Just to tell Hackmeet's events planners how extremely thankful I am for this cool conference. It was uber-TIGHT! And had a plethora of information. The grass roots style convention was also almost totally non political so you didn't have politics stepping on information dissemination. The coordinators did a great job! And so congenial too. GREAT free, informed talks on cutting edge stuff like open source content management, free graphics rendering , stealth, anonymity, a formidable lay-level presentation by a new EFF staffer on the legal side.
The awesome Rae, endowed w. enough people-person skills for three people, kicked it off with her cool talk on Drupal, open source collaborative content management. Good presentation on Metavid, a collaborative, open source model for archiving and presenting public record videotapes of U.S. congresspersons on the floor and in some cmtes. Jake Applebaum's non-technical talk on Anycasting and Tor, touched on recursive DNS and authoritative DNS, was killer, hilarious and had good stuff on stealth/anonymity. The attendees were pretty cool. Loved seeing all the Linux on I-Book folks. The fairly diverse crowd was one of the perks, living in towns like SF Berkeley Boulder Seattle Albuquerque Paris and Amsterdam. One brought a wifi horn antenna he'd built comprising microwave oven parts. No one touted anything unethical or illegal, and there was a green "feel" and an undertone of a VERY strong dedication to civil liberties, civil rights, anti-discrimination, freedom of speech, and appropriately, solidarity with immigrants' quest for rights. As a Mission district Latino and a human being, I laud the latter effort. Excellent talk by Akkana Peck, author of "Beginning Gimp" on GIMP and a forum on techside gender issues.
Free lunch of Vietnamese sandwiches and great Asian food I'd never seen. I scarfed down two of the abused, misused, politically incorrect glazed donuts and gazed upon the chimes of freedom. A genuine warmth to the folks both managing and attending -- an informal, unpresumptuous, BGP-knowin' audience.
For future knock-yours-sox off, laugh-your-ass-off, presentations, I"d suggest contacting Laura Chappell, a TCP/IP/Wireshark/net security type who consults for the bigs and law enforcement. Though she can command high seminar/lecture fees if she wants I think she'd love you and what you're doing. I know I do!
What a great and sincerely written comment! Rarely do you get this level of constructive feedback post-event. Also, we were really working on making this hackmeet a welcoming space for everyone, tech-phobic and tech-confident, etc.. and it sounds like we may have. Thanks for takin' the time!! (and I hope we have your contact info to let u know about the next one! :) Thanks to everyone else who worked on the hackmeet, especially all our bomb-ass speakers and also especially the speed-geekers! You really made this event.
Great job ! Very cool H.meet! wish i had more time for more sessions, can't wait to hear about more of these... and keep me posted... many people told me they wished they had known about it, but news hadn't reached their radars.
Thought i'd just toss into the collective mind pools a couple HOT territories and references for future consideration.
1.There's a really fascinating and radical-edged conference coming up in Berlin on copyright issues called "the oil of the 2st century: perspectives on intellectual property" http://www.oil21.org/ which might provide some ideas for future themes.
2.And think the gender and technology issues are of crucial importance to the tech and hack communities everywhere... and would be great to see the dialogue and ideas continue expanding there. i stumbled into the issue very naively, and poorly articulated, but found something on the net that expressed what i have been feeling intensely since becoming involved in a variety of media/tech environments...
On "Net Utopianism" by Faith Wilding
" It is of utmost importance [however] to recognize that the new media exist within a social framework that is already established in its practices and embedded in economic, political and cultural environments which are still deeply sexist, and racist. Contrary to the fond delusions of many net utopians, information exchange on the Net does not automatically obliterate hierarchies through free exchange of information across boundaries. Also, the Net is not a utopia of nongender, it is not a free space ready for colonization without regard to bodies, sex, age, economics, social class, or race. Despite the indisputable groundbreaking contributions by women to the invention and development of computing technology, today's Internet is a contested zone historically originated as a system to serve war technologies, and is currently part of masculinist institutions."
Well i'm only just beginning to seriously explore the gender and technology questions, and intensely wondering just how "masculine codes" are affecting the technological landscape and our "realworld binaries"(?) ... and i'm still figuring out the necessary language.
Would be great to see this develop as points for discussion and evolving practices, so that the roads toward balance become further travelled and illuminated!
Sunday 14 October 2007 Conference at New College San Pancho, CA
Just to tell Hackmeet's events planners how extremely thankful I am for this cool conference. It was uber-TIGHT! And had a plethora of information. The grass roots style convention was also almost totally non political so you didn't have politics stepping on information dissemination. The coordinators did a great job! And so congenial too. GREAT free, informed talks on cutting edge stuff like open source content management, free graphics rendering , stealth, anonymity, a formidable lay-level presentation by a new EFF staffer on the legal side.
The awesome Rae, endowed w. enough people-person skills for three people, kicked it off with her cool talk on Drupal, open source collaborative content management. Good presentation on Metavid, a collaborative, open source model for archiving and presenting public record videotapes of U.S. congresspersons on the floor and in some cmtes. Jake Applebaum's non-technical talk on Anycasting and Tor, touched on recursive DNS and authoritative DNS, was killer, hilarious and had good stuff on stealth/anonymity. The attendees were pretty cool. Loved seeing all the Linux on I-Book folks. The fairly diverse crowd was one of the perks, living in towns like SF Berkeley Boulder Seattle Albuquerque Paris and Amsterdam. One brought a wifi horn antenna he'd built comprising microwave oven parts. No one touted anything unethical or illegal, and there was a green "feel" and an undertone of a VERY strong dedication to civil liberties, civil rights, anti-discrimination, freedom of speech, and appropriately, solidarity with immigrants' quest for rights. As a Mission district Latino and a human being, I laud the latter effort. Excellent talk by Akkana Peck, author of "Beginning Gimp" on GIMP and a forum on techside gender issues.
Free lunch of Vietnamese sandwiches and great Asian food I'd never seen. I scarfed down two of the abused, misused, politically incorrect glazed donuts and gazed upon the chimes of freedom. A genuine warmth to the folks both managing and attending -- an informal, unpresumptuous, BGP-knowin' audience.
For future knock-yours-sox off, laugh-your-ass-off, presentations, I"d suggest contacting Laura Chappell, a TCP/IP/Wireshark/net security type who consults for the bigs and law enforcement. Though she can command high seminar/lecture fees if she wants I think she'd love you and what you're doing. I know I do!
Thanks!
What a great and sincerely written comment! Rarely do you get this level of constructive feedback post-event. Also, we were really working on making this hackmeet a welcoming space for everyone, tech-phobic and tech-confident, etc.. and it sounds like we may have. Thanks for takin' the time!! (and I hope we have your contact info to let u know about the next one! :) Thanks to everyone else who worked on the hackmeet, especially all our bomb-ass speakers and also especially the speed-geekers! You really made this event.
I wouldn't mind a listserv,
I wouldn't mind a listserv, or at least one email to the group so we can talk to each other
thx, and a few links for Hot topics
Hi all,
Great job ! Very cool H.meet! wish i had more time for more sessions, can't wait to hear about more of these... and keep me posted... many people told me they wished they had known about it, but news hadn't reached their radars.
Thought i'd just toss into the collective mind pools a couple HOT territories and references for future consideration.
1.There's a really fascinating and radical-edged conference coming up in Berlin on copyright issues called "the oil of the 2st century: perspectives on intellectual property" http://www.oil21.org/ which might provide some ideas for future themes.
2.And think the gender and technology issues are of crucial importance to the tech and hack communities everywhere... and would be great to see the dialogue and ideas continue expanding there. i stumbled into the issue very naively, and poorly articulated, but found something on the net that expressed what i have been feeling intensely since becoming involved in a variety of media/tech environments...
On "Net Utopianism" by Faith Wilding
" It is of utmost importance [however] to recognize that the new media exist within a social framework that is already established in its practices and embedded in economic, political and cultural environments which are still deeply sexist, and racist. Contrary to the fond delusions of many net utopians, information exchange on the Net does not automatically obliterate hierarchies through free exchange of information across boundaries. Also, the Net is not a utopia of nongender, it is not a free space ready for colonization without regard to bodies, sex, age, economics, social class, or race. Despite the indisputable groundbreaking contributions by women to the invention and development of computing technology, today's Internet is a contested zone historically originated as a system to serve war technologies, and is currently part of masculinist institutions."
http://www.obn.org/inhalt_index.html
Another article ( w/ Critical Art Ensemble) here put up by the amazing Subsol resource created by cultural and digital theorist Joanne Richardson:
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors/wildingtext.html
Well i'm only just beginning to seriously explore the gender and technology questions, and intensely wondering just how "masculine codes" are affecting the technological landscape and our "realworld binaries"(?) ... and i'm still figuring out the necessary language.
Would be great to see this develop as points for discussion and evolving practices, so that the roads toward balance become further travelled and illuminated!
Soli,jam On ! p.