Bay Area Consortium of Hackerspaces

The Bay Area Consortium of Hackerspaces (BACH pronounced "bah-kh" as in Johannes Sebastian Bach) is a loosely-organized association of hackerspaces in the wider San Francisco Bay area.

Join the email lists: announce and the discuss

Principles

BACH should operate under principles in the same vein or spirit as these:

• BACH should be very thin, with almost no over-head.
• BACH should exist to help its member spaces coordinate, communicate, and collaborate with one another.
• BACH should, above all, support the Bay Area hackerspace community's existent inter-dependence and resilience.
• BACH should, if possible, help articulate shared values between the spaces.

Events

• BACH 2014: State of the Hack. October 11-12, 2014. An unconference of the Bay Area Consortium of Hackerspace @ The Omni, Oakland, CA.

Meeting Minutes

• April 26, 2013
• May 24, 2013
• June 15, 2013
• July 20, 2013
• September 26, 2014

Newsletters

• Newsletter 0

Projects

Some potential projects include:

Simple

• Event / calendar coordination to help indicate overlapping events, as well as opportunities to attend each other's events.
• Resource sharing, under mutually agreed-upon terms.
  • To this end, setting up inventory tracking such as Labitrack, currently in use at Labitat and sudo room.
  • Labitrack is currently being rewritten and expanded to include project and skill matchmaking on a map-based interface. Contact User:Juul or User:Tunabananas for more info!
• Annual "BACH" Conference to converge the community and prepare for the coming year.
• Have a single event for sharing some updates / progress / etc for a few hackerspaces (e.g. Dorkbot).

Deeper

• Potential Hacker in Residence program.
• Crowd-funding for the local hacker community
• Hacker hostels / couch-surfing
• Insurance services (such as through a cooperative) for liability, building, up to health, dental, life, etc.
  • Opportunity to leverage collective buying power and economies of scale to reduce costs overall.
• Cross-bay resilient mesh network.

Logistics

To begin, it may be helpful to promote asynchronous conversation through personal notes to folks at potentially interested spaces. Next, to list interested parties below, form a simple mailing list and a basic web presence (on hackerspaces.org, or perhaps a sub-domain or other domain). Then, to meet very very infrequently, such as bi-monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually.

Hackerspaces

See: Bay_Area_Hackerspaces

Interested Parties

Join the email lists: announce and the discuss

List your username with ~~~ if you are interested. Also, link to relevant groups as necessary.

• Wrought from Sudo room
• Tunabananas from Sudo room
• mk30 from Sudo room
• len from Sudo room
• Dweekly from HackerDojo
• thex from Fort
• Nubsoz from Ace Monster Toys
• Davr from Ace Monster Toys
• ShoSho from Mothership HackerMoms
• Mitch from Noisebridge
• Judi from East Bay Maker Labs
• CuriousJohn from Sudo room, Noisebridge, around...
• Christinasc from Techshop
• Juul (talk) from Sudo room and Labitat
• EM_Che from Sudo room and Occupy
• CraftyAvenger aka Rachel from Ace Monster Toys, around and stuff
• hbergeronx aka matt from Ace Monster Toys, Sudo room, and Counter Culture Labs
• nthmost from Noisebridge, Sudo room, and Counter Cultural Labs
• lizzard from Noisebridge and Double Union
• Joseph_East_Bay from M.A.C.H._925
• Geekeasy (talk) from Breakwater Makerspace

Inspiration

• hackerspaces.be in Belgium
• ccc regional structure in Germany and nearby
• hackerspaces.ch in Switzerland
• More? ...