Romyilano

I like to build things. I prefer hacking and learning by doing rather than hearing a lot of excellent speaker talk. I'd rather be moving the movement than posturing to "lead a movement." I like passion. I don't see a lot of it lately. I see it at Sudo room more than I do at most places.

Life

Life is to be explored. It is a place of abundance. I do not see life in terms of a sports metaphor, I do not see it as a thing of high stakes win-lose situations. I prefer win-win. I find such metaphors limiting and better suited for simple people who like to support unnecesary wars and have a stunted world view.

I do not think creative people do things to compete. That stuff is so hokey. They do it mostly for achievement. This is not a corny baseball movie. This is life. It is about having fun, exploring and avoiding joining the major leagues. It's about forming your own league and inventing the cure for cancer. <3

Oakland

I used to live in Oakland and miss it very much.

When I lived in Oakland, I volunteered at the Rock Paper Scissors Collective http://rpscollective.org/ down the street. I helped clean up trash after First Fridays Art Murmur back when volunteers had to manage the security. It was not very fun doing security and telling angry hippie vendors we had to clear up the street or we would lose our art murmur license. It was not very fun picking up dirty beer and 40's in paper bags. Unfortunately those things have to be done.

It was more fun volunteering and doing the fun stuff like helping organize the Zine Library.

I would like to see Rock Paper Scissors Collective, Oakland youth, fun people who sew do more things with Sudo Room and build things. I would like to see more people have fun, especially if the people are from different social circles that wouldn't normally mix and it doesn't have to cost a lot of money.

Useful Stuff

One of my friends Joe Reagle Wrote a nice book on collaboration in Wikipedia. He outlines a lot of interesting situations and ways people resolve conflict on Wikipedia. It might be useful to people in an open source hackerspace as well. "http://reagle.org/joseph/2010/gfc/"
When I lived in Berlin I would often eat at Volkskuechen, which are these punk rock dinners that cost a $1. The emphasis was on making food, not buying it from a restaurant, or scavenging by dumpster diving. The food was usually better than what you got in restaurants. The focus was on creating cheap, healthy ways to eat food together. There were no book deals or bloggers or "thought leaders" people just did it http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuntenhaus_(Berlin)

Things I like About Sudo Room

People aren't afraid to disagree and have open conflict. When things get too passive aggressive I joke that you get situations like the murderous passive-aggressive California hippie cult leader Sal from The Beach. A healthy community is one where people have disagreements and resolve them non destructively.
I can talk to people about code. I go to a lot of events around coding where people talk about coding and don't actually code. People like to show me how to code things.
I like that it's a safe space where people can say they don't like social networks. In more corporate hacker spaces stuff like that can get you fired.
People are making things.
There are a lot of great books everywhere. There's something about print books and valuing print that makes for a special something.
There's less of people spouting that we need to eliminate liberal arts education and make everything business and engineering. People don't treat philosophy as "useless"
People know what zines are.
There are women who can code and hack things. I go to a lot of "women in tech" events that seem more focused on promoting ice cream and chocolate products than actually hacking. I go to those events and nobody is interestedin coding. there's a lot of people giving long speeches. there are a lot of powerpoints. It's not a judgement call, but it's interesting.
People do not talk about life as if it were a game. They talk about life as if it were something to be lived, to create and explore. There are minimal metaphors relating to touchdowns, playoffs and treating life as if it were one of scarcity in which only one team or player could win.