Notes and Questions
Principles / Practices
Topical Discussion: Everyone prepares a 5 or 10 minute talk on one area of a broad topic (e.g. security, real time, 2D graphics, etc.), also--or maybe more importantly--members must write a 2 or 3 page paper and a short working code sample on the topic. The goal is to force the exploration of new technologies. How do we keep it from becoming "just" school or work pt. 2? Well if those are really concerns, maybe this isn't the group for you.
Think about what you would like to do and do it. The Group is a place where you can share your learnings and be understood. You can be passionate about your topic and share in the passion of others. Be driven by the desire to share and to teach.
Commitment: The strength and success of the group will be based on members' willingness and ability to commit. If this idea is uncomfortable or foreign, the group might not be for you.
Exploration: A primary goal should be the opening of new doors and treading of new paths. We do the same old things every day, this is not the place for those things (i.e. f-web frameworks).
Toolkit: While we don't seek to rehash what we've already done and already seen, we do hope to come away with something we can use in the future. To that end we seek the practical realization of the specific areas we report on. Every report should include working code that implements or demonstrates the topic. By repeatedly exploring new areas and coming up with working code (learning by doing) we will extend our toolkits.
Impracticality: f- networking. Finding jobs and padding our resumes are not related to the goals we're gathered around.
Links
Atlas Economic Research Foundation
Organizations and Organizing
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People, whether technical or creative, gather at a private home for not-so-serious productivity and socialization. Organizers say they're trying to "resurrect the spirit of the Homebrew Computer Club." It's a non-exclusive event intended for passionate and creative technical people that want to have some fun, learn new things, and meet new people.
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Open Space Technology enables groups of any size to address complex, important issues and achieve meaningful results quickly.[citation needed] It functions best where more traditional meeting formats fail: in situations involving conflict, complexity, diversity of thought or people, and short decision-times. People have used it in widely diverse situations, from designing aircraft doors at a large aircraft-manufacturing company to engaging street kids in defining a sustainable jobs-program.
Some proponents[who?] have suggested that the reasons for the perceived success lie in what they call the Four Principles and The One Law. Participants hear these "rules" announced and described during the opening session. These describe rather than prescribe; they do not operate as rules which one must obey but simply describe what the system expects will happen in any case:
- Whoever comes is the right people: this alerts the participants that attendees of a session class as "right" simply because they care to attend
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have: this tells the attendees to pay attention to events of the moment, instead of worrying about what could possibly happen
- Whenever it starts is the right time: clarifies the lack of any given schedule or structure and emphasises creativity and innovation
- When it's over, it's over: encourages the participants not to waste time, but to move on to something else when the fruitful discussion ends
There also exists another tentative "law", usually referred to as the "Law of Two Feet" (or "The Law of Mobility"), which reads as follows: If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet. Go to some other place where you may learn and contribute.
This last "law" emphasizes that no one should sit in sessions that they find boring; instead only people genuinely interested in the topic at hand should attend the discussions.
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The Homebrew Computer Club was an early computer hobbyist club in Silicon Valley, which met (under that name) from March 1975 to roughly 1977. Several very high-profile hackers and IT entrepreneurs emerged from its ranks, including the founders of Apple Inc.
The Homebrew Computer Club's newsletter was one of the most influential forces in the formation of the culture of Silicon Valley. Created and edited by its members, it initiated the idea of the Personal Computer, and helped its members build the original kit computers, like the Altair. One such influential event was the publication of Bill Gates's Open Letter to Hobbyists, which lambasted the early hackers of the time for pirating commercial software programs.
The first issue of the newsletter was published on March 15, 1975, and continued through several designs, ending after 21 issues in December 1977. The newsletter was published from a variety of addresses in the early days, but later submissions went to a P.O. box address in Mountain View, California.
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- Sharing
- Openness
- Decentralization
- Free access to computers
- World Improvement
The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age - book on scribd
Nearly a century ago, Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism articulated the animating spirit of the industrial age, the Protestant ethic. Now, Pekka Himanen-together with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells-articulates how hackers* represent a new, opposing ethos for the information age. Underlying hackers' technical creations-such as the Internet and the personal computer, which have become symbols of our time-are the hacker values that produced them and that challenge us all.
These values promote passionate and freely rhythmed work; the belief that individuals can create great things by joining forces in imaginative ways; and the need to maintain our existing ethical ideals, such as privacy and equality, in our new, increasingly technologized society. The Hacker Ethic takes us on a journey through fundamental questions about life in the information age-a trip of constant surprises, after which our time and our lives can be seen from unexpected perspectives.
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It is commonly believed...
...that most programming languages languages are essentially identical. However, anyone who has spent any significant time studying languages such as Lisp, Haskell, or Prolog knows that some of these uncommonly used languages not only are fundamentally different from more popular languages but can actually give you a glimpse into the future of mainstream programming!
Study Groups
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the official wiki for the Washington DC Clojure Study Group devoted to the programming language Clojure. Connected to FringeDC.
processing-study-group (NYC Resistor)
We'll be hosting the first Processing Study Group meeting on Wednesday, September 24th at 7:00PM at NYC Resistor HQ. If you’re interested in Processing, from novice to expert, join the mailing list and come check it out! I’m looking for someone to give a 5-minute "Why you should use Processing" talk at the meeting, if you’re interested please let me know. See you there!
At a recent meeting of the Microcontroller Study Group, the group's de facto leader Bre Pettis greets each person as they arrive. Small packets of electronic components are exchanged from hand to hand like offerings during the greetings: bright white Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), three axis accelerometers to detect movement in any direction, Hall effect sensors to detect magnetism, all in crinkly static-resistant plastic envelopes. These trinkets are the tools with which the do-it-yourself electronics community hopes to change the way we relate to our possessions.
The Microcontroller Study Group, a branch of the NYC Resistor hacker collective, meets on the second and fourth Wednesday evenings of each month, in a storefront beneath the Gowanus Canal subway viaduct in Brooklyn. The group is dedicated to teaching ordinary people how to use microcontrollers; tiny programmable computers that can be built into everyday objects - from eyeglasses to tabletops to kitchen sinks -- allowing them to interact intelligently with their environment.
