
This is not the Freehackers Union... - apgwoz
http://sigusr2.net/2010/Oct/12/this-is-not-the-freehackers-union.html
======
davisp
Was I the only one reciting the rules to Fight Club while reading the article?

Rule 8: If this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club#Plot_summary>

Basic rules that come to mind to keep it hacker centric could be:

    
    
      1. If this is your first night to Hack and Tell, you must
         Tell.
      2. Before leaving Hack And Tell you must vote yay or nay
         on each Tell. If your Tell has less than X votes, you
         are not allowed back for Y weeks.
      3. If you're just returning from a Y week layoff, you must
         Tell.
      4. You must have a Tell every Z weeks.
    

I'm not at all certain what the correct values for X, Y, and Z are. Z would
obviously depend on the group size and time allotment. I think voting should
be anonymous and not announced until after everyone's left so voters are more
likely to be honest.

If it gets popular I could even see having a Hack and Tell website that hosted
videos of "successful" Tells and so forth. Going out on a limb and having
national votes to try and get a group of hackers together for a nationally
voted "Best Hack" event or some such.

Could be fun.

[ed: formatting]

~~~
apgwoz
What exactly are you voting on? This isn't a competition. I should also note
that I hand select the people that actually present after taking a look at the
product description and a) checking to see that it doesn't violate the "no
startup", "no work related things"... or attempt to. b) if there's overflow
invite the ones I think will be best. So far it hasnt' failed, but, there's
only been about 25 talks total over 3 nights.

Incidentally, don't do more than 7 or 8 of these talks a night--it gets way
too long too quick.

~~~
davisp
The idea about voting isn't to select a "best" hack each night, its to say
"take some time to find a better hack". That way if someone does get through
the pre-screening you have a way to say, "take a couple weeks to think about
your next Tell."

Granted the nation wide voting idea kinda gives the wrong impression on that
part. I still think it'd be a good idea to keep videos somewhere.

Granted it was mostly just hand waving on how to keep the non-hacker attendees
from overwhelming the hacker presenters.

~~~
dagw
Surely interacting with other people presenting their great hacks is a good
way to get inspiration for your own hacks and to get a feel for what your
group considers a "great hack". Kicking people out and telling people to work
in isolation until they stumble upon something that meets your requirements
seems both elitist and pointless.

------
samd
It's one thing to try and keep the group small to create a better, more
comfortable experience for everyone, but denigrating anyone who doesn't
present as "leechers" and keeping them out to maintain the purity of your
group is disgustingly elitist. Your entire calculus is short-sighted and
elitist; you are treating people as nothing but tools to advance your agenda.
If they don't contribute something to you or your group you don't want them.
What kind of community is that? Certainly not one that I'd want to be a part
of, and certainly not one that has any hope of "preserving hacking and
invention" as Zed Shaw described. First off, stop being so selfish and stop
dividing people into those who can do something for you and those who can't.
Secondly, if you want to foster a sustainable community you have to share,
teach, and give to others. Who knows, those people might even grow into the
knowledgeable, well-connected hackers that you so desire.

I apologize if I've completely misinterpreted your article, but after re-
reading it a few times and thinking about it I still get the same impression.

~~~
Robin_Message
It's just the standard 8th rule: If this is your first night at FIGHT CLUB,
you HAVE to fight.

Requiring participation in a community is not elitist; it is what makes it a
community. Otherwise, you just have some vaguely related people coming
together, some of whom are leeching. By requiring everyone invest in the
community you create a shared bond and a shared ownership. It's not saying
it's an elite club only for special people; but it is saying you have to make
a minimal first step of your own before you can enter. It's the same as
building a monastery or dojo high up a mountain -- partly for the peace and
quiet, but also partly to make it hard to enter -- those who turn up have
demonstrated some commitment.

In terms of motivation and teaching others, I'm imagining a fun club that I
can't go to unless I get on with doing some actual hacking....motivation to
load Vim in 3..2..1!

~~~
Robin_Message
Also from Fight Club (which, if you think about it, addresses exactly this
question -- making a difference to the world instead of just passively
consuming,) is the scene where Tyler holds up a convenience store. Tyler drags
an Asian convenience store clerk out behind the store, ostensibly to shoot
him. Instead, he badgers the poor clerk into distilling things: that he never
wanted this job; in fact, he's just making time as a clerk, and he was at one
point in school -- he had a passion to become a veterinarian. Tyler opts not
to shoot him and leaves him instead with the message: You're the living dead
now. Go back to school and make your life mean something, or I’ll kick you
into the grave for real.

Getting people to contribute something, before they can belong, is powerful.

------
joshu
Ok, I would like to see a Hack And Tell in silicon valley. Who wants to help?

~~~
jf
I'd love to help. (We could run a Hack And Tell at SHDH?)

~~~
progrium
Aren't SHDH lightning talks exactly that though?

------
justinlilly
I've been. It kicks ass. Tons of great little weekend projects (and more).

~~~
gregory80
second that, lots of fun to attend. The presentations I have seen so far have
been awesome. It's nice to go to a tech event and not look at a powerpoint
preso

------
yummyfajitas
Just curious, what is the typical size/complexity/difficulty of projects
presented? Are we talking weekend projects, e.g.:

    
    
        $ sqlite_diff db1.sqlite db2.sqlite
        Table(futures),4
        > CREATE TABLE futures (date text, symbol text, qty real, price real)
        > 0 rows
        ---
        < CREATE TABLE futures (date text, trans text, symbol text, qty real, price real)
        < 0 rows
    

Or are we talking bigger efforts, e.g.:

    
    
        $ fajitalang --wall testprogram.mex; ./a.oud
        Hello automatically parallelized world.

~~~
apgwoz
Good question. Monday night's meetup had these presentations:

John Britton: Dinevore (<http://www.dinevore.com/>) mobile app, built on
Titanium Appcelerator (<http://www.appcelerator.com/products/titanium-mobile-
appl...>)

Nathan Hamblen: Pilot (<http://www.github.com/n8han/pilot/>), a web interface
for Simple Build Tool (<http://code.google.com/p/simple-build-tool/>). Also
mentioned SPDE-sbt (<http://github.com/n8han/spde-sbt>), a plugin for sbt for
SPDE projects, and SPDE (<http://github.com/n8han/spde>) a library for using
Processing from Scala. (There was certainly some confusion related to this
project, so if you were confused, be sure to checkout all the links to piece
it together)

Sean O'Connor: Touralope (<http://touralope.com>), a Twillio
(<http://www.twillio.com>) based cell phone tours app, written for AppEngine
(<http://code.google.com/appengine>)

Zack Lieberman: EyeWriter (<http://www.eyewriter.org>), a low-cost eye-
tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists
with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only
their eyes.

Sergey Chernyshev: UserBase (<http://github.com/sergeychernyshev/UserBase>), a
user management tool to be used in on-line projects which includes an admin
dashboard and support for various non-local authentication schemes such as
Facebook Connect and OpenID.

Gregory Tomlinson: A photo viewer (<http://github.com/gregory80/photo-viewer>)
which does dynamic, but cached, resizing of the photos, built on Tornado
(<http://www.tornadoweb.org/>) and MongoDB (<http://www.mongodb.org/>)

Andrew Schaff: keyjson (<http://keyjson.org>),an order-preserving binary
encoding of most JSON values

Andrew Gwozdziewycz: Text Please (<http://textplease.appspot.com>) and Thumb
Through (<http://github.com/apgwoz/thumb-through>) a web service, and Emacs
(<http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs>) providing "just the text" for online
articles.

------
apgwoz
Created a group to discuss starting up local Hack and Tells:
<http://groups.google.com/group/hack-and-tell-orgs>

~~~
brianjesse
I joined the group -- may organize an event in Portland

------
camtarn
I love the timer which claps at the end of five minutes :) Great way to get
round that awkward 'Oh, it is finished? Should I clap now?' moment.

------
wccrawford
I've been to BarCamp a few years in a row now. They have 30 minute talks,
usually 2-4 at at time, so you can pick and choose what to sit in on. It is
totally volunteer for the presentations, and I've only seen a few that were
about products for sale, and even those were about how they were made or some
techie thing about them.

------
aarongough
I personally would like to see more stuff like this in Toronto, maybe it would
be worth my time to organize it...

I'm looking into doing a similar thing with month HN meetups here in TO.

~~~
apgwoz
I don't think I'd have done it, honestly, if I hadn't started working at
Meetup. It's the kind of thing that does take time to organize, but I really
wanted to discover what Meetup organizers go through. It's been all kinds of
rewarding, fun and great though! Highly recommend it! Let me know if I can
help!

~~~
aarongough
Do you have an estimate of how many hours per month it takes to organize?

If it was reasonable I would definitely be interested in doing it, and I would
be happy to affiliated with the official 'franchise'!

~~~
apgwoz
It's not _that_ much in all honesty, but then again, I already have a place to
meetup (at Meetup, which also provides us beer and regular drinks). All in all
it's probably about 5 hours a month, in addition to about an hour total for
setup and teardown the day of the event.

But, this of course would be a hell of a lot more stressful and time consuming
if I had to beg for a place to host it that can hold 40-50 people, and find
sponsors to get drinks and things.

Also, I can't imagine how much harder it would be if I wasn't using Meetup.
Now, I work there, so you might think "Oh, he's just promoting his product"
but, it has been instrumental in my success so far. It's worked well for
promotion (there are emails that go out for topic alert lists, and we're often
a "trending" meetup due to RSVP patterns), as well as member management, and
communication. I ask people to talk about what they'd like to present as part
of the RSVP process, for instance. And, if we needed to pay for a venue, or
food, or something else, charging people $5 to RSVP is dirt simple to do and
collect, manage etc from Meetup. (Sorry for the shameless promotion, but as an
organizer, it really does work)

That said, there are certainly successful groups in NYC that have a standing
meetup once a month, that aren't run via Meetup--just Google Groups, so it's
certainly possible to do. It depends on the group who you're attracting, etc.

