* I pretty much enjoyed everything about it. I almost wouldn't change anything about the night
The big takeaways was that people were into it, and they want to continue the event so I'm scheduling another one for the February first friday at the same time.
* noisebridge folks showed up. we got a big roll of paper from noisebridge, and that was very cool that we had more inter-hackerspace resource sharing. I think the paper was taking up a lot of space in their space as well.
* people felt very free and un self conscious to make stuff or perform music. there wasn't a lot of attention focused only on one speaker or performer, it was more like several organic groups.
* the biohackers, other cool folks and companies donated free materials without asking for anything in return. thank you! really appreciate it.
* very spontaneous - people just showed up with all sorts of setups and weird ideas, like painting on records using cheap acrylic house paint samples from Home Depot.
* complement, not compete with Oakland art murmur - i feel like trying to do stuff inside sudoroom during the art murmur is a bad idea, and i kept talking about it, so it was nice to finally prove my point. there are just too many distractions, and forcing sudoroom to be as loud, colorful or full of as many hot people to flirt with as art murmur is playing on our weaknesses not building our strengths. the mood was completely chill compared to the murmur, and focused less on sensory overload and more on recovery from sensory overload
Things that could have been done better
- No on-street promotion - we didn't have people standing on the street waving passers-by to enter the SudoRoom like we did during the last fundraising party. This could have brought lots of diverse, interesting traffic into the space.
- what is this about? we had a hard time explaining what the event was about in one word*
- No art MCs - We had advertised a live ART MC to act as a performer and walk around the space. we didn't really have this.
- street vendors from oakland art murmur could have been pulled in to bring their stuff inside and continue their informal "exhibitions" - probably to more success and greater attention
- [I actually preferred that there were no ART MCs since the goal was to avoid as much as possible an audience staring blankly at someone on the stage... the lack of an MC/comedian/talker made for a very non-egotistical and collaborative evening, with people feeling unafraid to go play the instruments, go in front of people, or make art without feeling they were being started at too much]