[ssf] Re: [g8-sheffield] An active week in Sheffield, and thoughts for the future

[Alan Dawson]

Quoting Chris <chris at aktivix.org>:

> Also it would be good to have a space for a hacklab
> (this could be the same space as the Indymedia space), for
> more on hacklabs see:
> 
>   http://www.hacklabs.org/
> 
> I can't make it to the meeting today, I hope it goes well.
> 


The meeting today was cancelled :-(

so we did some tidying up and my kids did some drawing.  The meeting was
rescheduled for 7pm Monday 20 June.  I won't be able to attend at that time.

w.r.t to an hacklab at the convergance space...

We'd need to identify the owners of the assets that that created the lab and
check with them that it was cool to keep them there.  I can think of at least
five people who lent stuff to make things work.  For what its worth my junk (
couple hunder meters cat 5 cable and an HP netserver ) is not required for any
other services immediately.

There are also some ongoing expenses to maintaining the lab.  Power and
Bandwidth.

Rather than spending money on purchasing electricity and bandwidth.  We could
investigate the feasibilty of providing power by battery ( ie like trollyd
(http://www.burngreave.net/~trollyd ))  and providing bandwith by wireless from
access-space in the same way that many organisations in Burngreave share
bandwidth (  http://bcan.burngreave.net/ and
http://mygmaps.com/show/0.0.7/?url=http://maps.burngreave.net/xml/bg2.xml
)

this would involve some capital outlay... and the support of Access Space, ...
but the resources would be able to be
reused in other situations, rather than the cash spent on renting power and
bandwidth.


The existing lab was built using Debian Linux ( http://www.debian.org
http://www.debian.org/social_contract ) in a Linux Terminal Services setup
(http://www.ltsp.org ) and the wireless network was set up using a wireless
router customised with OpenWRT ( http://openwrt.org )

I would look forward to running a workshop on how to install a similar lab.  I
see the embedding of skills to build, develop and maintain a media
infrastructure are valuable to developing an autonomous culture.


I look forward to hearing the results of the meeting

AED
-- 
"If you make decisions about software -- or anything -- based solely on
short-term cost and benefit, someone with a longer view can easily
manoeuver you into a trap from which it is hard to escape."