Public Meeting numero dos – recap

I couldn’t sleep last night. Who would’ve thought that being excited makes it hard to sleep? I want to start by thanking everyone who came out last night! It was an ‘interesting’ly awesome evening.

“Hello?”
“Um... Andrea. Rick says there’s people in the lodge.”
“Uh... what?! How many?!”
“Lots?”

About that... So there was a little confusion with the meeting space. The hall manager didn’t realize that the Arizona Predator’s Club was meeting in the hall the second Thursday of the month still. In a feeble attempt to not piss off the 50 or so men with hunting rifles, we quietly worked our way to the back of the lodge to use the back room for our meeting. After some crafty designing and posterboard, we opened a back way into the lodge, so everyone didn’t have to walk through the other meeting. Unfortunately, it was a bit shady at first. “Drive down and park in a dark alley and find the hidden door to the secret hideout". Cool in theory. Creepy in reality. Unearthing some flood lights helped, and to our knowledge, no one went missing. As the meeting began, we learned that not only did the Predator’s Club steal our main meeting space, they were also stealing all the A/C. It was a stuffy 80 degrees in our space, with a tiny little stand fan doing its best to save us. All that aside, everyone was a freakin’ trooper. There was an amazing turnout. We had 30 attendees at the meeting, including Jeremy, Rick, Sean, and I. It was a wide variety as well; everything from leatherworkers to electrical engineers, to Intel employees and artists. Some main points we hit on:
1.  Concept of the HackerSpace -- a place where people can come together to share ideas, resources, and a physical space.
2. Collaboration without a space -- a virtual survey will be available ASAP to fill in information about spaces you find. We're also developing a database for tool and knowledge sharing.  (Stay tuned!)
3. Need for physical space of our own -- Our ultimate goal. No Internet at the lodge and an obvious conflict of times once a month.Keep an eye and an ear open for places available and let us know at info@heatsynclabs.org.
4. Projects -- A few people brought their own projects and we played around with them.  We also did some mad lock picking work at the Lock Picking table that was set up.

So, next week we’ll be meeting at the same place at the same time. Only instead of a shady back alley entrance, we will be able to use the entire space. So the front door will not be block with guns, middle aged men, and antlers. Hope to see everyone next week!!