[HacktionLab] Thoughts, evaluation and outcomes from Spring Hacktionlab

Mick Fuzz mickfuzz at clearerchannel.org
Fri May 11 10:25:14 UTC 2012


I just wanted to say hi and share some thoughts on the hacktionlab at
the weekend

I really enjoyed it and was sorry that I couldn't stay for the Sunday. I
thought that there was a good number of people there, it seemed to work
pretty well. Was it about 25-30 over the weekend? One thing that struck
me was really this time was the big difference in levels of computer
knowledge of the people that were there. This was immediately clear for
the first bit about email. Some were able to be able to sign keys for
others they needed help to set up gpg, enigmail and thunderbird and then
generate a keypair etc.

I'm thinking that over barncamp we can deal with this divergence of
level more easily over the longer event, but that it was hard at this
event. For the 'escaping social media' session this was an issue as more
technical discussion had to be damped down to keep the session available
to all - that's not ideal - as those tech discussions are good to have.

For the planning of workshop, apart from the bitcoin on sunday and the
escaping social media on on sat, there wasn't much preplanned on the
list and wiki - I was hoping that it could work as a Barcamp style thing
with people arriving and pitching in - It didn't really work like that
and in some ways I don't think that we really gave that the best chance
in the way we started proceedings on Saturday. I think that this kind of
suffered from the variety of levels and from the fact that as an event
we kind of set ourselves up to try to cover a LOT of ground, tech,
security, media, campaign publicity etc etc. So I think that process
would be easier if the people arriving were coming from a similar place.

Anyway I'll leave it there and it would be good to get other people's
feedback. I think it would be great to add Simon to this list now as
well to try and involve him in this feedback.




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