DanceSound
Overview
There's a public school modern dance session with a smart, perceptive teacher. She comes in Sundays and I sat in on a dance class with her. Damn! that chick is so cool. She destroys every negative stereotype about dancers. She was into exploring bones and bone structure in her dance lesson, and was all about body awareness. All the guys in her class were so open-minded and neat. An all male dance troupe of guys that dances totally better than all the women! men putting their bodies on display! the gender bending implications and innovation are endless!
There are LED electronics. Lots of smart people and free open-source kits and ideas. Let's get those people involved!
There is an experimental sound meet-up with smart people. They actually hack on stuff instead of just showcasing company's software. Let's see their work!
Let's mix it up!
Happy Patterns
People hacking things, nobody having to listen to a speaker for too long
Dancers speaking one on one with the LED people on interesting things they'd like to do
Experimental sound people showing dancers how sound works
Little kids learning electronics
People promoting extremely local Oakland warehouse events on mailing lists that aren't run by a start-up
Creativity
Exploration
Connecting people who wouldn't normally hang out with each other
A measure of recognition for the musicians, hackers, and dancers in a way that doesn't sound like an infomercial blurb I'm sure some smartass will try to tease us about this though
Some kind of funny satiricial take on a corporate "fitness movement" with a mock infomercial on how $9.99 a month on our sudo room hack site will bring them love, bromance, perfection and career success. I'm sure someone has the will, the way?
A mock religious cult with its own scriptures and food (hey ice cream man!) focused around the worship of creativity
A Mexican drag queen. It's not complete until we bring the drag queens.
Some kind of big rant that disrupts everything where an engineer starts shouting that marketing is nothing, engineering is everything, and then there is a loud clap of thunder and lightning and it pours rain (without destroying the electronics)
Lots of activity and movement so that it's all busy and people don't have enough time to start quarreling about who gets to be in the spotlight
Anti-Patterns
You can do this stuff, there are no rules, and I'm sure some people will try to be wise guys. But like the idea of letting random people sleep at Noisebridge, break these anti patterns and massive boringness will occur. Your eyes will glaze over. People will fall asleep and become disengaged. It will stop being sudo room and become like so many other soulless, empty "tech" events that we encounter in Silicon Valley.
Pulling in too many readymade projects with readymade ideas made by other people in a way that inhibits the creativity of the group.
Involving a professional dance troupe ( too often they're just interested in promoting themselves instead of creatively interacting with the artists)
turning this into a free PR event for a Palo Alto start-up... I've seen this happen a lot. They show up, try to co-opt the excitement, promote their "fitness" start-up, then vanish later on like a bad one-night stand. Will they still be there tomorrow when we need our wires fixed?
Showcasing platforms from major corporations and pitting them against each other (oh Android is so much more open source than apple even though android isn't open source deep down inside!) There's a time and place for that and that is corporate trade shows like CES or weird cocktail parties full of massively boring people who don't think for themselves.
Lacking passion, zest, not caring, not getting riled up or mad about anything
I mean you can go through a checklist of what every other tech event does and acknowledge it, accept it non judgementally but hold it as an anti pattern for sudo room: has more people speaking than doing, has more women talking about coding than actually coding, is more about promoting big corporate brands than indie ones, full of dozens of people whose career it is to be a "thought leader" (maybe 1% we need, the rest...), has a lot of weird freebies in the form of cupholders, t-shirts, and bottle openers. that stuff is ok but boring and life without passion is also ok. do you want to be boring and without passion or do you want to live life with zest?