Techno Activism Third Mondays (#TA3M) in Madison, May 20th

[Nick M. Daly]

This month's TA3M will occur at [Sector67] on May 20th, from 7 - 9 PM.
The event is free and open to the public.

Techno-Activism Third Mondays (TA3M) is an informal meetup to connect
activists and technologists who are interested in the challenges of
surveillance and censorship and anyone interested in free and open
technology. Currently, TA3M are held on the third Monday of each month
in New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Madison, Wisconsin, with
Boston, Seattle, Hong Kong and Tokyo being planned in the near future.

Notes from this month's Madison TA3M will be recorded on [an etherpad]
before being moved to the [OpenITP wiki].

Sector67: https://sector67.org/calendar.php

an etherpad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/ta3m-madison-2013.0520

OpenITP wiki: http://wiki.openitp.org/events:techno-activism_3rd_mondays:madison


Goals
====================

- Networking opportunities for people in the techno-activism and
circumvention tools communities.

- Provide individuals with space for collaborative problem solving, to
meet new friends, and recruit for projects.


Potential Topics
====================

Topics will be finalized based on participant interest at the event.
Please reply to this email if you'd like to suggest or present on
additional topics.

- Collateral Freedom: Stories of Chinese Censorship Circumvention.

http://openitp.org/?q=collateral_freedom

/Collateral Freedom: A Snapshot of Chinese Users Circumventing
Censorship/, documents the experiences of 1,175 Chinese Internet users
who are circumventing their country's Internet censorship.

- Basic Internet Security: Anonymous networks and communal security with
Tor and PGP.

- How to Hack on Free Software Projects like MediaGoblin and FreedomBox.

- How to better connect with local hackers.


Future Topics
====================

- Weird Money: Ripple, Bitcoin, and the rest.


Links
====================

- Surveillance and Censorship Tools Survey:

http://openitp.org/?q=node/42

Please take the survey to help the Open Internet Tools Project
prioritize their projects.


Thanks for your time,
Nick

--
If you need to get in touch with me, try any of these methods:
https://www.betweennowhere.net/nick-daly.asc.txt

[Nick M. Daly]

(Removing L-E, as it's an announce-group.)

Christopher Allan Webber writes:

> How general is this usergroup? Is it "any cool projects that work
> toward advancing user freedom"?

It's specific to each city, but this question came up elsewhere, earlier
today. To quote someone with more words than I:

This TA3M thang is much different than other standard technical user
groups. This is not a Unix group, a Java group, whatever. I am
among those who run the *BSD group in NYC, and [in the BSD group] we
just don't and aren't even interested in pulling in non-technical
users. They are a distraction ;) But with TA3M, we don't just want,
but desperately *need* more non-technical users.

It's not technical, but it's probably more about communication- than
software- freedom (if we're splitting hairs).

> Also, is there a projector? If there is, I could give the talk I gave
> at ChiPy recently on Hy, a lisp written in python:
>
> http://hy.readthedocs.org/
>
> If there's no projector I think it might be a bit too annoying to
> present though.

Unsure. Other (Sector) Chris?

> I'd also be interested in talking about the structure of this group. In
> my experience these kinds of usergroups are most fun when there's a
> preset agenda... that's one reason I really like ChiPy: it's very clear
> what's going to happen, which gives people reason to show up. ChiPy is
> "all talks" though; the ChicagoLUG is also taking an interesting
> approach where it does one or two talks, then the rest of the night
> moves into hacknight mode. I think that might also be a good approach?

I'd love to add more talks to the Madison TA3M, but I've had trouble
reaching out and finding speakers. Right now, it's just me trying to
put together talks. That also makes the schedule pretty fluid, as there
aren't so many regular folks each month that we really can set and then
follow up on a list of topics.

I agree, though, an hour of talks + hackfest might be a good approach,
depending on the attendees. Please reach out to folks you know who
might be interested!