Talk about just "Hack" in BarCamp

[Haggen So]

Hi All,

I am one of the organisers of the Software Freedom Day(BarCamp and SFD
will happen side by side). One of our volunteers suggested to present
on the topic of "Hack" - when he discussed with his friend about
hackerspacehk, his friend googled the net a bit and said that the
people behind hackerspace should repent as hacking is illegal and
destructive.

I would like to suggest that while different realisations of "hack"
such as hackerspace are important. We should dedicate a session on the
history and philosophy of "hack" itself, in order to clarify and
elaborate on the idea and help participants to understand related
sessions better.

I also suggest to invite someone from LifeHack.org to present (yes,
http://www.lifehack.org/ is actually run by a Hong Kong called
StepCase, and the founder, Leon Ho, was present in previous
BarCampHKs).

What do you think?

Haggen

[Julian Lee]

Hi Haggen,

Agree completely! There seems to be much misunderstanding here in HK as to what we mean by to "hack". Would be great to clear things up a bit!

Some of the other examples of people doing "hacking" in HK include the folks at Wikitopia (http://videotage.org.hk/wikitopia/), Hackteria (http://www.videotage.org.hk/projects/20091114_hackteria.htm) as well as Dorkbot (http://dorkbot.org/). Seems like quite a vibrant community of "hackers" is coming up in HK!

Looking forward to an interesting discussion!

Regards,
Julian

[YKY (Yan King Yin, 甄景贤)]

Hi all,

I think that's an interesting idea...  I'm working on an AI project but I'm attending this mainly to look for inspiration and novel ideas.  So we can talk about how hacking can be done productively to achieve great things...

Cheers =)

KY

[Michael Melville]

Can't we just do a screening of Hackers? That movie was special.

[Jonathan Buford]

I think this is a good topic for Barcamp, but at the same time I wonder how much of it is preaching to the choir at that particular event. One way of approaching it in the long term is to just host events that teach people that many things are malleable within their world and that the ability to change them is not that out of reach. Look at just basic circuit bending, there are a lot of crazy stuff you can do with that, but unless you have at least a little idea of what the components are doing you would not really know even where to start with it. Or really making coffee, and not just blindly coming up with a dark brown liquid of some sort. It is one thing to talk about what the different things that hacking can cover, but regardless of the name for it, at the end of the day, it is more important to get more people to do it. 

[Haggen So]

>> Can't we just do a screening of Hackers? That movie was special.

Is it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_%28film%29 ?

On 10 September 2010 09:00, Jonathan Buford <jon.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think this is a good topic for Barcamp, but at the same time I wonder how
> much of it is preaching to the choir at that particular event. One way of
> approaching it in the long term is to just host events that teach people
> that many things are malleable within their world and that the ability to
> change them is not that out of reach. Look at just basic circuit bending,
> there are a lot of crazy stuff you can do with that, but unless you have at
> least a little idea of what the components are doing you would not really
> know even where to start with it. Or really making coffee, and not just
> blindly coming up with a dark brown liquid of some sort. It is one thing to
> talk about what the different things that hacking can cover, but regardless
> of the name for it, at the end of the day, it is more important to get more
> people to do it.

1. The person who I mentioned to have misunderstanding of hack might
be coming, so there might be more.
2. If not, we can discuss how to outreach on the day ;)