Monthly Archives: March 2009

March Hackspace Meet

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Saturday was the second meeting for the Birmingham Hack Space which made an impromptu relocation to Scruffy Murphy’s.

The meet was graced by the presence of Jonty and Russ, founders of the London Hack Space who were more than happy to share their experiences so far in setting up their own hackspace.

I think it can be said for any project that aims to bring people together that in order to progress you need to gather a community together. Once you have a strong community, even if it consists of a few dozen people, you can make real progress and begin to grow and achieve more.

As a result of the meeting the hackspace now has it’s own temporary blog, Twitter account and is on Facebook

Our next meeting is on April 11th, which you can find out more information on in this thread and then we’ll be having fortnightly pub meets staring on 15th April

WXWM late roundup

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Courtesy of Ms McQuillan

On Saturday 14th March I was at Kitchen Garden Cafe to take part in WXWM as a panel host. My 5-minute talk was a short introduction to hacking. I wanted to dispell some myths about hackers and hacking, show how fun it can be and also promote the Birmingham Hack Space at the same time. You can download the slides from my presentation for free (available under GNU FDL) and you can listen again to all of the presentations over at Rhubarb Radio

My favourite talks included Charlie Pinder’s talk on Pervasive Technology, which she illustrated using the medium of cake

My talk on hacking (with a little bit of promotion for the Birmingham Hack Space) took place near the end, but none the less was still well received. I was a little nervous but everyone seemed to enjoy my use of hats to illustrate the different sides of hacking.

Keep watch on this space for more hackery goodness soon!

WXWM

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Prompted by the number of Brummies migrating over to Texas soon for SXSW, the lovely Shona McQuillain has organised something similar. In her words:

It may have come to some peeps attention that a number of Brummie bods will be whooshing over to Texas all transatlantic style for SXSW (South by South West) later next week, to mingle and schmooze with web wizards, net honchos and to do some other shizz, like having fun. Not wishing to be outdone by this, a furious flurry of Twitter activity this evening has registered interest in a counter-event to these southern States shennanigans: WXWM. That’ll be West by West Midlands, then.

Yours truly will be giving a brief introduction to hackerspaces, so come on down to the Kitchen Garden Cafe this Saturday, 14th March from 2pm for some technological action!

First Hackspace Meeting

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Birmingham Hack Space Meeting

Last Saturday we had our very first Hackspace meeting. As we don’t yet have a building of our own it was more to sort out how to get funding, what we want to do and lots of smaller things.

What I really like about the technological community is how kind and useful everyone is. To illustrate, I made an audio recording of the meeting (which unfortunately came out crap) and so many people offered their usb sticks to save it on. Also, when discussing kitting out the building with computers and other hardware everyone had at least one spare computer! Where else in the world would that happen?!

Anyways, join in the discussion and join the group