hacking

Let’s compare two hackerspaces, noisebridge and cyberpipe, i’ve been active in cyberpipe for several years and have been at several events and talked with noisebridge members about their hackerspace.

First some history, cyberpipe has existed for like 8 years now, noisebridge has existed in it’s current space for not even a year, before that members used to meet at peoples houses. They both have similar goals, provide a shelter for hackers, allowing them to learn and have good old geek fashioned fun.

Let’s start the comparison with something cyberpipe really excels at, events. They have up to date exensive video archive of all events (made with OSS stack! well, ignoring proprietary design/firmware on camera ), the lecturers are given mikes, projector and proper-ish lightning. The events in noisebridge on the other hand feel much more ad-hoc and way less professional from organizational point of view.

Now let’s compare a field where noisebridge excels at, the community. The community in cyberpipe feels dead-ish, the events do bring in the activity, but soon after they are gone the activity vanishes as well. Members are mostly not self-initiative and rarely i can meet some random people to whom i can talk about python lambda (or something like that). Noisebridge on the other hand has a very vibrant community around it, people are teaching German, French, Haskell, machine learning, Python and doing whole bunch of hardware hacking (i some kind of cooking classes were supposed to happen). Also their members as opposed to cyberpipe’s are producing a lot of fun toys, like the thing which you put around leg and it vibrates on north or reverse engineered led panel which was hacked to display game of life.

To continue the community comparison, let’s have a closer look at the community itself, cyberpipes members are mostly students, while among the noisebridge members you’ll find quite a lot of high profile folks (google/microsoft employees, OSS core developers, folks running own startups), which is probably the reason for my biggest surprise, noisebridge founds itself from membership dues! That is a level of commitment which i’ve very rarely seen at cyberpipe (tho, as gandalfar points out no one has really asked cyberpipe members to pay money).

Another major difference is the organization, cyberpipe has BDFL (well, without the FL part), which means you have a central point of authority who can decide on whatever, noisebridge on the other hand has democracy (and i mean it!), every paying member has veto so can block a decision. Let’s have a look at how new members get in, first they sign some form with basic info, than 4 weeks have to pass, and at the regular weekly meeting (if the person in question is present) they are sent to get beer or something, than both positive and negative feedback about soon-to-be member is solicited from people present at the meeting and if no member uses a blocking vote the new member is accepted.

This kind of organization gives you a great feeling of freedom, their only rule is “be excellent to each other”. My thoughts on this kind of organization initially were there is no way in hell this can survive the burden of abuses or members conflicting. A lot of people involved like it very much this way (and it certainly appeals to my inner anarchist), so i hope i’m wrong

Tags: hacker, hacker space

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 8:30 am and is filed under Hacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.