 Hi everyone! Welcome to this panel of talks about design patterns in hackerspaces. First of all, the language. We have Mitch Oldman here, who is OK for you if you do it in English. Very good, so welcome to this panel on the topic of design patterns in hackerspaces. First, I would like to do a small show of hands. Who here is a member in hackerspace? Or a fablab or something like that. Don't have to narrow it down that much. OK, and who has kind of more of a leading role or something in a hackerspace? Like implementing design patterns? OK, that's slightly less. As I take it, Tony asked a lot of you guys to come and share some stuff, so might please the people in a leading role of a hack center come to the first row, if that's OK for you? Yeah, perfect guys, thanks. Just so that my friend Stephen here, who is going to be running around with a microphone, doesn't have too far to run. So we could have made this talk be like a really frontal thing, with having Mitch here and having Tony here, both with their decading experience, getting into decades of experience in One Noise Bridge and Oden-Vilo Sense, being hackerspaces where they are carrying or acting out a leading role. But we thought it might be better for everyone or more interesting if we could keep this more like a talk between peers, where people could talk about their issues they have in their hackers centers and what design patterns might help solving these issues. So first I would like to ask, are there any things like you have experienced in your own hackers center where you would like to ask someone else how they solved it, or just like that, so we could establish what are the things that you're curious about, what you want to know about, and then we could go through them one by one. Anybody? Oh, and wait, just before you ask your question, there's one thing I have to tell everyone. This is all being filmed, if that's OK with you, and it might be publicized, so if you don't want to be on camera with your face, you can just talk through the microphone and your off-voice on video, and if you want to present yourself, you can also come here on the stage. OK, so my question is about how do you solve the same things that trip you up when you flat-share? Like who takes out the trash or who has to wash the dishes if basically the person who is responsible for making a mess doesn't clean it up, and in a hacker space because there's a lot of people, it's harder to find out who it was, so yeah. OK, that's a good question, so let's just summarize that as like all the little things and housekeeping or something like that. Good question. Go ahead. I have a question. How do you handle like membership fees and sponsoring? So do other hackers try to cover all the costs of the room by membership fees to make it self-financed, no matter how high they're going to be, or do you try to keep the fees very low by accepting sponsorship and if you do, who do you accept? OK, so let's call that like financing, yeah, basically financing and funding. Anybody else? Are these the only two questions? I guess. Yeah, so yeah. Oh, you have another one? Yes. As a hacker space, a lot of people are kind of sensitive to using social networks like Facebook, for example, and so how do you advertise your hacker space in a, let's say, privacy-friendly way, because a lot of the options that everybody else has aren't really an option for an hacker space, I think. So like social media with privacy-friendly social media. OK, as we only have these three questions, why don't we just go through them and we'll see if someone else or something else comes up. OK, so first question about the little things and housekeeping. I see Tony wants to give the mic to Mitch. I guess that's because there's a certain rule set on design patterns for hacker spaces or something. So like everything we'll be talking about today, there's no right way to do anything. There's definitely wrong ways, but the wrong way is what doesn't work for you and your community. So this question about how to take care of all the little things, because the little things are what really freak people out in a community, whether it's flatmates or a hacker space. If people don't take responsibility for what they do, that leads to tension. No matter what, community is hard work. And if any of you have ever been part of any community in your entire life, you probably know that none of them have been easy all the time. And there's times when it's really difficult. One of the things that can make things difficult is if some people feel that they're doing more than everyone else. Some people seem to go out of their way so that they're always doing more than everybody else. And that can be problematic behavior as well. But the whole idea of design patterns, it's not rules, it's patterns. What has worked and what hasn't worked so well for all of us in our experience? And then we can share those. And just because it works well, what we've done at Noisebridge works well for us, doesn't mean that it will work well for you and all of your spaces. But we can share those experiences, we can learn from each other. And Hacker Spaces, as they've been popping up around the world, we've always been helping each other which is why we continue to grow exponentially around the world. So with that kind of background, Noisebridge, I can share an experience with Noisebridge. All Hacker Spaces are unique because they're started by unique individuals and they have unique characters in different parts of the world. Noisebridge is unique in that we are a bunch of anarchists, explicitly anarchists. We have no leaders. We only have one rule and that's be excellent to each other. It came from a bad Hollywood movie but it works for us. And we really do have no leaders but positions of leadership do form and Anarchy as we see it is people self-organizing to make cool things happen. So if anything is going to happen at Noisebridge, it happens because people self-organize to make that happen and around the world Hacker Spaces all have some form of that called doocracy. Things happen because people do it. Not because people are the best at it, that's meritocracy if that works and not because people vote on it, democracy, but doocracy. You do it if you think that no one will object and you can get the help you need by other people if you need help to do it. And if you like it, you can do it more. If other people like it, they'll encourage you to do it more and you can get other people to help and everyone gets good at it then. How do you get good at keeping a communal space tidy and organized and clean? But what does that mean? If a whole bunch of people in the community, all the people in the community are total slobs and they're totally fine with big piles of shit everywhere. Fucking A, great. You've got a great community and you've got piles of shit everywhere and everyone's happy. If you've got a kind of community where everyone is totally type A anal and wants everything totally in its right 1K resistor drawer and the players go here with an outline around it and the screwdrivers are all in order and you definitely don't want to fill up over here because that's for the flat heads. If everyone's like that, it all works. But it's rarely that way. There's usually slobs mixed with control freaks. So we have to work it out. At Noisebridge, what we've found is people gravitate to an area, whether it's electronics or the sewing and crafting area or the biology area, whatever. We have all these different areas. People gravitate towards that and some people are always taking a sense of propriety of those and are the people who rise to a position of leadership to make sure things are as tidy as people want. And as long as they're respected by the people in that area they keep being the point person for that. We get a free light show. I was late because I put up my tent right before running here. But other hackerspaces, someone volunteers for a position and they hold that position for a period of time. Some hackerspaces, they're voted into it. So what have you tried for your community? What's worked and what hasn't worked? I'm from the CCC SED-H Zurich and I think at the moment it's for the large part basically the cleaning tasks are done in a sense by volunteers. So I think it's just a natural thing that some people kind of have more of a sense of ownership over the space and I don't mean that in a negative way and then those are the ones that have then a stronger drive to keep it tidy and so there are certain people that just clean up more because it's more important to them that the hackerspace is tidy. But at the same time also a kind of fatigue sets if those people have to keep cleaning up after others and I feel the tension building in my hackerspace a little bit and that's why I want to find a way to kind of diffuse the situation. But I don't think it's really, let's say, institutionalized in a way that it's assigned who does what in terms of cleanup jobs or even just kind of that it's clear who we have to show appreciation to for the clean space. I guess there's a bunch of people who don't really pay attention. I mean I feel I know like the three or four people who are the ones who do most of the cleanup but I don't know if that's clear to anyone that it doesn't just happen to be tidy magically. And we do have a dishwasher now so one of the big cleanup jobs is kind of taken care of. I don't know what to say. So you brought up some people are doing basically three people are doing all the tying so those people start getting maybe burned out resentful for the other people who aren't and they're feeling like they're doing more work than other people and that's not a sustainable situation. So what are the other people doing that they're doing more of than the people are doing tidying up because while they're tidying up they don't have enough time to do all the other things that those other people are doing and what happens when someone feels there's something not working for them. Do you have conflict resolution means for conflict resolution in your community? Is it just ad hoc someone just can't stand anymore and then they scream and yell at each other and then you have to apologize. I mean that's one way to do it. What happens when someone is feeling frustrated? Is there a way for them to address that? At Noisebridge we have if someone feels like it can be of use they put a sign up like the magic fairy does not come here and tidy up after your mess. Please do that yourself. Something like that. I mean if there is one or more persons in a room there will be conflict. You deal with that when it happens. So all of us have been in community. What do you all do when there's a conflict or better yet what do you do when you feel like you're frustrated that you can deal with that situation before a conflict arises and there's all sorts of ways to do that. So what you can do is get everyone together and have a public shaming ritual against that person. In my experience and unfortunately I've been in a community where that happens it doesn't work too well. I don't think that works too well in anyone. You can have a public pillory. Is that English word? It's where you chain someone to the middle of a town square so they can't leave and everyone knows that they're the bad person. That doesn't seem to work too well either. But what works well for one community again might work not so well in another and what works not so well here might work great there. So what can you do for conflict resolution? What can you do to alleviate frustration before it becomes problematic? So I'm Michael, hello. I'm from Luxerio. We are placed in Lucerne and we also had this problem with the cleaning up. So we are using the rooms from a school and we got the feedback that there is a lot of mess after we meet each other in this room. And we started to say to each other I clean up your mess that you produced before you leave the rooms and this just didn't work because everyone did clean his place up but there is always some dirt around you and this wasn't cleaned up and we still got this bad feedback. And then we started to say if this doesn't work we still say everyone has cleaned his place but before the last person is leaving the room he makes a contract. And for us this started to work it seems to be clean but we still got this bad feedback and then we just started to use another room in the school and we still got the feedback the room wasn't cleaned up which we used before so it was just an accuse. I went to the teacher in the next morning on the day we didn't use the room and asked him was it okay this time and he accused us though there was a big mess it smelled from our food and these things and then asked him what do your students do in the morning do they eat breakfast or do they order pizza for breakfast and then he realized that he was still in the mood of accusing things and he was accusing your group for just something else and since then we had clean rooms and we didn't get any bad feedback okay so let me just continue on so all communities have people in them and people all have issues and sometimes people get angry sometimes people are happy a whole bunch of people or two people are upset at each other at the same time it can be a mess what happens in your communities when people have conflict with each other what do you do do you have procedures to follow or do you just like let people work it out amongst themselves combinations what do people do in their communities when there's conflict I'm also from KS Compute Club Zurich as him and I can at least contrast two ways I tried to address it was the same issue about a mess after our weekly meetings we have that concept of a I don't know how to translate it really well which is at the same day under the same time as a normal group meeting which is announced I think five days in advance and which also has some ability to decide stuff and this can be announced by any member and it is kind of a way to get people together and maybe it will only last like half an hour and then the normal meeting will follow where people do their own stuff and it can be used to address anything that you think needs the attention of everyone at least for a short period and I think we're not doing it doing these kinds of meetings enough because at least for me when I see an issue something that I think where I feel kind of powerless about something that I'm not okay with I think at least for me it helps to at least have a way to tell people that I see this problem and most of the time this will even result in at least a part of a solution and this is like one way and I think we should do that more and the other way that I tried was trying to get the same information across but on a mailing list which we also have where every member is subscribed or even more people and where I think even more people read that mailing list that normally tend to such a meeting and there is from my experience absolutely no productive feedback if the initial message is if that kind of I'm not okay with that situation because I think it comes across as just accusing out into the blue and this is a contrast that I feel is very strong and I think it's very important to find the right channel to tell people what your view of the situation is Okay, you got one more appointment or go ahead? So we have a really large community at Noisebridge there's hundreds of people who come through every week and we started off with 54 members and it only grew from there so there were a bunch of interpersonal problems that would arise with a group that is that large we found that on an email list it just was people arguing like they were on the internet or something so let's see there is well let me we came up with a somewhat formal procedure so if there's like if you have a problem with me it's up to you to come to me and let me know because I might not know if you think that I do know and that you're afraid to approach me then we have our websites a wiki so there are a whole bunch of people who have volunteered as mediators and they put their name on the wiki and so you can go to someone who you think is cool and say can you talk to me and that Mitch guy he's a bummer for me now and so we can all get together or if you're feeling like it's really unsafe and you don't even want to be in the same room with me because I'm such a dick then the mediator can talk to you and then come and talk to me and then once that happens it's up to the mediator to see well well you know it seems like you're being totally up front but that Mitch guy he's really defensive and he's not really taking responsibility for his part in this so it's up to the mediator to go around and just discreetly just ask some people if there's anyone in the community they feel like is not really behaving excellently that's our one rule right so they and then they might even name a name if they feel it's safe to do so and then they're looking for a pattern and it's like wow you know you had this problem with that Mitch guy and this guy had a problem with the Mitch guy which is sort of similar and so did two other people now that's a pattern that I need to someone needs to tell me something's going on and my behavior needs to change and if it's something easy cleaning up after yourself that's probably pretty easy to resolve if it's something that's more of like a personal issue on my part well maybe I'll be able to change my behavior without being disruptive to the group and maybe not if I'm willing though and it's not so disruptive to the group then and I change my behavior then things proceed on the other hand there are people who come to noise bridge a large open community this happens who are sociopaths and they won't change their behavior even if they say they will and they seem to get a lot of juice out of a lot of negative attention those people we give them a few chances and if they don't change their behavior they get put on our what we call our 86 page because in the United States if a restaurant takes something off of its menu that's called 86 so we have an 86 page and if you ever want to see some totally bizarre human behavior you can read through our 86 page you got some examples there like you really write down what those people did or most of the people on there are because they're incredibly terrible like they go to noise bridge to hit on women so that's not excellent no not at all okay so flirting is totally part of human behavior and flirting is fine but if you go to noise bridge to flirt that's not really cool weird but you know someone stealing someone threatening violence yeah there's some bizarre things as well there's a famous episode of someone who claimed to be a Buddhist monk setting up a shrine that was written up on boing boing so anyways if you have a large community or even a small community sometimes you get some really interesting stories that you can tell people later yeah there was someone sleeping on top of the elevator so this is an aside now this is just an amusing anecdote but we've been around 10 years we're going to have in September a 10 year anniversary exhibition and ball so a ball is a dance so we're going to have a big dance with music and demos and talks and all these things what we're going to do also is have historical plaques where some of the more bizarre things that ever happened in noise bridge are commemorated so there will be a plaque saying it was thought it was on this spot in December of 2014 where we caught living on top of our elevator it was rumored that up to 5 people at once were sleeping in the structure that was formerly known as the DJ booth up to 5 people were sleeping here at any given time who weren't welcome at noise bridge so anyways we've got plenty of stories like that but an email list is definitely not a place to work out problems with emotional content so I'll just say that categorically there is one pattern from the original design patterns and those original design patterns if you haven't read them in the last couple of years I'd recommend going and revisiting them they're really good to re-read every year or two because there's a lot of fantastic information there for keeping a community running smoothly and not everything there applies to you and your community but it's worth reading anyways one of the design patterns though is have a meeting every week and we'd revisit that at noise bridge periodically because some people are like now we go over the same stupid things every Tuesday maybe we shouldn't do meetings anymore and we always end up having continuing the meeting just once a week for people to have everyone doesn't come just having that opportunity knowing it's a place where you can just come and say hey hi how's it going or you know there's a place where you can just say this place is a fucking mess can't people clean up after themselves maybe just a little better whatever having that opportunity and for people to introduce themselves who are new to the community and for people who are new to the community to see how the community runs itself but what we found at noise bridge is that the weekly meeting is not the place to work out interpersonal problems because then the meetings become a place that no one wants to go and the meetings just get derailed into personal stuff that really shouldn't be taking up everybody's time so if people have interpersonal stuff we have that formal process that I outlined earlier okay so thank you Mitch if I may summarize this topic like you had we had different solutions to this problem of housekeeping and keeping your thing tidy and which resulted very quickly in not just that topic it's more of a thing about how do you act upon like conflicts conflict resolution patterns inside of your hacker space and we heard that you at noise bridge do that through giving self-organization and giving people a sense of ownership also for their small realm and leadership and stuff like that let's go to the next point on our agenda that would be finance and how do you finance your hacker space do you do it as flat as possible and external financing or funding or do you do it all through the membership fees that was your question I don't remember the name sorry Danilo right I'm guessing you asked that out of a certain reason right the thing is that we're still a pretty small hacker space in the Opusville core dump right now we're 28 people and maybe 10 come by every week depends on the week and we used to have a very small room with just 16 square meters and we ran out of room and then we had to switch to a different room and we're looking for different options but it still comes down to around a thousand bucks per month costs that we have every month and do we need to cover these somehow and originally my approach was to try to cover as much as possible with membership fees because then we're not dependent on anyone else nobody can influence us etc but the thing is that then the prices get high enough that people think that they don't really want to become a member because it's too expensive and they don't come by as often as they do and then on the other hand if it's too cheap then you have to find a lot of external sponsorship and then also if you look for sponsors which is what we are doing right now then what kind of companies do you ask we ask the city which didn't work out which would have been pretty nice because then you're kind of independent but if that doesn't work out do you start asking like any company that would give you money or do you choose between companies with an approach or do you just look for local companies and these kind of questions would be interested in how other Hacker Spaces are doing this maybe one small remark since you said you asked the city maybe you can ask them for cheaper rent in a place that the city owns instead of asking for money directly so at least for example in Zurich I think about 30% of the properties are owned by corporations or the city so there's a lot of places that they could basically give you cheaper rent and in fact that's a situation for the at the moment now can I ask Tony something about this I mean as far as I know you organize these workshop things and stuff like that is that one way you hard finance your Hacker Space or could you tell us something about that maybe in the past we had a very low rent 50 francs per month and in the future we plan to do events yes where you get you collect money for people who want to come to the they have to pay entry fees and yes okay so those are going to be like workshops soldering and stuff like that yes all parties okay something I'm guessing land parties excellent yes we also try to start some projects that could give us some money so one of the approach was working on a project where we distribute water temperature sensors in the lake and then try to find a sponsor for every sensor with the idea that we have an app where the sponsor is listed next to the sensor with the goal to get some stable income and there were some like sponsorship possibilities or shops that sell maker stuff or stuff like that that we ask and they would have given us a one-time payment or something like that but that's not sustainable so maybe also projects where you can get some regular income would also be an option to reduce the fixed costs yeah we're still it's one of the typical projects that takes forever so right now we found someone that would actually pay for one of the sensors but they're not done yet but maybe that's also going to help some people and also actually this month we tried to start our first workshop and we tried to it was about cryptocurrencies for total newbies and we tried to advertise it in the local supermarket but we didn't get any signups so either it was too expensive or we didn't like yeah maybe we didn't put a good explanation next to it or maybe it was the wrong place so we're still experimenting any other people have different ways they've made money income from their space well I don't think it's the case at our space currently but one idea is also to sell beverages at a bit of a higher price than you buy them to try to make some money it's easier for a small space which doesn't have to deal with legal issues that this brings with it yeah I want to address the point of being independent of any company and I think that's a really important factor and in our hacker space we are in the lucky position that the rent in the house we are in is very low and I think we found a pretty good solution in that we keep the membership fees as low that we can cover at least the rent with those membership fees so if any sponsor would sponsor us anymore in the next year for example we would still be able to run the hacker space we wouldn't have all this cool stuff we are able to buy right now and to provide to our members but at least we have the space so in this case we are independent from sponsors as we won't go bankrupt if any sponsor leaves but we are still able to have a very nice income for so to say from sponsors which helps us out so we can keep our membership fees quite low this way I'm from two box bunzi from Markov as I talked before we are using rooms from this cool and there we have very small rents which we can pay with our membership fees so it's a kind of sponsorship from the school to us and there is a kind of dependency for us to them to their rules and let us say the political meaning of their stuff in charge but we are trying to hold this very low but even though there was mentioned to sell beverages to get some money and we exactly did this not with the idea to get money just to have a mate on our space and it was always might that someone was getting mate from a supermarket then we had a pot where people can throw in money and we told her how much it should put in and it worked very well at the beginning but more and more there was just less money to put in so then we we told the people maybe you forget to pay your amount then they go to the pot and put some extra money in and it seemed to work a little bit longer but at the moment we don't know that there is a leak of money we don't know if someone is stealing or something else happened we don't want to accuse anything at the moment anyone we just trying to find out what happened if someone maybe just put the money away to save it but be care with this idea it's fair use does not always work in the community maybe first to address the issue with sponsored locations or something like that that you get for cheaper in our case it might have been possible to get a location that we could use maybe once a week similar to a school but that wouldn't be an option for us because we want to have projects that you can keep and then it's not really something that you can do and in our city there is not enough I can imagine that it's easy in Zurich but that wasn't really an option for us then the thing that was mentioned about the drinks beverages is actually one of the best income ways for us at first we had very low price we just had one franc for any beverage and then we decided to increase the prices so right now it's 250 Swiss francs and if you go to a bar and buy a beer it's usually 5 to 6 so it's still much cheaper to go to the hackerspace to drink something than to go to a bar but it still gives us quite some income over the months because basically every night you're there you drink something and that worked really well for us and we also have a cash box where people just put in something but we have a price list because if you just say put in something then some people are not going to put in anything because they think it's kind of optional and others put in too much and that's not really a good situation so we just fixed the price and we didn't have any issues with the money getting lost or getting stolen so far or we didn't notice but there was still enough left and there was also there was some guy that always got the beverages and for example he decided to just buy them as a sponsoring which is also one way that like a member can say well I'm going to buy these things for my own money and for one beverage it's really not much so it's kind of a nice way to sponsor it without you actually noticing much because you just go to the supermarket buy some drinks and bring them to space Can I just interrupt you for one second I mean we have five more minutes and we still have one question out like do you guys want to stay on this topic or do you want to have a really crappy short version of the third question probably sorry you want to stay on this one also you're doing the next talk and you will be okay with like postponing a bit yes okay so then let's do like maybe 15 more minutes on the next question is that okay for you so let's just like shortly summarize this one we had different possibilities like getting a cheaper space through the city or something like non-financial funding through like organizations of the state and non-state financing yourself through selling beverages and yeah and some things that weren't mentioned like selling t-shirts this is the t-shirt for rev space and they made a bunch of money on that and at Noisebridge whenever we go below three months of operating expenses in the bank I was the first treasurer so I made sure that if we ever dip below three months of operating expenses people freak out and that's a good time to freak out rather than when you're going to not be able to pay rent right so whenever that happens we have a party sell more beverages well we have a you know all we need is a box saying welcome to Noisebridge suggested donation ten dollars and then a person sitting there smiling nope and that's all it takes and actually there's been studies if you have a person where the money is then people are much more likely to put in and also if you just have a picture of a person next to where yeah picture of eyes is all it takes not even just a person then people are much less likely to steal and they're much more likely to pay for the things if it's an honor system and it works it works really well nice okay so last question was like privacy friendly social media how do you advertise or market your hackers based for your community or your not yet community in a way that is more privacy friendly as Facebook or Twitter so that was originally your question like I guess you have done some research or have you tried anything that did not work out not really it just sort of popped into my mind just now so I guess one thing that wasn't intentional but has a really strong effect in Zurich was having the location at a reasonably central place which of course I mean just we happen to find this place for cheap and it's much closer to the center of the city and I think on the usual night we have like twice as many people as as say three years ago when we were more on the outskirts so I don't think I'm not sure if there really was any other significant change other than the location in what makes it attractive to come there so I guess that's a large part but of course is very expensive usually sure and we've heard the idea of advertisement in supermarkets I find that a really great idea even though I guess it didn't work yet for you but I think it's worth trying so the supermarket thing was mainly the workshop because we thought that there are a lot of people like in the local city that are interested in some technical topics but don't know anything about them and for example there's the Mikroklubschule that covers a lot of these topics but not all of them and we thought maybe some people are going to be interested but it was an experiment and I don't really know who actually reads those posts in the Mikro the other thing that I never do know the other thing that we did was we basically are alive because we're in a village with a university and that's also basically the reason why I lived there because I studied there in the past so we always try to get students to join we also have separate prices for students like for people without income and people with income and for people without income it's 10 bucks per month which is anybody should be able to pay that so what we did last year was we had a lightning talk session at the university where we presented different topics and projects we had and we expected maybe five people to show up and then there were I think 20 or 30 lecturers showed up and it didn't have any effect on memberships but a few people came by our hacker space so maybe if we do that a few times it could work and I could imagine that there are also other locations where you could have like I don't know a free talk or present some topic or something where you indirectly show that you have a lot of knowledge that people could learn from and where people might become interested to take a look at your space and this ties in with fundraising and publicity because they go together things that are really really popular at noise bridge and hacker space is all over the world are how to make your own website Arduino for total newbies that's super popular how to solder that we've been doing that every Monday at noise bridge for 10 years and there's always 10 is the minimum number of people that's considered really small sometimes there's up to 50 people lightning talks are super popular we do that once a month having some things that are really simple for total beginners be free is really helpful because it attracts a whole bunch of new people that later might come to the space and some of those might become paying members or donate something and another thing is popular is how to sew fix it cafes where people can bring things and you don't fix it for them but you show them people help each other in fixing things and how to fix things so things like that are really good to have for free so that it attracts people who will become paying members and putting posters up is a way to do it you know hacker spaces are averse to and should be things like Facebook because Facebook has some serious problems but there are other social media for getting the word out that aren't so bad like diaspora which is one that anyone can host on their own server of course there aren't 4 billion people on diaspora so these are all trade-offs how do you get the word out but yeah putting posters up I don't know in Zurich it might be too clean people don't like posters in anywhere except the supermarket but and everyone has their own probably has their own washing machine so there's not a laundromat in San Francisco putting them up all over town on posts and laundromats and supermarkets and universities and schools also getting inviting teachers to have a field trip into the hacker space anything from little kids in first grade all the way up through university is a great way to get new people as well I have a question to you about terminology so I hear there are hacker spaces there are fab labs there are maker spaces they are all to me more or less the same thing maybe they are totally different I don't know but I was looking for a fab lab at the place I recently moved to and I didn't find any so they are calling themselves Sandkasten so I told them please somewhere on the website mention that you're something like a fab lab people might find you so what I suggest maybe to improve your publicity put those three or four or five words into your website somewhere that you're something like it maybe not exactly but people might find you that way and there's also hackerspaces.org if your space is not on hackerspaces.org it's a wiki just fill out the form and get yourself on there because then you will show up on any google or any search engine search if you're not there you won't show up but if anyone types in Switzerland hacker space all the hacker spaces or maker spaces or fab labs whatever the hell you want to call yourself it doesn't matter as long as you have a supportive community for people to come and explore and do cool it doesn't matter what you call yourself just but put yourself on hackerspaces.org and many more people will find you so I told you we are in a school it's a a technical school so people which do a apprenticeship in IT going through to school and the positive aspect from us is some of our members are teachers part time at this school and they make a little bit of advertisement and we a lot some of our members coming through on G-Side to our club and for us this is a really good way to get new members and even if we don't have a teacher from a time periods there sometimes people from us are going there and asking the teacher before can we come during the break and tell your students something about us and this worked very well so even if you are located on other places go to the schools or to the university and hold some short presentations this makes some noise people are beginning to talk and from time to time someone comes up to you Hi, I'm Steven sometimes when I travel around I go visit some other hacker spaces or maker spaces and what I sometimes notice is that when you have a website it really helps when you have clearly a calendar on it when you go to the website they see something is happening because for me as a guest it's not helpful it's always cool if you have something like a calendar and if there is one particular night or day where it says open night meet up then you know as an external that you can pop in and you're welcome and you're not disturbing so it always helps when you have a website that is also not just for people who are already into it but you know there you have a chance to jump in so that's from my experience when I go to other spaces I guess that's a really important point and it also ties in with what you said with the whole soldering workshops like this low barrier of entry stuff I mean like people from outside they don't necessarily know that they can just come to a hacker space and that they're welcome and like if you communicated the right way on your website or if you do soldering course 101 Arduino for total noobs that communicates a total other thing like get more people's attention and yeah maybe subscriptions so you had one more so we're not really a hacker space but kind of but we just meet up every week and do stuff so we kind of are so about just enabling people to spontaneously come by we had this idea that we once a month we don't meet up at our usual location like it's in an industrial area of sorts it's kind of away from the center so that the step is a bit lower for people to just appear and say hi and meet us but it turned out that like in our usual location we had new faces every two weeks or so like people said hey I saw your website so we decided to come and see what's going on here and on the other hand in this restaurant where you can really just come by and have a beer and talk it was just us most of the time so it seems like a hurdle of going out there to our space and like taking the freight elevator and calling people to come in because we don't have a key system or anything it it didn't stop anyone people new people came more often to our regular meetings there are new people meetings let me just say something first so the best way to do publicity is to tell everyone you meet that there's this incredibly cool thing and it even helps much more if you have stickers stickers are really cheap and people like stickers they put them on laptops they put them on poles they put them on skateboards they put them everywhere and it's really cool to see them when you're around and it has to have your physical address and your website on it and maybe a contact but certainly the name of the logo and a place they can find you but the best thing is to tell everyone and to tell everyone that you are totally open to everybody and you would love to have them come by if they're at all interested and then you hand them a sticker and now they have that reminder and when they see it they might come it's just one thing about what you said doing meeting in public places we had our local Linus Club we had some tables in a bar Saturday afternoon they were hacking there doing something I was going there trying to talk to this guy and they just didn't speak they didn't want to talk to me or I don't know they were so focused on their things and I didn't see the point them being there they just were a group isolated and I tried to stay there I sat down on a chair and just waited some guys started talking to me I didn't get any invitation maybe that's what you said just be open talk to the people that's maybe the most important point just being in public doesn't help if you don't talk we are all introverted geeks here but that doesn't mean you can't go up to someone and just say hey what kind of projects you play with that's a totally easy way to start a conversation with any geek that's a way to be welcoming there are also websites I don't know different places that have different ones that aren't tied with huge corporations there's one in San Francisco just called sffuncheap.com and it's just a place with fun and cheap stuff and anyone can post things there it's moderated by the website owner but stuff from noise bridges in there all the time and it's a way that a lot of people find out about cool things at noise bridge okay so do you have something to say or no you Tony okay because you were grabbing for the mic so thanks everyone for like these inspirational ideas on how we could tackle these three well in the beginning very isolated questions which then started like spread out into very broad topics I would like to remind everyone of you that Mitch Oldman is giving soldering workshops here so you might take part if you wish and please do so thank you everyone who took part had a question gave some response it was really interesting hearing from all you guys and like seeing that this whole thing is starting to grow in Switzerland or already has grown and is already something yeah thanks guys and now I'm going to stop over in the next guys session