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The Next Hackerspace 001: Why Baltimore Node?

For whatever reason, I’ve recently become renewed in my excitement for Baltimore Node. Maybe it’s the new year. A new sense of purpose?

Maybe it’s a push from other folks who are getting down and dirty with the hackerspace movement. The hackerspaces.org mailing list and baltimore-node-discussion are both seeing increased activity.

Maybe it’s a sense that Baltimore Node is getting stale. We’ve been going for six months, but relatively little has changed in that time. We haven’t lost many members, we haven’t gained many members, churn is low. From an institutional perspective that might be something to celebrate. For the organization’s whole existence, we’ve been profitable in strict financial terms.

The institutional perspective is boring. Finances aren’t the only measure of value.

Whatever the cause of my current mood, I’m ready to start questioning (again) what it is that’s happening in, with, and around the Node.

[some of] The Questions

What elements of the current hackerspace movement are baggage, and which are lasting?

How are hackerspaces & coworking tied together and why are the things they have in common important?

I see a strong call to move past a space focus and back (forward?) to a people focus. We don’t share a workshop because the tools are better, but because there are people around.

What is it I’m trying to do?

Why non-profit? Why not? Why am I not excited to chase after non-profit status? Is something like Fusion Partnership applicable or relevant to our mission?

What is next?

How does Baltimore Node grow? Should it be grown or should it be split? Should we be spending our energy as members or administrators growing this thing, or should we be seeking to plant more hackerspaces (or hackerspace-like things) in Baltimore?

This is not an exhaustive list, but it’s a starting point. I’d love to hear from other people here, on the mailing list, or on your own sites. This isn’t the start of the discussion, we’ve been going at it on the list and in person for most of a year now. It’ll keep going when we’ve all moved on because it’s really not a hackerspace discussion, it’s an enabling people conversation, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

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“What are you trying to do? Why Node?”

This is bigger than tools and more important than work and workspaces, although those ideas are very tightly connected to the Node. This is, at its core, about people. This is about providing a focus for the latent creative energies of as many people as we can reach.

“Latent,” you say, “but Node is made up of creative people. There’s nothing latent there.”

Well sure the folks who are part of the Node are creative, but I’d attribute that to the fact that we’re all creative people. Repeat: everyone is a creative person. I say latent because they weren’t all using it when they showed up. I am a believer in a natural range of talents—some may never be as good at ping pong as others—but I am also a believer in a capacity for interesting work present in every living human. Every person deserves the opportunity to pursue work that is interesting and fulfilling to them.

When I say, “this is bigger than tools,” I am calling up this capacity, this propensity towards great works; the desire to be part of and responsible for interesting work. I seek to encourage this in myself and others because I think our society largely seeks to take it away from us. In this way I am doing my part to form an anti-corporation. Don’t misunderstand me here, I’m not hoping for collective identity, something along the lines of the big-C Communists or Anonymous, for example. I want to see more individuality and independent identity, not less.

One funny thing is that it doesn’t take a hackerspace to do that. The hackerspace is a means to an end, but not the end in itself. It is extremely valuable as a central point of contact for a large group of people (I’m calling 17 members, 20+ including affiliates “large”) who are seeking similar ends, directly or obliquely. The hackerspace is not the only tool that can serve that purpose, though.

As a comprehensive or complete workshop, Node is relatively unremarkable. There is very little any member can do in the space that they could not do before in their basement, bedroom, or office. Maybe there would be a longer wait for parts or a harder time with fewer specialized tools, but the point stands. The Node, by existing, the simple fact of its existence alone, did more to nudge people into action than the tools inside it. The physical reality of the space, its existence as a meeting place and a working place is worth more than the tools, chairs, and tables inside it. Those things are fungible. More or less of them can be acquired as needed. People, on the other hand, are not fungible.

Those people are why I’m doing it. Because they burn like I do for an outlet. They have been bottled up in schools and jobs, and they’re willing to step away from it. I want to invite them along for the ride.

Why do I want to support Baltimore Node?

I want to support the Node in order to:

• Create new things.
• Encourage self-reliance.
• Encourage inter-dependence at a local scale. Grow connections, relationships, and information flows between humans instead of between companies and humans or companies and companies.
• Gather and grow a community of doers excited and equipped to solve the immense present difficulties of our lifetime.
• Help people prepare themselves to solve problems that we are not yet facing. Think toward future needs.
• Reduce the intentional or unintentional isolation of the technical community within the framework of society. Specifically, to diminish the role and influence of the techno-priesthood by throwing open the doors and inviting others in.
• Explore systems that are too big for me to manipulate on my own.
• Find out if I can build something people will love. It is a testing place for me in that way. It has something of a, “because it’s there” aura. (not claiming that’s a noble reason, just that it’s on the list)
• Redirect the free energy of as many people as I can away from waste and into productive, creative pursuits. It is waste when someone spends their day grinding themselves down at a job they hate simply because it provides money. No person should hate their work.
      Node is not a career path or an employment agency, but it can be a starting place in a personal search for meaningful work. Because it is so open ended, because it is so ripe with potential, I believe it may be the best starting place possible. If it’s not already then I want to continue urging its growth in that direction.
• Continue searching for something intangible. I am looking for something. I can’t say what it is, but I can say when and where I have seen it. When I encounter it, I know we’re on to something.

Snowboarding at the West Hampden (Baltimore) Terrain Park

The drop in: a 4 1/2 foot tall pile of shoveled-off-someone’s-car snow. It’s heavy, icy, and at the highest point on the block. Great for a starting ramp.

The view from the top of the run. The top of the drop in is at the bottom of the frame. The jump is just before the snowboard, near the “No Parking” sign.

This is a hip. It’s a cross between a quarter pipe and a straight jump. When I land, I’m turned 90° relative to my direction of take off. My axis of rotation is tilted about 45° relative to vertical, so I’m leaning back a little bit when I leave the snow.

A view of the hip while standing just downhill.

Strapping in for a run. I’m standing on top of the drop in.

A few videos:

A grab…

… and a spin.

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All in all, a good session. A few frontside 3’s, a few tweaked out grabs. I also learned that there are certain muscles surrounding my knee joints that have not seen this kind of exercise in a few years, and that that makes a difference. Snowboarding does not equal riding a bicycle in terms of joint stability.

Good times.

Recent Projects - Jan 2010

1: Coffee roasting chimney, 23 Jan 2010.

I described this in “How I Roast Coffee”.

2: A drawing board, 30 Jan 2010.

The kids like to draw with a scrap of paper and some pencils, but I feel bad letting them use a book as a flat surface to draw on. So this is a 1/2” thick piece of MDF (medium density fiberboard) that I painted with some old indoor house paint (acrylic latex) and keep in the living room to use as a drawing board. MDF absorbs water like a sponge and gets all lumpy, so I painted it in hopes that it would make it at least a little bit water resistant.

I find it useful since it’s always more fun to sit on the couch than at a table or desk. I made another one kind of like this a year ago, but it ended up as a shelf, so this is a replacement.

3: An easel, 31 Jan 2010.

I’m not a painter by training, but by necessity.

We had an old painting I pulled out of the garbage two or three years ago that my wife refuses to let me hang on the wall. So I figured I might as well cover it up and put something on it we actually like. Since I expect I’ll be at it for a bit, I built an easel out of scrap wood we had lying around. Sitting on the floor in front of it is working out fine, so I guess it’s finished.

This is after I already painted one coat of “Shell White” over it. The previous tenants of the house we’re renting left a lot of interesting colors of house paint, so I shouldn’t have to spend any money. I will also mention that it’s leaning against the main sewage line running out of our house.

4. Homemade kettlebell, my “burrito-bell”, Dec 2009.

Thirty pounds of sand + three garbage bags + 1/3 of a roll of duct tape + 10 feet of cheap rope = workout equipment for less than $10.

This is the device in my home gym:

Also known as the entrance to my basement. I can do just about anything you can do with a normal kettlebell, except when I throw mine in the air and it accidentally hits me in the face, I don’t have to go to the hospital. It’s more like a kettlebell / medicine ball crossover, maybe.

In “the gym” I have: a wrist roller with 30 pounds tied to it, a 15 pound barbell and 80 pounds of plates, and the burrito-bell. I pull the stuff out, lift it up and set it down until I’m tired, and then put it away. So far it’s been the most successful and productive weight based workout routine I’ve ever had. It’s pretty irregular, but life is irregular, so it fits.

5. The “light pen” - Jan 2010

The one is the smallest, but has made the biggest difference.

The background: our two oldest kids are three and four years old, respectively. Each night, when it’s time for bed (for the last four months or so), they get their pajamas on, they brush their teeth, we wrestle a bit, maybe read some books, then I turn off the lights and I stay in the room when they fall asleep.

Sometimes it takes 15 minutes, sometimes an hour. Either way, I can’t (won’t) leave until they’re asleep. Leaving all discussion of parenting methodology, most nights this is a waiting time for me. I don’t leave, I don’t make noise, whatever. It’s easy to be bitter about it, though. I get home at 6-ish and my wife hits the sack with our youngest around 10:30, so that doesn’t leave a lot of time to hang out, surf the web, watch a movie, work on projects, etc. So any waiting time, do-nothing time, feels kind of like lost time.

So I made this. I swapped the ultra-bright white LED from an old key chain flashlight for a dim red one I got with an old Arduino kit. Solder / desolder, the whole bit. Then I reassembled the light, duct taped the flashlight to a paper clip, and then the paper clip to a pen. I was concerned at first that the constant motion of the pen over the paper would make the gadget too difficult to use. It turns out, though, that the light is so dim that my eyes can’t really pick up the small motions. It can’t be seen unless you’re one foot away or looking directly at it, it doesn’t bleed light to the sides (which was a problem with the original white LED), and all I can see is the word immediately to the left of my pen and maybe three words on the light directly above.

The effect of this device has been huge. It’s hard to tell from the picture but in between my fingers are about 20 pages of a roughly 5” x 7” journal I’ve filled in the last three weeks. 2 sheets per page, 20 lines per sheet, around 6 words per line (with another 10 pages added since I took the picture, 48 hours ago). Let’s call it 7000 words.

Blog post ideas, poems, to-do lists, questions to myself, questions to other people, whatever random stuff I have left floating in my head after most of the day is done, all out of my head and on paper because a simple tool was combined with the right opportunity. It’s hard to state what a profound difference this has made in the last month. How I feel about the time I spend with my kids, what I keep bottled up, how easily I can express an idea or answer my own questions, how well I understand my own thought process; it’s all tied up in this light-on-a-stick. (I should mention I was slightly influenced by this blog post, too)

I might have to make more of these.

How I Roast Coffee.

This is why I can’t roast outside.

Normally we pull an extension cord through the window and do our roasting on the front porch. We don’t really have a choice since roasting coffee produces clouds of acrid smoke, which sets off fire alarms and leaves a stench in the house for days. The problem with this setup is, when the temperature drops below about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, the roaster never gets warm enough to roast the coffee.

In the past, I’ve used a small space heater to blow warm air on the popper while it’s running, but the combination of the popper and the heater blow out circuit breakers. Also, using the pop corn popper as it was originally designed can leave you with melted plastic.

The coffee roaster, a West Bend Poppery II capped with a one pint, narrow-mouth mason jar. The popper cost me about $15 on ebay, brand new, including shipping. I’ve roasted more than 20 batches in it over the last two years and haven’t had any problems.

Close up of the clip: a lightweight picture hanger attached to a spring which is attached to a short length of 18 gauge steel wire. The wire goes through a hole drilled in the top of the popper and then through a couple of washers to keep it from pulling out.

Roasting chamber, unhooked.

Disassembled roaster.

Close up of the jar. I scored it once around with a glass cutting tool, heated the scored line over a candle, and then dipped the jar in a bowl of cold water. After that I used a normal sanding drum bit on a Dremel tool to smooth the edges of the cut glass. The irregular crack on the near side is where I failed to get the jar hot enough to crack on the first try.

When done properly, the score-heat-quench method can cut a straight line around a bottle (or jar).

The pre-roast weigh in. The coffee I’m using is Mexico Fair Trade Organic Oaxaca Water Process Decaf from Sweet Maria’s. It’s dark to start with because it’s decaf, 100g is about all my roaster can handle.

This coffee was ordered as part of a batch I ordered awhile back. These days we buy all our green coffee at Zeke’s (http://www.zekescoffee.com/).

Into the roasting chamber you go, my dears.

A view of the whole rig. The board is just shorter than the width of the window frame, which leaves a little room at the far right for ventilation (in addition to the space around the chimney).

The chimney is about three linear feet of 3” diameter steel ducting. Where it meets the top of the roaster, I cut a fringe in the end of the pipe and flared it out slightly. There’s not a tight enough seal where the chimney hits the jar, so I wrapped it in aluminum foil. Air is drawn in around the pipe where it pierces the MDF, and is heated by the pipe, which gets way too hot to touch by the time the 7 to 8 min roast cycle is finished.

The chimney blows the chaff out into the garden. It’s, like, totally ecological, or something.

I use a flashlight to keep an eye on the color of the beans while they’re roasting. In this case, I hit first crack at about four minutes, and finished at just over seven. Decaf roasts faster than regular and produces less chaff, in case you were wondering.

Just finished (the roaster is unplugged), checking to make sure the color is good.

This thing is friggin’ hot when it’s done.

Onto the cooling tray, a medium sized (about 12” diameter) pizza pan.

Tada! I left it outside on the porch railing for about five minutes to make sure it cooled off as quickly as possible.

And the finished product. You can see the volume of the beans has increased, but the weight has decreased (100 grams down to 87 grams). I pretty consistently lose 15% of the pre-roast weight. That means if I pay $5.00/lb ($11.02/kg) for green beens, it’s actually costing me about $5.88/lb ($12.96/kg) for roasted coffee.

Still a great deal since Zeke’s charges $9.99 a pound for the same coffee if you have them roast it for you.

finale

Green to roasted in about 20 minutes (setup + roast + teardown). 100g starting weight leaves me with about 85g which we’ve found to be enough for two batches in the french press.

Without precise temperature control the quality varies, I’m sure, but I’ve only had one batch that wasn’t better than any store bought, pre-roasted coffee I’ve ever tasted. Coffee is best when roasted less than five days and ground less than five minutes before brewing. Bringing the roasting into our home means we get 98% better coffee than we can buy in any store. I’ll leave the extra 2% to the dedicated home roasters.

For more information on home roasting, including safety instructions, check out Sweet Maria’s.

see the full size images on Picasa

Node, Food Makers, and Networks of Learning

In a society which emphasizes teaching, children and students—and adults—become passive and unable to think or act for themselves. Creative active individuals can only grow up in a society which emphasizes learning instead of teaching.

from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, et al.

The alternative to social control through schools is the voluntary participation in society through networks which provide all of its resources for learning… Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life, that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow her to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if she cannot get in the door.

from Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, as quoted in A Pattern Language.

Education, with it’s supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas, and credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producrs, consumers, spectators, and “fans,” driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve “education” but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and let people shape themselves.

from Instead of Education by John Holt

Over the past year I’ve been part of and close to the growth of two organizations in Baltimore seeking to make some of the changes described above, Baltimore Node and Baltimore Food Makers (Foodmake.org). Each serves a different set of people, each has different goals, but both are seeking to encourage learning by doing and by creating connections to people.

The first, Baltimore Node, is a hackerspace. A hackerspace is first a physical location in which tools, primarily electronic and technical in nature, may be stored and used. At the Node, 24/7 access is available to members and access is available to anyone in the community on a regular schedule. A hackerspace is also, more importantly, a network of people geographically centered in a city or region (Baltimore in our case), who share a specific interest in expanding their knowledge of technology and specifically putting that knowledge to use. People who are interested in learning and doing, not just talking about doing. All hackerspaces are unique in their specifics, but these two definitions are at the core of every hackerspace.

The second group, Baltimore Food Makers, is a loose confederation of people learning how food moves from the farm to the table and taking control of that process by growing and making their own food. The introduction on the home page sums it up: “If you have a skill you want to learn or share related to gardening, home food processing, or cooking from scratch, speak up! This group exists to connect people who want to learn with people who have skills they want to share.” Through monthly potlucks, field trips, demonstrations, and discussions, information is passed freely from those who’ve done it to those who want to do it.

New Educational Institutions

Node is not a school, or even a new kind of school, because it is many things a school in our society could never be. Free access, open relationships, no coercion, all action and direction coming from the members. Baltimore Node is an organized place for learning, but it is not a school.

It is not necessary that the people teaching be professionals or even experts. It is also not necessary that the people learning become licensed or certified in the area they are studying. The system is working when those seeking knowledge find what they are looking for.

We see this in small ways in the world, already: I need a phone number for a local dentist, I consult a phone book; I have an issue at work, I go to a coworker; I need to know when the parachute was invented, I go to Wikipedia. Node and Foodmake seek to cause these teacher-learner (resource-seeker) relationships to form intentionally, on a longer time scale, and in a less transient fashion.

My goal is to turn dependency on an institution, which in many cases is a very modern phenomenon, into dependency on a community. I want people to be less dependent on traditional schooling, the government, grad school, and big agriculture; and more dependent on their family, their friends, their neighbors, their community gardens, and the geek that lives one block over whom they’ve never met.

I don’t want to harp on what is good or bad about my culture except to say this: the potential still exists to be a nation, a city, a neighborhood of people who seek out knowledge and an understanding of how the world works so that we can rebuild what is broken, improve what already exists, and invent new solutions to the problems staring us in the face. All this we can do without being told it needs to be done.

But, Node and Foodmake are not where my network stops. I don’t expect they ever will be for anyone. Groups like Velocipede Bike Project, the Free School, BMore Smart, BmoreConnected, and even Ignite Baltimore and TEDx MidAtlantic are seeking to unbuild the walls between people so that real relationships, real networks of learning, can form.

What’s next?

 1. Don’t put your hope or your faith in the big institutions.

Your education is no guarantee that you will find work to do, or that you will know how to do it when you find it. And it’s disheartening, but the government and associated institutions that worked at their most creative to get us into our current mess are not, by definition, creative enough to get us out of it. It may or may not be a universal truth that collective greed is stronger than collective wisdom, but it is true in this case.

This probably won’t look like fighting the power as much as it will resemble a step towards independence. Don’t waste energy tearing things down when it’s so much more fun to build new things.

 2. Seek fellowship with people who know what you want to know and are doing what you want to do.

“Fellowship” is an old word and tricky to define. I like to think of it as an unspoken commitment between equals to make an effort to grow together. I don’t just mean grow closer to each other, but that each person would independently grow, encouraged by the other.

This is occasionally as formal as a workshop or a potluck, but is more often informal. Physical presence in a location, attention to another person (put away the electronics), or an effort to maintain relationships across distance are all valid forms of fellowship, valid ways to build a network.

 3. Share what you know.

Be conscious of the fact that you know things other people might not. You know things in different combinations than anyone else, and have insight others don’t.

There are two ways to share what you know.

   1. Sit around and wait for someone to ask.
   2. Find people who are interested and invite them to share first.

You can probably guess which I prefer.

There are many opportunities to share what you know without being a big-T Teacher (http://is.gd/6EbET, bottom of page 22). The Node is open to anyone leading workshops. Baltimore Food Makers is always looking for people to lead skill sessions at their potlucks. The Free School is open to all proposals, regardless of your qualifications. Ignite Baltimore accepts speaking proposals from anyone and only filters because they have more speakers than time to let them talk. You have a unique set of skills, experiences, and passions that no one else has. There are people ready to hear what you have to say.

The problem is that it’s a rare thing to be asked what you know, to be invited out of the blue. Your knowledge can best be put to use if you create sharing opportunities. So what does it mean to create a sharing opportunity? For the Node it looked like 10 or so of us meeting (thanks to a single open invitation on Twitter) and realizing we were all excited to start a hackerspace, but hadn’t been invited to do so. So, at that time, we invited each other. The best way to start sharing your knowledge is to ask others to share theirs and to listen carefully.

I’m not saying push yourself on people, ready to pounce when they stop talking, always thinking ahead to your turn in the conversation. Instead, be open to the fact that you may not be the smartest person in the room. Start the conversation by asking others to share, and be open to sharing if that opportunity arises. You won’t be able to share anything until you’re trusted. Nothing kills trust like inconsiderate smash-and-grab style conversation (I need to work on this one).

My wife started Foodmake not with the goal of telling as many people as possible what she knows, but of getting those people to tell her what they knew. The group’s success is in part based on that flipped relationship. Not, “come here so I can tell you something”, but “come here so you can tell me.”

Why Beauty Matters

Quotes from parts 1 - 3 of Roger Scruton’s essay on beauty.

“There are standards of beauty which have a firm base in human nature, and we need to look for them and build them into our lives.”

“People need useless things just as much as they need useful things.”

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

William Wordsworth: The World Is Too Much with Us (1807)

“All art is useless” - Oscar Wilde

“Put usefulness first, and you will lose it. Put beauty first, and what you do will be useful forever.”

“Ornaments liberate us from the tyranny of the useful, and satisfy our need for harmony. In a strange way, they make us feel at home. They remind us that we have more than practical needs… We have spiritual and moral needs. And if those needs go unsatisfied, so do we.”

Native Metaphors

(originally posted Dec 2009)

As programmers it is our privilege to create what cannot be realized in the real world. But right now our language of development (our pattern language) is dominated by metaphors that move from real to virtual. The website has visitors, I click on a link, I put the file in the folder. Is it possible that this metaphor flow will ever reverse?

Could virtual space become the source of metaphors useful for describing the real world?

Arguably this change has happened for some. Many who leave the web after an extended visit notice the lingering effect. Like a cruise passenger who feels their sea legs a week after the voyage ends (real world!), the techno-adept longs for straightforward status indicators above their family member’s heads.

The weakness of a real-to-virtual focus are easy to pick out; files that can only be in one folder at a time are limited by a metaphor, not a technical difficulty. The weakness of a shift to virtual-to-real as the primary metaphor flow are less clear. It doesn’t seem likely the weakness will based on limits.

The primary goal of the tool making practice of programming is extending and expanding our abilities as humans. This is also at the core of the metaphoric shift. As our ability—to create, to visualize, to track, to organize, to remember—extends, so extends our reach. As our reach extends, our world expands and the material we have to draw on for the creation of new metaphors multiplies.

The difference between this tool making craft and all others that have come before it is the extent to which this craft draws both the practitioners (creators) and the beneficiaries (users) into itself. Time spent in the virtual world is larger in many ways than time spent in the real, and this is why the shift will happen.

The benefit to software developers will grow from this trend as the metaphors we use become native to the medium in which we use them. Maybe at that point they will cease to metaphors. Our pattern language will be complete in itself.