HacDC

BIRTHING HYDRA: Growing the Hacker Community The first in a series of conversations on community building in the Hacker Community in Washington DC and beyond!  Part of HacDC's Grand Opening Week. The great resurgence in community building on the part of the greater hacker community over the past 10 years is not coincidental. Responsibility lies in parallel influences including a generation raised on the hacker ethos established by the Boomer generation, the precipitous decline of the price point for entry level experimentation and prototyping, more than two generations of obsolescent technology ripe for the hacking, and the perennial motivation to showcase and compete in the meritocracy of inventors and artisans that characterize a Western approach to innovation and political activism. Hardware hacker communities are by necessity meat space phenomena, dealing as they do with chunks of matter and not just the electrons and code that the software hacker communities have condensed around. Join representatives from DC's Make:*, Dorkbot*, and Hac* organizations in the first of a series of talks aimed at defining the best way to use each organization's mission to grow the region's burgeoning community in a synergistic manner.