Open Meeting: Sun 7th November
From Hacklab
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The meeting will be at 5pm Upstairs in the reading room at rampART.
The address for rampART : 15-17 Rampart Street, London E1 2LA, Nearest tube Shadwell.
1:' Hacklabbers in attendance
Ana, Chris, Pat, Ben (not rampART Ben), Reuben, Sash, Asa, Jo, Earle.
2: Apologies
Jane
3:' Previous Minutes and the matters arising from them.
Internet connection We are pretty sure that the broadband connection is currently paid up till April (at least the cash for this period has been given to Martin). It was decided to earmark �67.50 of the Hacklab cash that Ana currently has to cover broadband up until the end of June. It was noted that we need to get the Hacklab cash from Javier that he still has. After Christmas, we will look again at holding more benefits to raise money for internet costs after that.
4:' Agenda
- Anarchist Bookfair - materials to produce, rota
We will be sharing a table with Indymedia. The table has been paid for and our half of the money given to Indymedia by Ana. What we would use our table for was discussed. Asa will work on updating and finalising the text of an introductory leaflet for the Freedom Hacklab, and Ana will help make it look nice (add a "made exclusively with Free Software" notice to leaflet, but do not use a penguin logo as this is too OS specific). Various CDs will also be sold for �1 a pop - Ana's free software for Windows collection and the copies of the OpenCD we have in the lab can go along. Bringing copies of the new Ubuntu Debian-based Linux distro. was suggested too, though it was also mentioned that John from Indymedia offered to give us spare copies of Knoppix that were left over from the ESF. I think it was decided to go with these as long as they are fairly recent (i.e not 3.2), though anyone wanting to burn copies of Ubuntu or any other free OS will be welcome to bring them along.
It was felt that having various leaflets available would be a good thing. The Free Software Foundation has plenty of such things downloadable (e.g. why free software and software patents are good and bad respectively). Something about why it is a good idea to switch over to Firefox from IE would be good too and Earle has offered to come up with something on these lines since he could find nothing on the Mozilla site afterwards (perhaps Mozila will use it too!). Note that the OpenCD only has the full Mozilla suite and not Firefox, thou ana's CD does. So anyone who can make copies of these various things and either bring them along on the day or leave them in the Hacklab ready to be taken over should do so and let it be known on the mailing list so that there is no duplication of effort.
Pat and Reuben agreed to make a banner to hang near our table (something to take on demos too?). They can use the RampART banner making room (top floor) and it should have our name (see next point on minutes) and probably www.hacklab.org.uk too.
As for people to actually run the table: Ana and Asa agreed to be there all day, taking turns and Chris said he would come in the afternoon to do the same. As part of the reduced cost of the table, we have agreed to help with the clean up of the bookfair. Pat said he would stay and help with this too. "North London" John said in the last meeting he would come along, though not all day, as he had meetings he wanted to go to (I think that goes for the rest of us too, so if you could take some turns on the table, that would be great).
- New name for Hacklab collective? 'Hacklab' implies a place but there now seems to be a consensus that we are a collective with multipule projects (the Freedom Hacklab, Rampart computers, alt ESF etc). Maybe somthing simple like "London Hacklab Collective" who work on the "Freedom Media Hacklab" and other projects?
Since the consensus now seems to be that we are a collective with an identity and activities distinct from the Freedom Hacklab itself, it was suggested that we should have a name for the collective itself too. The idea of using the Ohm (or omega) symbol (which in electronics is the symbol for electrical resistance - or the measure of the degree to which an electrical component opposes the passage of current) for the collective was suggested by Reuben. This is an idea that dates back to electrical engineers who were against the American invasion of Vietnam. See the following two links for more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm http://ejke.sindormir.net/pipermail/freedomlab/2004-November/001463.html
After some discussion the name "London Hacklabs Collective" was agreed as the provisional name with a week given to suggest alternative, more clever names via the mailing list.
- Publicising Freedom Hacklab to activists
It was suggested that our presence at the bookfair would go a long way to advertising ourselves to activists, while word of mouth should do the rest. After all, the Freedom space is not the biggest. When mentioning the Hacklab, we should remind that it is open every Saturday with some weekdays too (though the website should be checked before assuming it is open on weekdays). Also, when mentioning Hacklabs, the Hacklab in RampART should be mentioned too. Chris checked with Ben after the meeting and he was fine with this. One more thing: please everyone remember that Sash is currently down on his own for every week in November and is even doing some week days! Please commit to some Saturdays if you can, or at least join him when you can.
- Security concerns re public internet access
The root passwords are too simple. It was decided to change them over to something harder to crack. Sash to perform this change over and let techies know of new passwords as needed.
- Rethinking our dual-boot policy
The policy we developed almost a year ago to run Windows on *every* machine along with a Free OS (Linux or FreeBSD etc.) has proved to be more trouble than anticipated. The details of this have been thrashed out on the mailing list as well as previous meetings. The upshot is that maintaining TWO configurations for every machine, plus the extra work it takes to keep Windows partitions virus, adware and spyware free is just too much. Therefore, it was decided to drop our dual-boot policy. All machines that currently have a Windows partition (about 3) should stay as they are because we will need Windows sometimes, plus lots of work has already been done on them.
8. WiFi Chris has sourced a wireless hub that the Freedom Hacklab can have soon (when he's finished some things with it). He mentioned that a good way to get Whitechapel Art Gallery to give us money for wireless access would be to simply set up the wifi, go into the cafe with a laptop and show it to them in action. Jo (who Jane introduced to me at the Indymedia autonomous ESF space) is involved with Comsume.net and various other wireless projects, and offered to run a workshop on WiFi, in which a lot of interest was shown. The workshop will be arranged and publicised as soon as Chris can get us the hardware.
9. Freedom Press donations Since the last meeting with Freedom 3 months ago, we have raised about �10 in donations from Hacklab users (including a whip-round at this meeting). Since this is clearly not enough the sustain the �20/week Freedom have asked for, we decided that we need to let them know that we will not be able to sustain that level of donations to Freedom for the foreseeable future, though we still wanted to stay in the room if possible. Asa went to Freedom afterwards and relayed this to John, one the editors of the Freedom paper who was supportive and said he would bring this up at the next Freedom Press meeting (Wednesday).
10. AOB Earle mentioned the OpenGuide to London ( http://london.openguides.org ) and said on the mailing list later: "it would be really great if you could write yourselves, the Hacklabs, Freedom Bookshop, RampART" onto it. Chris asked what people though about setting up remote ssh access to machines via the router - we were fine with this in theory. Two fairly fast machines at rampART that were set up by Chris during the ESF used motherboards and/or processors from Freedom. Chris asked if we were ok with them staying at RampART. I requested one should go to Freedom. It was decided that the older machine that this one will replace should go to ASS (the Advisory Service for Squatters) if they still want it - Chris offered his FreeBSD machine.
- The minutes were read over and agreed.
5: Date for next meeting.
Sunday 5th December ??
( please add or adjust any details missed )
