Taking a break from HackerspaceSG

[Roland Turner]

All,

After almost 12 years (!), I've decided to step back from involvement in HackerspaceSG.

Background

More than a decade ago, Meng — knowing that I had a background in founding technology community organisations — asked me if I'd like to be involved in a project to set up a hackerspace in Singapore. Needless to say, I was! I'll spare you a detailed recitation of the dozen years of the intervening history; suffice it to say that the sort of widespread acceptance of tinkering, hacking, and recreational making that I was hoping to promote and support has been achieved many times over.

In the meantime the other technology community projects that I'm working on have become more numerous and more time-consuming, to the point where I'm dropping the ball occasionally so I'm feeling the need to focus my efforts. HackerspaceSG remains sentimentally important of course but — if I'm honest about it — my continued involvement is largely inertia rather than a material part of any active pursuit of broader goals. Consequently, I've decided to end my membership at the end of this month. I've not made any decision about whether or when to resume membership in future, but am making a clear break now specifically to motivate a clean resolution and/or handover of all HackerspaceSG-related things that are currently on my plate.

Plenum

I'll cease chairing plenums from October 1st. It might be helpful for people interested in taking this on to make themselves known, here and/or to Valentine.

I remain available to chair any plenum held on/before September 30, but won't be chairing any held after that date. Although the way I've conducted it since founding has been as an active participant in much of the debate rather than simply keeping the meeting in good order, there is no requirement that a new chair do so. Narrowing the chair's function to the more traditional one opens the role up to a much broader range of candidates, and perhaps to multiple people serving in rotation. I'd suggest that the decision about who will chair future plenums is currently Valentine's to make — particularly about whether he'll chair them himself or recruit someone(s) to do so — but that anyone interested in gaining experience in this function in a fairly low stakes setting might consider volunteering.

The change in chair is connected to a larger structural problem. What started out as a clearing house for resolving issues that arose between more than a dozen people actively working on developing HackerspaceSG and that couldn't readily be resolved any other way has expanded into being the primary forum for HackerspaceSG to discuss or decide an enormous range of things that might reasonably have been resolved more directly and more quickly by other means. At the same time there's been a reduction to about two people who are actively driving HackerspaceSG. I've discussed with Valentine at some length the broader problem of establishing consensus on a mission and recruiting an engaged executive team, but I'd suggest to the entire membership that plenum should only be used for things that can't resolved any other way, rather than as the first stop for all organisational questions or concerns. Getting the duration down from 2-3 hours to ~30 minutes would also seem desirable.

RIPE Atlas Probe

I'm looking for someone to take over care and feeding of the RIPE Atlas probe hosted at HackerspaceSG.

It's a small device that RIPE uses as part of its enormous Internet measurement project. The task is not by itself terribly exciting (resolving outages if someone has kicked the plug out; periodically re-flashing the thumb drive when the probe crashes; perhaps an hour's work every few months), but it is part of an important data source for projects involved in understanding the health of the Internet as a whole. The important requirement is a willingness to keep an eye out for emailed alerts and to act reasonably quickly (a day or two perhaps) if attention is required. The device belongs to RIPE and I placed it at the request of a friend involved in their outreach to build/sustain the network. I understand the intention being that technology community spaces are good places to have such things hosted because the resources and expertise are likely to be available.

Please let me know if you're interested.

Timing

My decision and timing are unrelated to the current movement towards a fresh start for HackerspaceSG and possible relocation, but it would seem that the timing is particularly good in that right now is an opportune time to recruit fresh blood and to build new structures and norms. I did think about whether it might not be better to wait until the lease renewal and/or relocation are bedded down on the basis that this (plenum chair succession) is one more problem to solve in the midst of everything else, but on reflection I'm convinced that it is the other way around, that deferring my stepping back would only prolong the difficulties described above to a point in time where people were actually less engaged, which doesn't seem at all helpful.

Looking forward

I have tried without success to imagine where HackerspaceSG will be a decade from now, or even whether it will, and I honestly can't. Had someone asked me in 2009 about where I saw HackerspaceSG in 2019 I would have been similarly stumped, but I'd point out that the same is true for ProgSoc more than 30 years after I co-founded it, and it's now stronger than ever, in large part because of its periodic reinvention by subsequent executives. I'd suggest that that same is possible for HackerspaceSG — now on its third executive — so long as people engaged in running it remain open to ongoing change in the environment and the organisation.

- Roland

[Huiren Woo]

Hi Roland,

Thank you for your enormous service to Hackerspace.

> I'm looking for someone to take over care and feeding of the RIPE Atlas probe hosted at HackerspaceSG.

I currently own a RIPE Atlas probe at home and have some experience
operating it. I can continue to help maintain this probe at
hackerspace. We can discuss this off mailing list to facilitate the
transfer of operating ownership through RIPE.

Best Regards,
Woo Huiren

"I don't know about you people, but I don't want to live in a world
where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do. "
- Gavin Belson

[Kai Hendry]

Thank you Roland, your efforts didn't go unnoticed!

[C David Rigby]

Hi Roland,

Although I am long gone from Singapore, I have remained on the list. Thanks for all you did. It was awesome to hang out and to join Hackerspace at its inception. Best wishes for your future endeavors!

David Rigby

On Thu, Sep 2, 2021 at 6:25 PM Kai Hendry <hen...@iki.fi> wrote:

Thank you Roland, your efforts didn't go unnoticed!

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[Jennifer Dodgson]

Thank you Roland, for everything you've done for the space. Best of luck in the future.

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