What's it take to create a hackerspace?

Hacker Space Brussels (HSBXL)

So, in case you haven't figured it out, I'm really getting into this hackerspace area.  I'm a member of denhac (www.denhac.org) and on it's board of directors.

I'm working with my town to try and get them to create a municipally sponsored hackerspace (which I'm calling a makerspace because the word hacker, still, makes some of the more conservative types cringe).

I'm trying to figure out how this can fit into a communities educational system, it's local businesses, it's civic structure and the overall infrastructure of the town it exists in.  And it should exist in every single town.

At first, some people thought hackerspaces where just a fad.

Wrong.

This is a major societal trend.  It's related to community, education, the high cost/debt created by and questionable value of college, the end of unions (and the end of things like guilds and apprenticeships), the desire by many people to start their own businesses and needing a place to prototype concepts into products (software, hardware, whateverware) and it's a place where students and elder/experts come together.

It feeds our need, as humans, to create, to learn and to teach.

First, watch this video (seriously, watch the whole thing; he's a true geek so keep that in mind.  He nails what a hackerspace is, embodies the enthusiasm of it and defines nicely where we're going with them).

All done?  Good.

He seems a bit out there doesn't he.  This guy reminds me of all the guys that started the personal computer revolution.  All of them.  These are the types of people it takes to create large shifts in how society works.  These are the people that can (and have) literally, changed the world.


OK, get time to get started.

Now, get a group of 4-5 people together and start meeting on Tuesday nights (why?  Because, that's when all the hackerspaces have open house night, it's random, but you have to pick a night so it might as well be when everyone else is doing the same thing).  No agenda needed other than all 4-5 need to have watched the above video.  This little group of founders will figure it out.

Find a space to rent.  It'll need at a minimum a workshop, a classroom and a kitchen (like) area.  A lounge, computer room and office would be good, but not required.  It should be as nice as it can be, but at the same time, as cheap as it can be.  It needs as much internet bandwidth as you can get.  It can be smallish at say 1000 SF, or largish at 5000 SF.  Our space at denhac (3D render of the space below) is in the middle of that range.

Start accumulating tools that can be shared among the community (see below for a good hackerspace tool list).

Decide what it costs to have a membership.  This can be anywhere from free (you've got a sponsor or rich member willing to cover costs) to $150+ a month (as an example, one for profit hackerspace type space called TechShop operate this way).  I'd suggest a tiered membership with something for students (say, $10-25 a month), regular members ($50 a mo) to a 'patron' type membership (people that want to give more to support the space) of $100-250 or more a month.

Apply for 501c3 status.  Most other hackerspace have done it already and have been approved.  This is NOT required to get started, it's a nice to have and makes it easier to get donations.

Make very simple rules.  I like the one and only rule the hackerspace the video speaker helped found made:

Be excellent to each other.

That's it.  No more needed to get started.

Open your doors.

It really doesn't need to be more complicated than that.  A community will form.

Thats it.  Now get to it.

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Here's denhacs floor layout (thanks to Matt Yoder):

It's about 2500 SF.  It has a large garage door (front right)- wanna pull in a truck?  You could; cement floors on the first level (perfect for shop gear, etc.).  A computer/server room (front left).  A lounge area with couches and tables (middle left).  A utility room. A Bathroom (unisex).  Classroom (back 1/3 of space) and a sort of loft area above that perfect for work stations (electronics, 3D printer, radio/recording station, It's workspace.. basically all the less messy stuff that would require a cement floor goes upstairs).

List of tools to consider (but not limited to) for a hackerspace (thanks to www.hackerspaces.org)

 Tools: 

• Bench space
• Clamps / vice 
• Screw drivers  
• Saws
• Woodwork 
• Metalwork
• Hammers
• Metalwork
• Woodwork
• Files 
• Woodwork
• Metalwork

Machining and Power Tools:

• Band Saw
• Laser Cutter
• drill press
• CNC router
• 3D Printer
• water cutter
• Routing
• Welder
• A basic arc stick iron/steel welder + sticks + auto dimming welding mask to contribute 
• Angle Grinder
• Industrial Vacuum Cleaner
• Domestic Vacuum Cleaner 
• Disc sander
• Hot glue gun
• Air compressor 
• Plastic injection moulding rig
• Engraver
• Jigsaw
• Sandblaster
• Orbital Sander 

Electronics:

• CRO
• Digital Osc
• Logic Analyser
• Hot Air Soldering Station
• Bench Power Supply
• Multimeter
• Solderi
• Solder Stations  
• Rework station
• Microscope
• Spectrum analyser to 6GHz
• Prototype PCB cutter
• SMD soldering equipment
• Eeprom programmer
• Components
• signal generator
• Frequency Counter 
• PCB etching gear
• UV Exposure box & photo resist developer
• Video camera 
• Colour TV 
• SMD oven

Services:

• Internet
• Water
• Power
• Gas

Computing:

• Programming setups (various languages)
• Private Cloud setup (VM's and related services for members)
• Server (file server/web server/proxy) 
• Laser Printer
• Projector
• Motion capture rig
• Wifi 

Mundane Misc:

• Badge maker
• White boards
• Power extension cables 
• Work lights 
• Storage systems
• Lockers
• A sofa bed
• Speakers (even cheap ones, for playing music) (@predakanga;
• Amp 
• A water feature for the foyer
• Copper waterlilly I made while back with pump & base

Kitchen:

• Coffee/Caffeinated Drink
• A fridge for Red Bull/Mother(the new one)
• The space has a fridge, it will require decontamination...
• Stove
• Kettle  
• Microwave (if it's wanted/needed - Big)

Education:

• Lectures and experts in Arduino 
• Reference books
• Cocoa programming book
• Many "Gingery" Series books on furnace/metalworking
• Several PIC/Micro books, electronic theory books 
• Several Airbrushing and painting technique books
• Magazine subscriptions - e.g. make and Circuit Cellar
• most issues of make plus new ones as they come out 
• Bookshelf for communal books and magazines
• 5x7 foot bookshelves
• Magazine holders

Craft:

• Silk-screening supplies and "wet area" (to conduct silkscreening) + vacuum frame (~24x40 inch silkscreen)
• Letterpress equipment and engraving machine
• Vinyl cutter
• Sewing machine

Art Material

• Airbrush & small compressor 
• Paints
• Acrylic 
• Photographic Lights

Loan Kits:

• Different microcontroller  
• SBC prototyping 'kits'
• Library of dev kits

Materials:

• Perspex/Acrylic and plexiglass
• Thermoplastic (HIPS) offcuts 
• Woodworking tools + wood store
• Pigments
• Assorted square/rectangular steel tubing 

Mechanical:

• Hoist
• Engine crane(s)
• Dyno

Safety:

• First aid kit
• Fire blankets
• Smoke detectors
• As fitted in the space, require new batteries, and wiring into the space.

Performance / Film Making:

• Blue screen
• Stock of standard clamps / bar extensions
• Cheap dimmer racks waiting for the lighting desk you bring with you
• Electric piano keyboard

Events:

• Change counting machine (surely we could make one)
• Two cash boxes (helps for managing floats, excess cash, running simultaneous events)

Gigabit Cities. How?

I commend Julius Genachowski, Chairman of the FCC.  He wants to see a 'Gigabit City' (1000 MB internet connections to homes and businesses) in each of the 50 US states, by 2015.

But there are two big stumbling blocks in the way.  First, how does this get paid for?  Is the federal government going to help jump start this by providing infrastructure funding to help?

Apparently not.  At least, there are no plans for it at present.

Second, how do you get around all the laws being passed nationally that make it illegal for a municipality to install a gigabit network for it's citizens?  I live in Colorado and we have a law like that here that Comcast and it's friends paid off some state politicians to put into place.  The premise was 'government shouldn't compete with business'.  It makes it illegal for a municipality to put in place a Gigabit Network without first having a special election and getting the majority of the population to vote in building the network.  Comcast then comes in, funds an astroturf group, and scares the hell out of the population with BS stories about raised taxes and failed efforts by other cities to scare the population into voting against putting in a data network utility.  Sadly, many of these 'failed efforts' stories are true.  Why?  Comcast made them fail by going into these cities, cutting prices to below what the cost was for the city to build and fund the network, and ensure things like municipal bond issues designed to pay for a city owned high speed data utility would fail.

When business provides the least possible service for the most possible money, and kills off anything that might compete with it, that's not doing your economy, or your citizens, any favors.  Data networks are no longer just another business service. They are an essential utility service.  I don't want to trust that to just one company per city.  I'd like some competition, even if it's the city itself providing it.

These companies need to either embrace the opportunity and build out ahead of what they say demand is, or get out of the way.  Currently they're not embracing anything, and they are not getting out of the way (they are actively blocking it at every opportunity).

There needs to be a change at the federal level outlawing these 'cities can't play' laws keeping them out of building data networks like the Gigabit Cities our FCC chairman (and many others, myself included) want.  This is something the FCC can do now:  Campaign for a change to these stifling laws being put in place through private lobbyists, state by state, paid for by Comcast, ATT, Verizon and all the other usual suspects.

If our government really wants to jump start America's ability to compete and innovate, building super high speed data network utilities is one of THE best ways it can do that.  The prescription is simple:

1) Provide real federal funding to municipalities to build out gigabit fiber to the curb for homes and businesses. Treat it just like building out highways for our cars.
2) Repeal (and make impossible to enact) these truly stupid laws that keep cities from building their own data network utilities.

It's really pretty simple.  All you have to do is help pay for it and tell Comcast and friends to get out of the way.

The result will be an incredible jump in the vibrancy of our economy (local, state and national) and you'll see an explosion in the expansion of knowledge and the ability of our workforce to do things no other workforce in the world can come close to.

Give people the infrastructure and they'll build on top of it.  They'll build products, services, companies, institutions and communities you can't even imagine today.

Hackerspaces, VC's and Investors.

The more I look at Hackerspaces (or Makerspaces, or whatever name you want to use to describe a co-op like group of people who like to create things, be it software, hardware, art, media, furniture, whatever . in a warehousey place where everyone stores and shares tools/knowledge and joins as a member and helps pay the rent)  I have to wonder:

Could this be a new Venture Capital/ Angel Investment model?

I mean, this is where people who like to make things are gravitating towards.  These are the people the investors are all trying to suss out and recruit.

I'm pretty sure some of the more recently created hackerspaces I'm seeing form are being used by investor types for just this reason (I just read up on a new on in Loveland, CO that seems to be funded by a guy who's a serial company starter himself).

It also looks like it might even be an actual business onto itself as well.  Different levels of access to the space and tools cost a different level of monthly 'dues'.  Maybe profit oriented, maybe non-profit.  Maybe a bit of both.



Is it a new kind of business incubator?

You could also look at them as a bit like an ongoing Techstars entity without the extreme focus of a set number of teams with a specific timeline to create.  It would be a looser kind of thing (sort of like a hackathon that goes on and on.. with things forming and popping out from time to time when they mature enough to be real).

Could it be a 21st century "guild center"  where people apprentice to learn new things?

I also suspect these spaces could become real community centers for towns creatives.  Kind of like the Free University model we saw in Boulder and other parts of the country back in the 60's and 70's.. effectively teachers self organizing to pass on knowledge to anyone interested in a broad range of subjects, and people interested in learning showing up to soak it up.

You could also look at it as a place that supports informal apprenticeship groups that are self organizing with the help of a place to meet (the hackerspace) and online tools to organize people and promote the meetings and classes (Meetup, Facebook pages, etc.).

Mix this all together, the creators with ideas and desires to build stuff (sometimes products and services, sometimes just cool stuff for themselves and their friends), investors who can fund things beyond the hobby stage, a place to meet and create community, a place to share tools, knowledge and expertise and a place to, well, just hang out and think up new stuff with interesting people.

Really... it's a community where that special subset of people, that 5-10% or so of the population that like to make things, can come together and have a clean, well lighted place to just create.

These places could become pretty magical.  Especially if every town had one.

Some Potentials:

Imagine all the local media types who have been laid off from their jobs at the local newspaper, radio station and TV station getting together at a hackerspace and creating a new local media entity of some sort that combines local news, events, community information with an online radio station (paired with a Low Power FM license), a specific YouTube channel for their town and a website full of the latest news and happenings...  I know I'D pay attention to something like that.  I might even contribute to it to keep it going.

A set of classes taught by, say, sysadmins, on how to securely run a business or school network.  I can see our city government and school systems hiring these folks to help run their own networks.  Or businesses in town realizing 'hey.. we have some real talent here, why are we outsourcing this to some consultant anyway?'.

Or a Node.JS expert teaching a regular class on whipping up apps on Android, and a bunch of high school kids or recent HS grads who've taken the class forming a gaming company that uses Spokeo balls to create a multiplayer soccer game, which turns into a company that in turn get's some Angel funding from hackerspace affiliated investors.

How about an EE who teaches a class on simple circuit design, attracting some EE wannabe who's never going to college, but has a gift for chip design that he would never, ever have discovered if he hadn't had access to people, ideas and a place to grow that ability like his or her local hackerspace, and then running into a Seagate employee who's also a member that get's him a job with the local Seagate software group.

Maybe a group of designers who are coming up with interesting toy designs and using the Makerbot 3D printer to create prototypes that they test market via the web to see if anyone will buy and then use the same prototypes to get quotes from factories in China, S. America and N. Dakota to make them in quantity.

It's really about community

Basically, it's a community for the 10% of people that make things, and it could be supported by those makers themselves as well as the people that invest in people that make things.  It could also partner with local schools, local municipalities and local businesses to help meet different needs in the community, whatever that might be.

And, I suspect, entirely new products, services, art, media, jobs, and entire companies will get formed out of these hackerspaces in the coming years.

If I were a Venture Capitalist, or an Angel Investor group, or even a school district or city government, I'd be taking a long hard look at helping to start, or just flat out funding the initial startup (rent, some basic equipment, not very expensive) creation of a hackerspace in their town.

I'll bet the ROI they get would far exceed any money put in for just about anyone smart enough to get plugged into what looks like a new global movement just now starting to really pick up steam.

Google: Ingress Location Based Game

So, got a closed beta invite yesterday to Googles Ingress game.  Reviews sound good.  Looks like a location based game designed to get people to walk around and take pictures of things (betcha Googles got some interesting things it can do with THAT data).

I played Shadow Cities pretty intensely for a few months early this year, similar concept.  We'll see how good Google is at games when I start playing it later this week.  More to come.

On Makers & Hackerspaces

Paul Graham's got a short thought piece up on makers and the Hardware Renaissance.  Great read.  Link to his latest thought piece here.

I recently joined denhac (www.denhac.org), a hacker space based in Denver and it's full of makers.  People who love hardware  But they also love software, technology, music, art and media.

There's a trend here.  A big one.  I think the cost of creating hardware is dropping.  Atoms will always cost more than bits to produce, but the distance in cost between the two is closing fast.  The cost of the tools needed to create are dropping extremely fast and the capabilities of these tools are skyrocketing.

When I really think about it, these hackerspaces are kind of the new computer club, moose lodge/coffee shop/bar/hangout/workspace and free schools of the 21st century.  

I suspect they may be even more, like the beginnings of new local media creation points.  A place where media makers come together as well as technology geeks.  An intersection where the cool kids from all the clicks meet, and. well.. create.

Our denhac, for instance, is for us a club,  a place to work, an impromptu movie theater, a recording, podcasting and live internet radio studio, a 3D print shop,  a well stocked toolshed for hacking together a range of silicon based projects you'd be surprised at the sophistication of and a university to take classes on damn near any subject you can imagine; for example: denhac has in the last few months, had classes on Synthetic Biology (hacking DNA with $3000 home 'labs'), Lock Sport (picking locks), Serious Computer Security (think: ROP Exploitation and associated protection techniques) Game development, Home Beer Brewing with microcontrollers, Silicon Mask Making (Level: Hollywood), DEFCON 'badge' creation (basically a custom computer that does wild stuff built into your DEFCON badge) and on and on and on.  It's a 'true' Free School where those who can teach something interesting self organize and present classes for any interested person to attend and learn.

We've got a van.  I don't know why.  But we've got a van.

We're also getting ready to put together a proposal for a Low Power FM (LPFM) license (something that's going to become available mid next year... a 100 watt FM station that covers your local community).  This would make us the first hackerspace with it's own live radio station (we already have an internet radio station, why not go retro AND analog!).

Creating DEFCON badges, en mass

Now, put all this stuff together and what you really have is a place that attracts intelligent, interesting, creative and slightly crazy people.  The ones that don't really fit into the 'corporate' culture of a big company (although many members work at these big companies).  You'll get lots of startup types.  People who like creating things because they feel the need to.  Because they want one.  Because that damn thing is stupid and and I can do so much better.  And when you get these kind of people together, well, really good things happen.

I'll even go so far as to say that, if your town doesn't have a hackerspace, you might think about getting to work on creating one.  It's going to be the place that attracts all the creatives.  It's where the cool kids will hang.  It's where the future's, very likely, being invented... right now.

A good cellular provider experience.

I had an odd experience yesterday with my cellular provider.

It was a good experience.  

I know, right?  Who says that nowadays?

But it's true.  I switched to Sprint about 3 months ago.  I received a bill that had something on it that I didn't understand.  On a Saturday  I called Sprint and was on hold for less than a minute (huh.. that's new).  The person who answered was not a native English speaker, but it took me a few minutes to figure that out- which is great.  No communication issues there.

The charge was an extra $10 a month that made sense, but hadn't been explained to me by the store employee.  This, of course, pissed me off and based on previous experiences, I simply said "fine... screwed by yet another phone company" and hung up in disgust.

End of story.  Well... no.

Several hours later, the SAME customer service rep called me back.  She told me she'd talked to her supervisor and they would remove the $10 charge, for 3 months, since no one explained it to me.  

I know, it's only a $30 credit, but damn.... I have never had a phone company give a crap about a complaint I made before, let alone have them react to it in the exact right way: "We'll refund your money, but now that you know about it, and why, we'll charge it from this point forward".

So, they addressed my concern, they gave me a reward, and they preserved their ability to charge me that $10 a month without pissing me off every time I see the bill.

Impressive.

Maybe I'm wrong; maybe this was an anomaly of some sort, but if this is the 'New Sprint", I'm sold.

And yes, that's a Galaxy S III (my new phone).  And yes, I love it, still, after 3 months.  Had the iPhone 4s, don't miss it at all.

Oldie but goodie: Custom eWorld Screens.

Ran across these and thought I'd throw them out there.  These are customized screens to the Apple eWorld service (my group at Apple created the software for this service) that was around in the early 90's (pre internet days).  Some appear to be copies, but they're all slightly different.  More on eWorld here if you're interested:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWorld

Enjoy.