 We're going to have a little chat here today about some of the changes amongst the Defconn groups and some ideas about hack spaces, inner hack space communication and extra hack space communication. On our panel, we have Nick Farr, Dave Marcus, and Anarchy Angel, and then let them go through and come on, shots, shots, shots, shots, come on, 5 hour energy shots, come on, wake up people, let's go. I know most of you are still in here because you fell asleep in the EFF's talk, so if you're just waking up, we're going to talk first about the Defconn groups point items. I just became the Defconn groups coordinator about a month ago. We have some very interesting changes coming along, yeah, right. Black needs a beer. Who's got a beer? Yes, who has a beer? Anybody have a cold beer? Bring black a beer. Bring it here, I'll take it. Excuse my voice, I've been yelling at humans all day. So with Defconn groups, we've had some interesting things. Domestically, everything's pretty solid, you know. We have a pretty good infrastructure. Yeah, we have some, you know, domestically, we have a pretty solid infrastructure. People kind of get it. They understand what Defconn groups are. Internationally, we've had some issues. Just to get a few things out of the way, you cannot be Defconn of a country. So no Defconn of India. You can't copy the Defconn.org website and then start your own up and start charging admission. I mean, it's kind of crazy that I don't have to be saying these things, but it's true. I'm talking to pretty much all Defconn groups in India on that note. It's a privilege to be a Defconn group and, you know, treat it respectfully. So with that, I'm going to go through and let everybody tell you a little bit about themselves. Nick? Thank you, Black Dice. I'm Nick Farr. Most people know me for my work with Hacker Spaces back in 2007, back at Defconn way back then. We organized a trip bringing people from Defconn to the CCC camp in Germany where we showed people like Bre Pettis and Elliott and David Holt and a lot of people who went back to the United States and started Hacker Spaces based on the German model that was going on over there. Since 2007, there's been an explosion of Hacker Spaces in the United States. And now... You fucked up every single one of them. And Dave has his own opinions on that. And so that's why I'm happy to sort of present just a very brief overview of what's been going on since and discussing a lot of the things that have been happening since 2007. Dave? I'm Dave Marcus. I'm known mainly for being Dave Marcus. It doesn't really require a whole lot of other explanation. My day job is being the director of advanced research and threat intelligence for McAfee. But with Nick, I helped start a Hacker Space in Maryland called Unallocated Space. So I'm happy to share my horrendous, horrible experiences of doing that and working at a disgustingly close relationship with Nick, who is a really tedious human being to work with. So there you go. I'm Mike Guthrie, also known as Anch. I run... I'm the coordinator for DC 503 in Portland, Oregon. I'm also a member of the Hacker Space brain silo in Portland, Oregon. And I'm calling bullshit on myself. Why not? On yourself. I'm Adam Mespedia, also known as Anarchy Angel. And I run DC 414, which is a Milwaukee chapter of DEF CON. And I hack shit. Bear assessment. So Nick has a little presentation about just in general hackspaces. Have fun. Yeah, tell me about Ritter Man's talk, like what happened today. I don't think... Dude, we should... Yeah, the people we didn't leave, probably the ones who passed out. Yeah. Can I get one of those? Is that sharing it up? I don't want one here. I understand. Make sure it's swapped over. Is there a function in the screen? Okay. I've been running into other dorky stuff, so... I believe it, so... You fancy a squirrel? There you go. There you go. Oh, this is a boot too. It does that. Yeah, it don't work. Okay, there you go. We have to have technical support to start our presentation on hackspaces. I did. Alright, we about ready? Hey, is that turned on? Alright guys, what's up? My name is Block Daze. I'm the DEF CON Groups Coordinator for DEF CON.org. We're going to have a little chat here today about some of the changes amongst the DEF CON groups and some ideas about hackspaces, inter-hackspace communication and extra-hackspace communication. On our panel, we have Nick Farr, Dave Marcus, and Anarchy Angel. And then let them go through and... Come on, shots. Yeah, shots, shots, shots. Five-hour energy shots, come on. Wake up, people, let's go. I know most of you are still in here because you fell asleep in the EFF's talk. So if you're just waking up... And with that... Yeah, I think alluding to what Dave was talking about, I've been involved in two hackerspaces that took a little while to get going and one of which is currently in a struggling phase. And so I wanted to instead sort of focus on the negative, I wanted to focus on the positive and look at what an ideal hackerspace looks like. But before that, if I may be allowed to do so, I'd like to plug my Kickstarter. Some of you might remember a couple of DEF CONs ago. I ate a 20-patty in and out burger as a fundraiser for the hacker foundation. And now that I have a Kickstarter that's in process, I said I will repeat what I did several DEF CONs ago if Sierra Zulu makes its $50,000 funding goal by 10 p.m. tonight. That's the URL. So if it gets funded by 10 p.m. tonight, I will eat a 20-patty burger at the Ninja Networks Party which we'll probably get blogged and tweeted and you can see it or join in there. And for every additional K above 50 that gets funded, I'll eat one additional patty. A stack of 20 patties? Yeah, you could say that, yeah. You'll eat a Nick Farr's worth of patties. There you go. Just like you, Mr. Dave. But getting back to the points, I wanted to, again, focus on the positive. What does an ideal hackerspace look like? But to start off with, a lot of people get hung up on what the definition of a hackerspace is and I have a very, very simple definition. It is simply a physical space where hackers gather to hack things together. Not that complicated. Hackerspaces go by many, many other different names. But whatever you decide to call it, if it fits that definition, I'd call it a hackerspace. Ideally, the first thing that should come to your mind when you think about a hackerspace is a really awesome group of people who are dedicated to hacking and making things and bringing in more people to help them hack and make things. A lot of building that community is focusing primarily on teaching, learning, and hacking. There should be a constant intellectual simulation going on inside of a hackerspace that's fun. Hacking in large part is about play and about discovery. And as a process of that, hackerspaces should always be coming up with new and cool projects. It doesn't matter if it's something that gets boing boing right away, but if it's something that's cool to you and your community and it's new and it's something that hasn't been seen before and it could or does inspire the larger hacker community in some way, that's the kind of thing. Those three things together, people teaching, learning, and hacking and coming up with cool projects are what I believe an ideal hackerspace is all about. Hackerspaces are nothing new. How many people here have been involved actively in a hackerspace? Okay, and then keep your hands up. How many people have attended a hackerspace at least once? Keep your hands up. Keep your hands up. How many people have never been in, driven past or have access to a hackerspace? Okay, so minority of the crowd, most people that those answers get better and better every single DEF CON. But there are hundreds of hackerspaces just in the United States. There's almost a thousand throughout the entire world right now. And I wanted to go over some of the traps that I think a lot of hackerspaces fall into. Hackerspaces that are really successful, that are great at building a community, teaching, learning, and hacking and coming up with cool projects you all know about. They're out there, they're constantly in the blogosphere, a lot of them make mainstream media. And I really wanted to look out where the six sort of common traps that I think a lot of people who get involved in the community and get out there and start a hackerspace tend to fall into. The first trap, and I'm talking a lot of personal experience here what happened in my most recent hackerspace and allocated space in Southern Maryland is the thought that, you know, we don't do that here. I don't believe in that at all. Real hackers can hack on anything. It doesn't really matter what it is. And ideally, your hackerspace will be looking at things that are beyond your comfort zone. If you're mostly IT people, you'll get into hardware. If you're mostly hardware people, you'll get into the more of the info second, the coding things like that because it's outside your comfort zone, it's something that you want to find out more about. Second really big common trap is the hackerspace. It's kind of just become some place that you hang out at after work, party, drink, play games, this sort of other thing, yada, yada, yada. That's all cool. That's a great socializing and having a social space where people feel welcome to come into is an awesome thing, but it should be secondary to the things that you should be hacking on and working on actively in a hackerspace. Third trap that a lot of hackerspaces fall into, some people call this the Founder's Curse is the leader with the vision trap. You have one really strong personality and everything that happens in the hackerspace sort of lives and dies by the opinions and the whims and what other people perceive that personality to like or dislike at any one given time. Get rid of that. That's a really harmful trap in any kind of an organization that you're in. Successful organizations follow ideas and energy and passion. They don't follow people. And successful organizations welcome all sorts of different ideas, projects and are always bringing in new people and new ideas and breeding off of that enthusiasm that comes when you have a constant supply of new and excited and talented and passionate people coming in the door. Again, single point of failure is the next big trap that a lot of hackerspace has fallen to, where maybe it's not something where you have a bottleneck at the leader, but in various different administrative functions that a lot of hackerspace or there's one person that always does that one thing. Just like in real life where you should have backups for everything and start eliminating single points of failure everywhere in your process, you should have backups for your key leaders and admins. One of the really big things, one of the first things they teach you in whatever kind of leadership class you're looking at is that the best leaders start training their replacement immediately because that lets those leaders get up to the top or movement or whatever it is that they're doing. They know that they can disappear. Things happen to people. Accidents happen. People get burnt out. Everybody that's in a critical position no matter what it is, if it's a critical project your hackerspace does, if it's the treasurer, if it's the person that's responsible for scheduling things, no matter what it is, if it's a critical function, that person should be finding and training their replacement right away. And then the second to last trap that a lot of hackerspace has fallen down, some people refer to this as drama, some people refer to this as interpersonal conflicts, but regardless of all of that if you're not learning, teaching, hacking, working on something or figuring out what you're supposed to be working on, you probably shouldn't be in the hackerspace. So much energy gets burned up on everybody in the space discussing one particular personality who's creating a roadblock to teaching learning and hacking in a hackerspace. It's very simple. If it's clear that a person or a thing or whatever is not contributing to the hacking in a hackerspace they should leave or they should be asked to leave. And then the final problem which like anything in life is always a problem, how do you manage your resources? So many people try to solve a money problem by thinking about different schemes or things that they could do to raise money or that's the wrong focus. If you are having money problems, you should be thinking about how you can bring in more people, new ideas by doing different classes, events, working on cool hacks. If you bring people to your hackerspace, your money problems will disappear. And then that's the brief presentation that I wanted to give on my ideas this year at DEF CON. Awesome. Awesome. So I just want to kind of get some opinions first from our panel members here and then I'm going to ask for some questions from the audience if you have them. Any type of tips or successes that you've come across any little pitfalls but not just negative. What's like some pro tips as far as going for a positive movement? Hackers are inherently lazy. Hackers are inherently lazy. Hackers are inherently lazy. Hackers are inherently lazy. I'm really trying to build the DC 503 group and we have some momentum and then we have some non-momentum. And so you kind of have to get people motivated to want to do stuff. And some of that is projects and some of that is just being somebody that's an active personality and some of it is me and some of it is not. I get busy and I have a full-time job. I'm just sitting in the audience right now looking at me giving me the evil eye you should be working. But I have a full-time job and we get busy and we don't schedule meetings or I miss a meeting and the next meeting I show up to people aren't there or it just kind of happens. But so being consistent and becoming consistent is something that as a hacker space or even as a group it needs to happen. The space that I'm in is actually pretty cool. They meet every Thursday. They have open house every Thursday. We have exploit night every Wednesday night, every other Wednesday night something like that. It's pretty cool. But being really consistent and understanding that people are people and people get busy is really important. Consistency. One thing I think we kind of failed on from the beginning and it's our own fault is not having a lot of interesting classes that ran at a scheduled period monthly. So we would have weeks that were really active when we had a lot of people at the space and then we have periods of time when it wasn't. So by not having a consistent schedule of doing something on a Wednesday night every single week, something on a Thursday night every single week they faltered to the clubhouse environment very, very quickly. So really having an idea of six or seven events to run monthly is really, really helpful. Whether it's a night dedicated to hardware same night monthly or same night weekly those kinds of things do a lot to bring people in on a consistent basis. And then make sure you pick your space correctly where you physically locate it. Location, location, location. Being located next to a school is a good thing. Being located in industrial areas are a good thing just because you get people who are kind of naturally hackery in certain ways or that are in a scholastic area you get lots of interest from students. If your space is located in the wrong area you could be behind the eight ball from the beginning. So location, consistency and like Nick had talked about before the financial model is a real big deal too. We tried a very different financial model at Unallocated, didn't we Nick? A key holder centric financial model where the key holders were responsible for the financial running of the space and everything was just donations. We had no membership or anything like that. It was a good idea for some things and a really problematic idea in other areas. And you can't change your financial model in the middle of it either. Then you become the Netflix of hacker spaces, right? You change your financial model when you're not offering anything new everybody gets pissed off at you. If you don't have anything new to offer something else that I found that's really important is having space for people to actually work. The space that I'm involved in right now it becomes cluttered really, really fast. You get donations of hardware and various pieces of stuff that people don't want and you have people that don't turn it away. You become their drop point. We had that same problem too. Drop CPUs off to us. I'm not kidding you. I walked in this space one day and there was a stack as tall as me of Rackmount PCs that were worthless. And if you're doing technology disposal that's real cool if you're a technology disposal place because then you can make money from the recovery of the circuit boards but if you're not, what you are is somebody else's fucking warehouse and that shit takes up space real damn quickly. And when you've got 800 CPU towers and you don't have a project you're working on. I could create a Google with a Beowulf cluster. I have a metric shit ton of Rats and rat-mounted servers if I get one more Dell 2860 I think. We have a wall full of those huge CRT monitors and stuff like that. And you don't want to turn it away because you may have a cool project with it. More often than not it's going to be a big wall of CRT monitors. But if you make it into an art project or something like that it becomes interesting to do but you don't have a lot of people that will say I'll take that big pile hardware and turn it into an art project all the time. Are these corporations paying 20 grand to recycle a pile of crap? Another thing that I kept saying and I never had time to do myself is if you've got a big pile of whatever it is, start taking it apart. It's a solid idea of what you want to do with it but it's junk. There you go, smaller piles is better. Smaller piles is better than bigger piles and you learn something by taking anything apart or just destroying it. Like how to get smaller piles of shit. We had tried to rip apart the CPUs into the circuit boards and then try to attach all the circuit boards together and try to make art out of them and stuff like that. It's one of those things where it's a great project that everybody works on for four hours and then nobody ever works on it again. And it never gets cleaned up. I'm of the considered opinion a good hacker space starts more projects than it ever finishes because it really should be about starting cool projects so it's not important that they necessarily get finished but don't leave a fucking mess. Yeah. The cleaning your shit up after you're done is really, really important. We had a real problem with that too. Today it's a real problem. And that's where I think people get really pissed off at personalities. That's where your personality conflicts come in is you'll have some people who end up cleaning up the space more often than others. And that just causes resentment. It's like don't let that fucker in anymore. He always leaves a mess. Or it's such and such as drunk up in the loft again. Kick him out. The loft is an awesome project. The loft is awesome. Luckily for DC414 we're still growing. Back to consistency. I try to make every single meeting no matter what's going on. I'll drop everything. But we also have it planned. It's the first Friday of every month and it's been that way for the last two or three years I do believe. So I mark that on my calendar head time. My boss is no. This is what I'm doing. And then back to one of his points was don't make partying a priority. Well we kind of do. But we don't do it at our meetings. We have two separate meetings. We have a technical meeting where we talk about technical junk. And then we have another meeting where we just get drunk and shit faced. We do that every month too. But the day for that is more fluid. Whenever anyone can get ready to get drunk we'll all pick out a date. Quite recently though we've been doing quite recently we've been doing onto projects. We've been using our social gathering which is essentially what I call it for making a room in a haunted house so that we go completely outside of the tech field a lot. We try. Like for instance making a haunted house that's not something that as far as I know no other group is doing which is kind of cool I thought. And other than that we just try to have as much fun as we can and still learn something. At the meetings themselves we don't usually take stuff apart or anything like that but we try to have a presentation, a couple presentations at each meeting. And the presentations reach from failing at web hacking to making hyperbonic bays for plants. Plants. I love plants. To lock picking to modifying laptops just all over the spectrum. We try to keep it all over the place because we have a couple of guys that are techies we have a couple of guys that are hardware freaks and then we have a couple of guys that don't know anything about everything but know a little bit about everything. So we try to keep the spectrum super super open and so far that's been successful to us that's probably the key to our success. That's one thing we didn't do enough of early on is we really focused on trying to build out technical stuff right technical technical hacking hacking hacking without really realizing that you know you can run a carpentry class as a hacking class. Or you can have your laser cutter class or you can have your whatever you know it doesn't really matter what it is it brings people in who share information and talk about things in a creative way and it's all hacking when you get right down to it but we didn't I as a founder I just never considered that early on it never occurred to me to teach you know carpentry in a hacker state and things like that I think they all have their place and you want to teach something get up and teach a class. Well plus you know it's great for us because then we get to learn something that we knew absolutely nothing about you know I had no idea you know how to how to lock pick until we had a lock pipe and I had no idea how to make a hydroponic bay until somebody came in and showed me how to do it you know it's great you know I get to teach people and I get to learn a whole bunch which is awesome you know you couldn't ask for anything better than that. You brought up a really good point earlier too you you slot time for fun you know having fun is is a super super large importance about you know what we do I mean I do this work is not work for me work is fun you know and hacking is fun and so you know we you need to make time for fun. I call bullshit on your job comment because your boss is in the audience. I call bullshit on your job comment because your boss is in the audience. You guys need a set of these I mean when you start speaking you guys can just These are awesome. These are up here when we got here. They're really awesome. We took the party thing I think a little bit too much of the limit when we first started on allocated because I don't have a band like liquor or there was there was a period of time I thought we were going to die. We were going through we were going through bottles of Yeagermeister per night for a week at a time I thought there was a period of time we were going to die and it's a tone for the space after a while it turned a lot of people off rightfully so you know we're a bunch of drunk idiots for the first month and a half of that set the tone of the space. I don't know at DCTG5 we make it a point to get drunk weekly with one another. It was hourly for us. We try to keep the whiskey out of the picture just because well I mean we like the stuff that we have working to still work after Our tagline was we're a drinking space with a hacking problem and it was well deserved because it was out of control and again I think it set the wrong tone for the space and it was hard to recover from that I have to say your flame vortexes were fucking cool though. We are the home of the fire tornado of course everybody can see that picture on my iPhone up here but that's what we're known for it unallocated is fire tornadoes. We've gotten 30, 40, 50 foot fire tornadoes what? Oh sorry. It's a giant flaming tornado. Anyway that's what it is. I'll show you the video later if you want to see it. We would set up the fire tornadoes and they were absolutely amazing. One of the points that I personally came across as being an issue is too stringent of behaviors being put on the people now there are some liability issues that you do have to look out for as far as like property damage if you lease a space or something like that but too many restrictions kind of sets the tone of the group in any manner. Everybody has their own regulations internally that are necessary for the group to continue having fun without catching a building on fire or catching someone else on fire. I found out laser pointers are killers to DC groups. I wonder how the 90 watt laser works across the room. I've heard this before. Can you give a tattoo with one? That's another one. Not going too far. Are you speaking from personal experience? Yes. Oh yes, very much so. You can imagine the people I run with they all have lasers and let's just say yes, you can give an awesome tattoo with a laser. Anyway. The focus needs to be on it can't be set enough the focus needs to be on the projects and the hacking. It really is. If you focus on those things you'll have a good hacker space but it's remarkably easy to have a screwed up hacker space. It's remarkably difficult to have a functioning hacker space. You would think they're completely different. One of the things I've seen is the functioning spaces tend to get together more. The functioning spaces for instance interspace communication. I know there's been some headway connections connected. Dark Nets connected. Chaos VPN stuff. We'll talk about that and kind of give them an overview of that here in a second. The idea behind what we're working towards is to pull resources that one group has with the sort of scheduling and job system to get pieces, let's say machined that you don't have something to print that piece. If you take a look at the Red Bull creation that 23B just did there were labs sending all sorts of cool ass pieces. They put in an old space lab sent a bunch of stepper motors via air mail. Just in the middle of it you saw this project come together in a 72 hour space and other groups were the ones who supplied a lot of the parts. I wouldn't say the predominates there was a whole lot of intergroup communication and intergroup sharing of resources that came together and really benefited the groups more. Then they were individually and that's kind of what we're trying to do is get groups provisioned who are active and functioning. So with that I'll explain what the Chaos VPN is. Dave? Yes, the Chaos VPN is kind of what it sounds like. It's a VPN run out of Germany right Nick, the admins are out of Germany. Hamburg. It's a simple setup depending upon the box or the router that you're running and it essentially connects you to hacker spaces worldwide and even other hackers individually worldwide. Setups are relatively easy. You can share whatever resources on the Chaos VPN that you want. At Unallocated we had shared our Minecraft server, our Wiki or VM farm actually to be used for remote pen testing and stuff like that and there's a whole list of the Chaos VPN Wiki that says this is which hacker space is connected and these are the resources that they actually share out. So if you're looking to do Jabber or you're looking to do open Quake tournaments or something like that you can hop onto the Chaos VPN and do it or you can get on the communal bulletin board or the communal Wiki and say I have these resources I'm willing to share you have these resources you're willing to share and it's underused technologies I think there are. I think there's something to be said for hackers interconnected and hacker spaces interconnected. Yeah that's a pretty big like a pretty big focal point going forward at least from my perspective being a coordinator is getting resources for people to share. So just kind of look in the next coming months for your Dofcon groups there's going to be a dark net that's going to come up sort of an unofficial inner group that's actually been in the work between a few spaces in the south I'm based out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana and we happen to have a whole bunch of hardware that was given to us and so we've been kind of setting it up we have a VM farm we have an elastic computing environment so other people could spin up things but the idea is just behind it all connecting and I don't know I think the Dofcon group and the groups in the northwest I don't know how well but I know regionally the Dofcon groups do communicate together quite a bit well yeah we really don't communicate with a whole lot of other groups we subscribe to their mailing list and whatnot but I guess we're small fries to most of them they at least the Chicago one but you're not which is really the only one in our area I've talked to many people that want to start one but like he said hackers are generally lazy and when I say oh we'll start a hacker group they're like oh fuck that so so yeah the only other major group in our area would be Chicago and we just haven't had too much success in communicating with them but that's probably mostly my fault because I haven't really tried fair enough the idea is to get a forum in an area where those groups can easily communicate with one another also Dofcon forums is a great place to find other people in your area I mean there's a whole section for it but just to provide those resources kind of overhead it because it is an isolated sort of cell arrangement where people don't step out they don't drive two hours to meet people but they also don't use technology for telepresence to help kind of get people together and a little bit more of that going forward an easy to use resource is kind of what we want to offer and with that I think you have anything else to add Nick? should take questions with that if anybody wants to walk up there's a microphone right here we got 20 minutes step up ask any questions one guy I like this guy how's it going guys this is really cool because I'm from laboratory b.org we're out of Burlington Vermont bunch of guys running the Dofcon here out there we've had our space for about a year we had a false start two years ago found another space what's your experience been with your relationship with the greater community like we've recently been featured in the local newspaper along with a number of maker spaces in fab labs and things popping up all over what are the best practices in terms of like that relationship how do you see that working that's going to be dependent on a lot of your members for instance we've done real good with reddit groups and things like that because we've had people at the space who are redditors so they've talked it up on reddit a lot and we've gotten a lot of publicity through that we've done pretty good at one or two local universities they've come in for lock picking night they've posted on the boards about it and stuff like that that comes down to I think sometimes to your local members and what they do and then leveraging their own communities if you've got a lot of young students you'll get mad activity from their student body who doesn't want to learn how to pick a lock I mean everybody will come in for that especially if they're kids in school so the more networking you can do the better Nick, you've had more experience than I have I mean again it depends on the area but the three big things that that I think always work really well and just in order of simplicity one just writing press releases there's a lot of lazy media out there that is looking for somebody to to write articles for them so write the article that you want to appear and just send it out to as many news organizations as you can this works better in smaller areas where there are more small town newspapers or small town radio stations and things like that not so much in big cities the second thing is get excited about other hackerspaces projects post comments on their blog their Facebook group, tweet at them if you see other hackerspaces doing cool things reach out to them so that when you have something cool about it you can go to them and say hey you know this project looks a lot like yours or we were excited about your project can you be excited about ours and those sorts of things will just happen automatically and of course the third thing is reaching out to people at cons that's simple enough you're just walking through the hallway you're going to hear a conversation of somebody is hacking on something you're hacking on feel free to butt into that conversation or I solved this problem or I have this problem that I'm running into do you have a possible solution for it basically those three big things in addition to press releases for number one making friends with journalists anytime that there's like writing letters to the editor if they're talking about oh bad evil hackers doing bad evil hackers things reach out to them and write them like no we're good we're real hackers this is what real hacking is what you're writing about is not what hacking is about that's a criminal element and any human activity there's going to be a criminal or illicit element to it jumping on that consistency too when the media stuff is a real big deal if you're going to establish a blog or a twitter presence it really does come down to consistency one of the best people at it I know of is grex down at nova he consistently blogs about local hacker events that are happening down in the nova area and he blogs multiple times per week he tweets multiple times per day in some instances so there's a lot of mind share about nova hackers because he's always putting information out there and sharing information he also gives shout out to other hacker spaces and everything else he's probably one of the better examples I've seen of someone who really knows how to talk about it and chat it up correctly and do it in a very genuine way and he's really consistent about it also having a spot for other groups in your area to meet in your space is a really, really good way to get the word out about your space if you can get the 2600 group to meet in your space or your lugs and bring them in because they're going to see that you've got a cool space and you're going to get people working on other projects outside of those meetings in your space as well so community outreach dude nothing gets the newspaper better than people that you thought were bad doing something good in the community and that little dynamic I don't know is newsworthy to a lot of even the tech writers for your local paper they'll want to get in on that I don't know sometimes it's even non-technical do a food drive go feed the hungry go hack your community if you really want them to get attention make them your project it's all on the table thanks man so what can you do about a neutral negative or defunct hack space I mean especially when they're claiming that they are the official hack space of the area start a new one there's no such thing so you're talking about spaces break into their hacker space and change their fucking locks so those tedious bastards can't get back into their building shut them down start your own space honestly start your own spin off space if you don't like the vibe at hacker space A go and start hacker space B there's no special thing I deal with this routinely a group starts up in an area where there was a guy who wants to retain some sort of control over a group that really doesn't exist we always say first communicate with them but if they're being an ass start your own nothing works better than success being rid of the defunct defunct ones just one up them that's the best thing that I got for it does that answer your question I mean you want to build a better hacker space and then make a point of telling them that you're better than their hacker space the problem is that they're going to the press in places like that it's putting a bad environment just fire with fire go to the press back you don't have to go head to head there is no official hacker space of anything and that's the thing if they go to the press and say we're blah blah blah eventually if they don't have anything to show for it they're going to look like the charlatans they are and in the meantime while they're making fools themselves come up with something cool we're the likely they'll end up on like attrition somewhere like that things fall off quickly from there a lot of those go away after a while too they'll just burn out and die eventually anyway my experience is that they'll go away you guys will still be there hacking it up dude shot you're going to hit somebody at those things that's the goal it's in the right zone so I'm only going to hit those two guys right there I'm still picking my next seat very carefully around you sorry I used to be able to speak before last night when you started this conversation off you had mentioned that you had gone to Germany to see what they did in their spaces can you tell us a little bit about how they are different and maybe speaking in terms of maturity and how their groups have evolved whether they're more stable that sort of thing as far as how they're different I'd google for something called the hackerspace design patterns that's basically that will illustrate in essence what they do and how they're different and it's not to say what's going on in Europe as a whole it's not like a shiny rosy happy paradise they're just seven or eight generations ahead of where we are that's a real big deal Nick and I were talking about this before the last time I was in Berlin I went to sea base for the first time and they've been around for a while I don't want to say they have a road map but it's a mature space it's a mature space with developed areas and an established set of members and people that go there so it's hard to say how they've gotten there with the exception of maturity over the years but it's a developed dedicated area but they're not all that much different template-wise honestly then unallocated or any of the other spaces I went to, they were different size-wise but it was the fact that they had mature broad memberships and I really think at the end of the day it's the people at the space that make the space and that's probably what I would always default to is the people will make a good space so in a sense what you're saying there's a critical mass involved time has just allowed them critical mass given them that opportunity to grow and create the critical mass that maintains them I'll also add to that that I think if you look at the growth patterns of hacker spaces in Europe and growth patterns of hacker space in the US we've grown much much faster that anybody could have imagined going from two or three places that you could call a hacker space to hundreds in the space of really three years is something remarkable and the fact that two or three def cons ago a bunch of people were coming up to me and asking how do we start a hacker space nobody asked that question anymore because it's something that's been done hundreds of times you can Google this answer very very quickly and that's something that we have a lot to thank the Germans for for the design patterns and I think that we will get up to that level of maturity quickly but right now we're sort of in the first kind of decline phase with anything that grows very rapidly you'll see a little bit of a decline before you get the next big acceleration and growth thank you I'm Sytec from Alphan Labs and we're kind of in the trap of the leader with a vision type of space and it's actually worked out for us three years in the way that we can maintain the space and keep it going and there's not too much fluctuation financially however I feel like the people want to be more of a bizarre and branch out and just be their own entity sort of and I was wondering what would you suggest to facilitate a safe moving out of that type of role into more of a widespread facilitating space we even had the problem of someone leaving our space and starting their own space as well so we'd like to comment on that type of thing I'll tell you projects fork hacker space is fork generally a good thing it doesn't always happen for the best of reasons it usually happens because there's a personality conflict but that's good there are now two hacker spaces where there are one two communities where there used to be one as far as you know what the leader should do you know and I've there's it was a group of say two or three people who started hacker spaces and then were sort of nudged out or didn't feel comfortable or left for whatever reason and that group now I mean we could probably have a panel discussion of 20 people who have been edged out of their hacker spaces or felt like they had to leave their hacker spaces in a lot of ways if somebody usually the personality types that it takes to start a hacker space are very strong personality types just to get everybody going to plow through all of the obstacles that it takes and then usually when that person you know is no longer needed to be in that sort of leadership visionary role the best thing for them to do to let the space grow and mature is usually just to step aside entirely and not go off and start a new hacker space but go and be a regular peon member of another hacker space and let the hacker space grow and mature in and of itself you know the people fall in people establish certain patterns at the beginning of any kind of a relationship and for whatever reason those patterns will persist and until you feel that those patterns have been broken it's usually better to just absent yourself thanks watch out alright we have what maybe four minutes or two minutes I'm actually going to pack up and leave I'm going to go to another talk five minutes alright next question I have a question for the newer you want to come to my talk too let's go we talk about growth especially for the newer groups should they be taking more of a messianic approach of actually going on trying to get members because the people that do want to be in a local they're going to find the group I mean how much effort should really be put into growing the group well alright so like membership drives if you will kind of the things behind it you can go out and we have a lot of people come to our group who drive for like an hour and a half because they really want to be part of something but if you're in that role phase getting drives just by putting your group out there mentioning where you're at making a good public awareness as to hey we're going to be on Tuesday at this place once a month or every week and make it something that isn't that's openly accessible you know whether it be like our group plays trivia every Tuesday at a local bar and that makes a real sort of easy entry and other people in the room hear you they see you they see as a cohesive unit and they kind of gravitate towards you let me add to that too is look at non hacker spaces or non hacker places or non IT places right I think one of the most important things to do is make hackers out of non hackers right you take your non hackers and turn them into hackers to do that you have to go to the places that the non hackers are right so if you're looking to expand the base it's a good thing to reach out to some of those areas where you wouldn't necessarily find hackers necessarily but looking into those other communities schools are great places engineering universities are great things like that reaching out to those kinds of pockets of people are good ways to bring in new people are good because they think differently than we do and I think we become better hackers by bringing in broader sets of talented people I can add to that by saying what's worse what's worked for us a lot is word of mouth word of mouth has been great for us we've gotten probably 50% of our membership that way the other 50% usually find us on defconn.org so that's an awesome research and yeah one minute's okay yeah that's been awesome for us and we hand out flyers and we also have an area that all the groups in Milwaukee use and for that has been great for us as you know I hate to cut you short but I'm giving a signal that it's time we do have a Q&A session directly across the hall in the Q&A room if you have any questions you want to keep asked but sorry I want to thank you all for coming out I hope to see you all soon around the conference just come by and say hi have a great day