protozoic stage: we’re discussing various models for structuring the group and also looking into different spaces to work in. As well as a few discussions in pubs there has also been a bit of hacking at my place. Our next session for getting stuck into some hacking has been set for 11-6 on the 11th of April at the Linux Emporium in Sutton Coldfield.

If you don’t have a specific project to work on, then please feel free to come along anyway to meet some of the gang, find out what everyone is up to and potentially discover a collaborative project to work on or some new skills to learn!

I see a huge overlap in ethos and tools between the hackers and the BARGers, so stand by for what I am sure will be interesting interactions between the two groups in the near future.

Here are two photos I took of yesterday’s meeting with some nice surprise effects: the first is Antonio explaining how he plans to lead some of Birmingham’s artists and art organisations into the light and the second one is inspiration zipping around the room before lodging a stonking idea into my head.