What does a hackerspace look like? And the next Hackerspace Brussels meetup.

Thursday

Metalab Promo from kewagi on Vimeo.

This is a very cool video about the 2 first years of Metalab Vienna, the hackerspace in Austria.

A hackerspace or hackspace (from Hacker and Space) is a real (as opposed to virtual) place where people with common interests, usually in science, technology, or digital or electronic art can meet, socialise and collaborate.

The hackerspaces.org website has a good overview of all hackerspaces and information about how to start one.

If you are into hardware hacking, coding, electronics, wifi, whatever.. and want to share and learn with others, join hackerspace Brussels (hackerspace.be).

The next meeting will be about OpenWRT on the 23-24th of January. Florian Fainelli and Nico from OpenWRT team should be present. Please send an email to zoobab@gmail.com if you plan to attend.

If you can give a workshop of your own on different topics, please contact them.

Hackerspace.be announcement:

OK so we've a space (an old shop in Schaarbeek, Brussels), named it voidpointer and ptr_ organized some social/art events/meetings there.

But as we're all into hacking, making, code tinkering and opensource, we just needed to give the whole hackerspace thing a go: we set up for a bootstrap meeting 3 months ago (October 2008); Since then we've been meeting monthly (with unplanned meetings in between, just building things during weekends).

We go completely non-funded (for now) : all material is personal property or lended from local artists' organisation 'OKNO', or found somewhere around.

Space is circa 100 square meters; We've got a big window on the street (easy for showing off things we've done), a little electronics lab (arduino, scope 50Mhz, soldering irons and a lot of junk) , library (lots of tech books, engineering computer science, science fiction) – in the basement we've also got a little atelier with lot's of tools (steel saw, TIG welding station, wood router & saw stuff, …) / there's the idea is to use the space as coworking space during the week (so doubling it's use and get some revenue rolling in… if all goes well) — though this is just an idea for the moment…

Meetings' activities range from having a coffee and talk about projects, assemble (can't call it 'organize') workshops or actually build stuff together; there's quite some people involved from creative fields, so we spend quite some time into finding creative uses for those technologies, building installation pieces etc.

There's no true manifesto of the space, other then it should all be possible: voidpointer defines a location/address, but doesn't imply the activities / structure of things happening. (Source: hackerspace.be)