Hackerspace Meeting No. 2 (5th October)

Attendees:  William Liang, Daniel Cheng, Michelle Lam. CY Ng, William Hui, Benjamin Law, Lester Lim, Julian Lee

Key points discussed:

a) What is a hackerspace?  

- Agreement in that there are several defining features of a hackerspace, e.g. a physical place where people collaborate, make things and share ideas, and participate in an open, democratic community.  

- Also, the concept of mashups / interdisciplinary collaboration is considered very important.

- Some discussion as to whether the hackerspace should coexist with a cowork space.  Conclusion was that while there are places that combine them, and there is some overlap, in general the type of community that each fosters is quite different.  Hence the hackerspace here in HK should be focused on the "hacking" element more than cowork.

b) Should we join in one of the other cowork / hackerspace efforts?

- Brief outline of the various other organizations we have met and discussed with, including BootHK, M-Lab, Videotage, Foo Tak.

- Agreement that we will definitely need to work with others until we have our own space.

- However, also agreed that we need to maintain a separate brand identity (e.g. X @ BootHK, X @ M-Lab, X @ Videotage etc).

c) Members, marketing and workshops.

- All agreed that key focus for now is to try to pull in more members to build the critical mass needed to get a physical space.

- Plan is to hold workshops to attract members, and to market these workshops online.  Based on Benjamin's experiences at Muecs, plan is to market via Facebook and UwantIwant.  Will also try to leverage Videotage, Pixelbread, the Google Groups and the Universities to attract members.

- These workshops should charge to cover materials costs, although similar workshops in Shanghai charged RMB50, so maybe a ballpark of HK$100 per workshop would be appropriate.

- In terms of monthly membership dues, this needs to be discussed further, but an initial guess of HK$500 per month was suggested.

d) Name

- The final three names that were suggested are: Jam Factory (匠房), Mashspace (協作空間), and Hackjam (客匠).  

- Votes are to be submitted by midnight tonight (Wed 6th Oct).

- Final decision was to use Hackjam (客匠)

e) Workshops. Agreed that we should put a place on the wiki to get people to add to the list of workshop ideas.  Mashup / interdisciplinary ideas were the most popular.  Some ideas that were discussed include:

- Vertical garden with automatic watering.  Mashup between greenfinger types with the the microcontroller crowd.

- Bass / rhythm activated Christmas tree lights.  Mashup between electronic art and microcontroller crowd.

- Electronics for non-engineers

- Cooking for engineers

- Darkroom processing for photograhers

- Software programming workshop

- Cooking for engineers

- William Liang will poll the other hackerspace groups (e.g. the meetup group, and the various google groups) to try to get people to volunteer workshop ideas.

f) Work Plan.

- For the next meeting, it was suggested that we need to have a plan for the next few months moving forward, so that we can see how to divide the work amongst the attendees

- This work plan should cover the critical tasks to run the next few workshops, so that we can begin to do these while also preparing a longer term plan

- William Hui agreed to take an initial stab at this

g) AOB.

- Missed discussing other potential collaboration partners (e.g. MaD)

- Missed discussing alternative sources of funding.  Michelle had previously mentioned loveideas.hk.  Julian mentioned CreateHK as a possible funding source.