Hackerspace Committee Election

You could not have a museum, and have the room for your lab stuff

what the computer geeks want via a survey,

We have the analytics and the voice of our committee. Nothing to figure out there. Anyone can do a survey at any time but attendance records for classes and forum views are the telling items. Software classes gets less than 100 views, raspberry pi, infosec, and machine learning gets the triple digits.

locksport is a part of computer committee

Because the committee drove it to completion and those same sig members joined the makerspace and Computer committee. Go to any hacker convention, meetup, or even talk to our own members here they love themselves some locksport.

Locks are just another system for us to play with and make work the way we want to. Digital, analog or otherwise. Its a puzzle in the mind of a hacker.

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I’m not sure what “nerdy stuff” you’re referring to, but you watch your job and stay within arms reach of the laser at all times of operating the lasers. You do not wander off to a computer museum. Please don’t be teaching people unsafe practices that violate committee rules.

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I don’t know any of y’all so I am not going to say anything politically about the candidates.

From my own PR perspective, I (and I think some other people in PR like @anonymous_bosh ) believe that calling this committee “Hackerspace” is a great way to attract members to get dual memberships with DMS in addition to any coworking spaces they’ve joined for the simple reason that we can prototype here.

Think about what we can offer to inventors of IoT (Internet of Things) apps and devices.

Need electronics? We have it. Need a 3D printer? We have it. Need to build something out of wood? We can do that. Need a science lab? We’ve got that, too. There was even a guy in a sewing 101 class for an idea for sportswear that he wanted to keep secret by sewing it himself. I think this is an opportunity for DMS to be known as the place where we make more than computer image mockups.

The Hackerspace concept can let us open a bigger tent for people in the startup and entrepreneurship communities, and give us a place at the table for Startup Weekend and Tech Week and Hackathons (again, hacking tech together, not doing anything illegal). Tech Week is know for having events all over the metroplex, and would give enormous marketing opportunities, especially if we can get food sponsors to pay for refreshments.

We could invite people in to speak in the lecture hall and put them up as free events on Eventbrite to attract more people.

Like I said, I don’t have a political agenda, just a desire to help build membership and serve the entrepreneurs and startups who can do mockups all they like, but have to piecemeal their prototypes.

Thanks for reading.

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Actually… that we do. The Mame terminal project is large enough to house the FPGA boards (direct archive of the logic boards), RetroPI, PI cluster and terminal for the bbs. covers the museum part.

That rack gets moved into its proper place for storage and hopefully no one took off already with the cisco routers that go into it along with the VPS server that’s there. We’re talking 8u’s of storage the rest is free for draw storage for tools and other items.

That white display cabinet can either be donated to the south lobby or given back to the committee member who donated it to DMS. While the glass desk is small enough to still fit in the committee area and frame out the space while being a display point for committee classes.

Any books can sit on the metal shelving we already have.

Everything was planned for that footprint we have currently. The fundraiser thing is even part of pruning out the backlog of items the retro side of the committee wanted to keep around in my studio.

“nerdy stuff”

C128, bbs, and hackable stuff in the museum.

Please don’t be teaching people unsafe practices that violate committee rules.

Saying in general example of things that take a long time to wait on while either opening up for a slot, of course the lasers are something that must be baby sat. Most that bothered to visit the committee area in the pass are waiting on 3d prints or an opening at the lasers.

It might be worthwhile to fast track the members to a laser safety class as part of their orientation if they’re likely to have the urge to take it apart to see how it works, and especially to show them where the carbon dioxide hoses are.

@Holliday Thanks for posting about that. Those has been my vision for the space since before joining years ago back when we use to support member’s kickstarters for IoT and hardware hacking projects.

It’s been a long struggle to bring that back to the space with tons of road blocks but it seems we have the membership here now that can do it.

The hackerspace them has always been something VCC brought to the space and now as Computing Committee it should drive it further and be a larger part of the IoT community here while representing DMS at makerfaire, Defcon, and national Hackathons like the Major League hackathon.

All things we’ve strived to do under my tenure as Chair and things that we committed to double down prior to the merger.

Thanks, Dwight.

The post was flagged as off topic and hidden, and since it’s not directly about the election, I can understand why.

It would be great if the post could be visible someplace else, though.

I came to DMS originally looking for it to be part of the startup community, and was surprised that it wasn’t. The second time I came, I thought I’d make 3D prints, but never figured out the software because I got mesmerized turning pens on the lathe.

I want to join the Hackerspace committee, too, but we’ll see how it goes. My team won 2nd place at Startup Weekend two years ago, and the judges told us we lost by 1 point because we didn’t have time to show the app walkthrough. It was done, but we couldn’t get to it in 3 minutes because we focused on data about product demand.

I agree about shifting lock sports elsewhere. At a WordCamp I attended, it attracted a lot of black hat coders, which made me a bit uncomfortable.

Keep in touch, you have a friend in the PR Committee.

Holly

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I hope I’m just misinterpreting the conversation, but in case I’m not I have to say… Members ABSOLUTELY CANNOT just take the lasers apart to see how they work. If you want to learn about the lasers and help maintain them, join the Laser Committee.

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I would love to see classes on python, and its most used libraries like Numpy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Scipy and Scikit-learn, general Data Science and Machine Learning Algos, Tensor Flow as well as PyTorch.

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I came to DMS originally looking for it to be part of the startup community, and was surprised that it wasn’t. The second time I came, I thought I’d make 3D prints, but never figured out the software because I got mesmerized turning pens on the lathe.

I want to join the Hackerspace committee, too, but we’ll see how it goes. My team won 2nd place at Startup Weekend two years ago, and the judges told us we lost by 1 point because we didn’t have time to show the app walkthrough. It was done, but we couldn’t get to it in 3 minutes because we focused on data about product demand.

I agree about shifting lock sports elsewhere. At a WordCamp I attended, it attracted a lot of black hat coders, which made me a bit uncomfortable.

Keep in touch, you have a friend in the PR Committee.

That’s Amazing to hear! It’s great that we have makers like yourself that are passionate about something especially with startups culture. Something that would greatly help our new president’s mission to reach out to that community and business leaders.

Lets meetup up at the VCC Office hours and crack out a plan. I’d love to hear your thoughts and what we need to get this moving.

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I’m hearing that the Civic Hacking SIG is wanting those classes too. Now that the Computer Committee has $5000.00+ in their funds they should be able to afford hiring some teachers.

I personally know how to make iOS and Android apps. I’ll be teaching a full-fledged iOS course soon. In the mean time, you might get some value out of the course I’m doing on Wednesday. It will show you how to make a simple web app that can be added to the home screen on iOS, Android, and Windows (desktop, not Windows Phone) devices. If you can’t make it, I have a repeat scheduled for a week after.

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Another promise you can hold me to: I will support teachers instead of driving them away. When it comes to initiatives that we spearhead, we need to be focused at doing a few things really well. But with teachers we need to support all of them since it doesn’t take a lot of time and effort. Teachers need to be encouraged and we need to give them what they need so they can give members and non-members what they want.

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It was a joke :grinning:

VCC Committee Report 06/2019

  • links to the published minutes for a meeting that had two attendees. It is the 2nd meeting of the year for VCC, despite occurring in June.
  • list project events:
    • DIY MAME Cabinet class was cancelled because we are enforcing non-makery honorarium rules. No replacement event was made.
    • DIY Smart Mirror that is not an event, just a one item Talk post with a YouTube video.
    • ANSI Art Displays, is in a matching blue font which creates the false impression it is a link to a real project. It’s just colored text.
    • Hack this payphone which links to a Talk post started in April 2018. The phone is still not unlocked per last post 3 months ago. Despite the back and forth on the page, you seem to be the only participant in the project.
  • DevOps Leadership
    • Intro to docker link goes to an online workshop. There is no corresponding class on the DMS calendar or mention on Talk.
    • Intro to CICD with travis-ci is in a matching blue font which creates the false impression it is a link to a real project. It’s just colored text.
    • Intro to git and github is in a matching blue font which creates the false impression it is a link to a real project. It’s just colored text.
  • InfoSec SIG
    • Locksport is lock picking, which isn’t computer related. The link goes to an event that was cancelled because we started enforcing non-makery honorarium requests. The replacement event in July was well attended by 24 people. Taught by you.
    • Monthly CTF link goes to an event that was cancelled because we started enforcing non-makery honorarium requests. The replacement event in July was well attended by 12 people. Taught by you.
  • Crypto SIG. “Looking for presenters and talks. July is the next one and we’re scheduled for a roundtable with an intro to blockchain until we can get some lectures.” There is no roundtable on the July calendar.
  • Meetups
    • Barrista Days. Links to an event that is describes as a Barrista SIG. Two attendees. Fail to see how this is relevant to VCC mission. “Know the inners of grind types, flavor profiles, espresso, cold brew, and lattes? Then come show your art.Whole Beans would be supplied and includes a tasting session.”
    • QuakeCon is a third-party event.
    • Retro PC Collection Crawl links to an event not hosted by VCC.
    • North TX Retro Computing is a third party group that uses our rooms to host their events.
  • Radio and YouTube.
    • YouTube link goes to a channel that has 2 subscribers, 3 videos uploaded 2 years ago, 2 videos uploaded a year ago, and 3 1.5min demos uploaded 2 months ago.
    • DMS Radio is in a matching blue font which creates the false impression it is a link to a real project. It’s just colored text.
  • You link to the VCC Talk category and have sorted the posts by number of views, the highest one dating to 2016 with 6K views, followed by others with thousands of views from years ago.
  • Removing the view sort tells a different story. The 2019 posts have views in the tens to hundreds range.
  • CommunityGrid links to a Google Classroom with no classes.
  • Smart Makerspace links to a post with one response that says “Hi, computer science graduate here. This was hard to read :confused: there’s a lot of jargon on here.”
  • Blockchain goes to a discussion started by a non-VCC member. You link to an online Hour of Code class.
  • DMS Radio. The current file played the sound of a storm.
  • DMS Zine links to a necrothread which died in Feb 2018 that you revived yesterday.

This documentation is itself lacking.
The momentum seems to come from two well-attended events hosted by you last month, one of which was lock picking.

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I share many of the sentiments of @holliday.

I would like to be involved in helping out DMS with software development and maintenance. This seems like something that should fall under the perview of the hackerspace committee. I’m sure there are quite a few members that have coding skills but getting in league with them has been more difficult that I think it should be.

I think the PR perspective of naming the committee hackerspace has the potential to bring in a lot of interest to classes and events. But why would they join after the class or event is over? Unless you have something else for them to do they won’t have incentives to become members. I would suggest coding projects that span weeks or months that everyone can contribute to. And specifically I’m not thinking github - but rather meetups where people can sit in a room together and get help. Lots of help. Call it a class or whatever but it’s a chance for people to work together and learn faster than they could on their own. This could be an iphone app or a whois gizmo but the point would be to get them involved and interested.

Relating to DMS internal apps, could the group start taking ownership of these a little at a time? Those might be good starter projects for getting people involved and teaching them how things work around here. At the same time, as members we could enjoy apps that are supported by a team that we could thank/blame.

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Some of those were covered by Adnan earlier this year, but I think once it gets cooler, I’d be down to revisit those topics as a student again as well.

Dwight’s not wrong. Physical security has been part of hacker culture for as long as I can remember, and I guess it officially became part of the InfoSec domain once it started showing up on certification exams like the CISSP.

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