Jim Grisanzio

Here is an excellent Q&A with Akiba from Tokyo Hackerspace about how hackers in Tokyo are coming together to help people suffering from the massive earthquake in Japan on March 11th: Hackerspace Happenings: MAKE Interviews Tokyo’s Akiba. Especially heartening is that hackerspaces from around the world are contributing as well. Here are some comments from Akiba about community:

We had a discussion yesterday about hackerspaces and community resilience. Hackerspaces foster a maker culture where you’re encouraged to take apart, modify, and build things …

One of the things that really struck me was how fast the other hackerspaces responded to our call for help and support. Within one day, we had offers coming out of hackerspaces in Oklahoma, Arizona, Detroit, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Germany, Singapore, and many other places …

So hackerspaces not only contribute to community resiliency by having the capability to make and modify things as needed. There is also a network of support from other hackerspaces that can respond almost immediately to a cry for help …

In Tokyo Hackerspace, we’re putting together a plan to have designs specifically for disaster situations and that are ready to go immediately. They’ll all be OSHW/OSS and we’d like to start an effort to work with first responders like search and rescue organizations to train them on how to use the technology. That way, first responders can set up mobile charging stations, set up wide area portable intranets, and have a variety of tools at their disposal based on the situation …

The points Akiba makes about community are most important. To me the topic represents a clear way of thinking about the world and our place in it.

In modern societies too many people are too used to core problems being solved by governments or non-profit organisations. But those resources are never enough when things really break down under the stress of a major disaster. Sure, hundreds of millions of dollars are being donated in a global effort to help people affected by this earthquake, but we are well into our 3rd week now and far too many people are still suffering. That is inevitable given the scope of this particular disaster, but it should also be a reminder that we are all vulnerable.

The real lesson in every disaster is that people — all people everywhere — need to be as prepared as possible to care for themselves, their families, and their local communities in those critical weeks immediately following the initial hit. That helps reduce the burden on the first responders so they can better attend to those who are injured and can’t care of themselves in the short term. People who build things, people who participate in communities, and people work in fields that support the health and well being of others seem to understand this quite naturally. Hackers included. Obviously.

The guys at Tokyo Hackerspace are actively helping out in the massive effort to support people affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Communities of all types are joining in and hackers are no exception. They are raising money and starting projects to build items badly needed in disaster areas. If you have resources to give or if you have time and talent to offer then please do get involved.

THS on Twitter. THS on Google Groups. Images of hackers around Tokyo.

Here’s a nice clip on hackerspaces — Science on the SPOT: Open Source Creativity: Hackerspaces — from Mitch Altman at the San Francisco Hackerspace, Noisebridge. “We have one rule and one rule only: Be excellent to each other.” How’s that for an elegant governance model for a community? It doesn’t have to be complex. It just has to work. There are about a thousand hackerspaces around the world with a couple here in Japan. I’m friendly with the Tokyo Hackerspace. Nice guys. Dale Dougherty mentions hackerspaces in his TED Talk on Makers, too.

Here are 101 images from the O’Reilly Make Meeting 06 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. More Make and Hackerspace images here. See Oreilly Make Magazine here.

After the Tokyo Linux User Group meeting last night, a few of us went to see the guys from Hackers on a Plane (HoaP) at Tokyo Hackerspace. Really nice time. Images here. More images from Lem Fugitt here and here. All of my images from BarCamp, Make, Hackerspace here.

Here are my images from Tokyo BarCamp 2010 on Saturday. It was a long day — 18 hours door to door, actually. But that’s BarCamp. And it was frustrating to miss so many great sessions since there was so much going on simultaneously. But that, too, is BarCamp. Aside from that, though, it was a really great day getting together with the international community in Tokyo.

This is the third BarCamp here in Japan in the last year where OpenSolaris community members have contributed in a significant way — either by presenting, organizing, or sponsoring. Also thanks to the organizers and participants who directly contributed, and to the sponsors for offering so many resources so freely. People from dozens of communities participated all day in sessions on software development, networking, security, content, hacking, science, ecology, politics, community building, activism, language learning tools, etc. Great to see so many guys from the Linux community participating again as well. Hope the images came out ok.

I tag all my BarCamp blogs here. And I have thousands more general community images here. More BarCamp Japan stuff here: Fumi Yamazaki, Rick Martin, Johan Rooms, Yoshifumi Yamaguchi, BarCamp Tokyo tag on Flickr (tbarcamp). Also, for more on this type of open community conference, see the Community Leadership Summit.

Lessons learned here.

Here are about 90 images from the Tokyo Make Meeting 05 2010 this weekend at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Ookayama Campus. I saw a bunch of guys from the OpenSolaris, Linux, and Java communities and also the crew from Tokyo Hackerspace. Great fun. Lot of interesting hacking going on in Tokyo, and everyone I spoke with said the community is growing in size, diversity, and quality.

See Make on Twitter here. See Make Magazine here. Also related from the past: Tokyo Hackerspace, O’Reilly Make Tokyo 04 2009, Tokyo BarCamp 2009, Yokohama BarCamp 2009. And don’t forget to participate at BarCamp Tokyo 2010 next week on Saturday May 29th!

Here are 320 more images from Tokyo Make 05 2010 from Lem Fugitt (Robots-Dreams).

I stopped by the Tokyo Hackerspace house in Shirokanedai earlier today and dropped off 10 OpenSolaris Bibles and 15 OpenSolaris t-shirts. And a few hats. Actually, I dragged the stuff all the way from my office in Yoga. It took forever. Those damn bibles are bricks. A thousand pages each. But I figured a house full of international hackers could use some books and shirts. I find the Hackerspaces concept really interesting because it attracts people who participate in multiple communities

Related: Tokyo Hackerspace, O`Reilly Make Tokyo, Tokyo BarCamp, Yokohama BarCamp.

Monday was a holiday here in Japan so I went to the O`Reilly Make Conference and saw some of my Tokyo Hackerspace friends there — among thousands of other Japanese Makers. Really good time.

Make Magazine | My photos in Make blog (cool) | Make Conference News Video (Japanese)

I stopped by the Tokyo Hackerspace Open House today in Shirokanedai. Really nice day to welcome a new community of hackers, builders, and artists into existence. This space, which is a two story house in Tokyo with a backyard, is a welcome distinction to a virtual world filled with distributed digital networks. Tokyo Hackerspace is local and quite physical, and it grew out the community activities at Tokyo BarCamp in May. It`s very cool. Go to the site. Join the mailing list. Stop by the house. Get involved — physically.

I’ve been checking out the Tokyo Hackerspace gmail list for a few weeks. Looks very interesting. The project grew out of some discussions at BarCamp Tokyo a couple of months ago, and I spoke to Karamoon about it at the OpenSolaris community event this weekend. In a world of ever expanding global digital communities, it seems like a nice idea to have a very local a very physical space to hang out in and hack on things that need hacking. Global and digital are fine, but local and physical are needed too. For info, check it out on the wiki.

Amazing day at BarCamp Tokyo all day Saturday and well into the evening. I got home totally exhausted. This event was wonderful because it was organized by volunteers, the corporate sponsors were interested in supporting the community, everyone cooperated and participated, the talks were diverse and interesting, the venue was cool, and we filled the place with about 100 people from many international and Japanese communities in Tokyo. It`s all about the community. And the community led in every way. Over time we should continue moving in this direction and mixing among as many communities as possible. Tokyo is a very large hub in the global community, no question about it. More here on BarCamp Tokyo