[HacktionLab] Thoughts on where we could go now with HL

[Mike Harris]

Hi All,

Thanks very much to Mick and Naomi for the session on Sunday morning on 
"What next for HacktionLab?".  I took a photo of the notes:

https://hacktionlab.org/index.php?title=File:What_Next_For_HacktionLab_June_2023_Notes.png

A feeling I came back with, and had also after Todmorden last year is 
that the approach of returning to the HacktionLab format of holding 
gatherings in different cities or other locations that the network is 
invited to is what seems to work the most effectively.  The last two 
remind me of the HLs we had previously in Leeds, London, Bradford and 
Oxford.

This is a departure from this group doing either of these two things:

- running an annual festival-like event
- doing actual projects itself, such as the tech tools book and website

I think the moving from place to place has legs.

Something else that came up is that someone mentioned that the current 
web site (wiki) is possibly a little bit vague about what HL actually 
does.  The wiki is old and there's stuff on it from back in 2009.

I therefore wonder if we had a poll to see whether we agree that the 
principle purpose of this group is to hold annual (or more frequent) 
gatherings in different locations around the UK to foment social, 
political, professional, and skills-sharing networks, the sharing of 
projects, the creation of a space for people to find out more about and 
maybe join existing projects, and for people to do 'reverse workshops' 
(milk the audience) and we agree that, then we could perhaps update our 
website to state clearly that that is what we NOW do.

We could then provide a "HOWTO host a HacktionLab" page that covers what 
anyone who would like to have one in their location would need to do.

Cheers,


Mike.

-- 
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Mike Harris

Email: mike at mbharris.co.uk
Web: https://mbharris.co.uk . https://xtreamlabnet . https://elsevier.com
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