Mark J's Hax post-mortem discussion

[Mark Jenkins]

Hey folks,

That was probably the best Saturday we ever had for our hax festival,
though 2016 may have been pretty good.

It's worth asking ourselves what helped us get so many people through the door.

My best guess is what Hackerspaces.org's wiki calls The Sine Curve Pattern:
https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/The_Sine_Curve_Pattern

Meaning, we're just at a good place right now where awesomeness has
fed more awesomeness and we have a lot of great members and associates
in our network.

As a community we've burned through so many awesome people organizing
fundraiser dance socials that we may be at a peak right now that is a
contrast againt our pandemic low.

Alternative theories:

* Even though we were lackluster in many previously used advertising
mediums (no paper poster campaign at all!), some new ones were
activated that may have got a lot of value out of.

* The alignment with Meme being in Cube could have helped? I doubt
that lead to many random visits but there may have been people in our
network who were present for that and came by and also brought some
friends?

* In our second year running with a catered lunch, people are easilly
attracted to free food?

Your thoughts?

---------

Next year I'm stepping away from any committee level involvement,
including being a talk coordinator. I will try to support the event
just as a Skullspace member as much as I can in advance and on the
weekend-of without crossing the committee level.

May return in future years.

So, what I have to say is more advice to people taking on next year
and not anything I'll be able to directly influence:

It is a mistake for us to do a fundraiser dance social in the same
weekend. We've seen this time and time again. We don't have enough
people to split up the responsibilities. A dance event on its own is a
big undertaking and the regulatory burden for these events has grown
over time. Everything else about hax is a different, big undertaking.

As much as I want to encourage our Hax festival to be representative
of all the things that go on in the space ("the hackerspace experience
condensed into a weekend"), we're asking too much of people to try to
do it all right now.

A mark of future success would be when we've grown the community to
the point where the workload can be split and it all can happen in a
weekend. Even so, I'd recommend putting any party *after* the day of
great talks as "the afterparty". If there's tickets this even allows
us to give tickets to speakers as an extra award for their
contributions to be enjoyed after the fact.

I appreciate that history shows us that Fridays draw the biggest
crowds with the most disposable money. I believe if we're operating
well enough we can reach a tighter Saturday crowd.

But we're not there yet.

--------

One thing that did not in the end make me happy this year was our
getting a change of use permit for the whole weekend at 150 capacity.
That is a very high occupency load for our crowded space at anytime
and the scrutinity we recieved was justified at those occupency
levels.

Our Saturday of talks doesn't need anywhere near that, but it was hard
to pivot the regulatory conversation to what the Saturday required
when our Thursday night took such a priority.

I felt like we came close to canceling our Saturday due to needing to
hire human fire alarms without the revenue model to justify the
expense.

I don't really like the idea of Hax ever being a thing that costs the
space a bunch to put on. Doesn't need to be a fundraiser, community
building is more important, but I've never wanted it to be a thing
that harmed well earned reserves. (the reserves are very important due
to "The Sine Pattern")

Expect some follow-up effort from me to try and help Skullspace undo
the harm of having to engage in uncessary expenses for make our
Saturday work. If you'd personally like to make a donation to
Skullspace in the name of having supported what we achieved on the Hax
7.0 Saturday, keep me in the loop mark AT parit DOT CA.

Also, a note for any of the board folks doing financial post-mortem,
the entire honouria fund was sent to me. I still need to figure out
which speakers will are making a donation back vs asking for it and
then I'll be sending it one, it is a minimum of 3x$60.

I hope there was also an effort to account for donations associated
with the weekend so as to have a whole picture, I did try to do some
begging while I was MCing.

There's more I'd like to say but I'm out of time!

One more thought. I would not have supported our scheduling choice if
I'd be aware we were up against the finale weekend of the Pride
Festival which includes entertainment at The Forks Saturday and Sunday
and a parade Sunday.

But, perhaps "festival season" and "festival weather" is part of the
magic of getting people out of their homes and into the community.


Thanks to all who participated,
Mark
past talk coordinator / festival founder

[Mark Jenkins]

I'm really sorry to hear about that Dennis. We need to remove our
automatic calendar entry for First Friday.

On Sat, Jul 4, 2026 at 12:26 AM Dennis Sloane <dennis...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I came to Skullspace for first friday today 2026-07-03 and was ready to hang out. Nobody was around.