Bay Area Consortium of Hackerspaces/April 26 2013

BACH Meeting Notes – April 26, 2013

Attendees

• Tim (Marin), JC (#fort), Jenny (sudo), Marina (sudo), Eddan (sudo), Matt (sudo), Judi (San Leandro), Len (sudo), Marc (sudo & Labitat)

First BACH Event

• Exhibit Hall / Demo Space
• Unconference-style
• Political party conventions
• Targeted outreach could muster a reasonable showing

→ Leisha, ShoSho (Hackermoms), Mitch, Liz, Danny (NB), Grubulous

• Roundtable with selected topics that everyone can flow in – top 3 concerns / issues

→ Delegates at the table :) → Crowdsourcing the topics

• Prior to the event, delegates are decided on to represent the various local hackerspaces participating
• Co-host / run the event – different spaces reasonable for different aspects of the program
• Documentation and recording of the event
• Hold it at sudo? Noisebridge? Oakland Commune?

Goals for Event

• Comments to the SEC re: crowdfunding on behalf of BACH / Common Declaration (Eddan)
• Getting hackerspaces inter-exchanging; introducing to new spaces; networking/exchange (JC)
• Commitment from key people of different hackerspaces to convince them to participate (Tim)
• Needs assessment (Marina)
• First steps toward shared inventory / skills / projects database (Jenny)
• Needs assessment and general feedback / survey / patterns document / sociology (Matt)
• Converge, commit, feedback, interoperability

Date

• End of May – mid-June
  • May 31, June 8, June 15, June 22, June 29
  • Doodle poll to set the dates

Communication Strategy

• Weekly IRC check-in at #bach on freenode
• Announcements on the meetings only
• Weekly discussion thread?
• Asynchronous/synchronous option
• RSS feed syndication
• Newsletter and updates on the various spaces
• Check to register #bach

Future Meetings

• Play Bach to open! and then dim the lights and begi
• Play Bach to close! and then fade out to end
• How often should we meet?
  • JC suggests a monthly ritual (cites his experience running a user group)
  • Table this til the first event (consensus)
  • Tim suggests a model akin to the Chamber of Commerce
  • In Vienna, the Chamber of Commerce is running a Tor node. Convinced due to economic espionage, and it became standard in the business community (Eddan)
• Open Hackerspace Tour (JC)

Discussion Overflow

Shared Values

• Helping to articulate the unique and common values among the spaces.

Regional Coalition-Building

• Larger scale – all of California, West Coast
• Decentralization and federation; create a model for building regional coalitions – a lot of them are built upon standards → Creation of protocols / reference
• NIST – National Institute for Standard Technology
• BACH is interested in forming an open standard by becoming a reference implementation for becoming a regional hackerspace

“There's never competition, only collaboration.” -Judi

Action Items

• Date Doodle (or When2Meet) - Matt
• Description – Eddan, Matt & Jenny
• Outreach to folks on the wiki page or who haven't listed themselves but would most likely be interested – All
  • New folks should add names to wiki page
  • Subscribe to low-traffic mailing list
• BACH Newsletter – Judi / Jenny / JC
• Social Media Strategy
  • 1. bayareahackers
  • #sfbayhack
  • #bachgrp FTW

Next Meeting

• May 24 (Friday) in San Leandro