Hacker DojoOrigins + Influence

Historical background of Hacker DojoNot just SHDH, whole lineage of hacker cultureContext tells you why things are

Coworking

Hacker Dojo has three basic functions:-Coworking-Events-Community, the glue

Coworking

Events

Hacker Dojo has three basic functions:-Coworking-Events-Community, the glue

Coworking

Events

Community

Hacker Dojo has three basic functions:-Coworking-Events-Community, the glue

SHDHBarCamp

Hackerspaces

CoworkingDorms

Incubators

Hacker Dojo is a mix of existing institutionsSome of these are memetic cousinsSHDH: direct ancestor, but obviously influenced by...

Hackerspaces around since early 90sUsually as an open workshop, also classes and communityTend to be more hardware oriented. Why?

Been around for a while, exploded in 2008

Mostly in Europe

Chaos Computer Club

Europe is also home to oldest hacker organizations

As well as largest LAN parties, evolved from or involve demosceneDreamHack

Brings us back to DevHouse for reasons I’ll get to, but it’s worth pointing out thatall the founding members were common attendees

in fact, 2 of the first 5 directors, david and i, started devhouse.

Likely familiar with DevHouse, but I actually want to go further back.DevHouse not only grew out of LAN parties, but a love of a ...community, set of ideals, culture known as hacker culture.

My experience with hacker culture started very early. Although my parents were not hackers, my grandfather was. He was an engineer at Intel when I was born in 1985, but also a “hobbyist computer enthusiast” -- a hacker. He had a lab of cool stuffthat looked like a hackerspace. About a year after I was born, he died.

There were a lot of machines in his lab, some he built on his own. His main machine was an IBM clone, but I could never get it to work for some reason

Got Kaypro 4 to workI read the manuals and learned to playascii text versions of Donkey Kong and Pacman

Eventually my parents found a Commodore 64 at the flea market,This was now the early 90s and this was somewhat obsoleted technology...but I was in love with old tech. Most of the books in the school library were out of dateand about BASIC, which I could take home and use with my Commodore.

So I loved this stuff. This documentary came out and I learned all about the historyof the Silicon Valley... and I was in love with it. The people, the stories, but also theattitude, and the culture. Big kids. It resonated with me deeply. This was 1996 and I was 12.

I was also influenced by popculture. Even then I knew Hackers was silly,but it was about computers! Making this computer wizards into rockstars.Also Wargames, which I liked more because it was real, and I even liked that itwas full of old technology, it was what I grew up with.

I was also into games, obviously console and PC games. This obviously led to LAN parties.

2001I’d cram people into my tiny room at home or here we borrowed the karate studioone of my friends worked at. This was during high school and through LAN parties,I met a guy named Andy Smith there on the left. We later became roommates and coworkers.

2001I’d cram people into my tiny room at home or here we borrowed the karate studioone of my friends worked at. This was during high school and through LAN parties,I met a guy named Andy Smith there on the left. We later became roommates and coworkers.

These two guys: buttthunder and retard.Found LAN party in Los Gatos called LGLAN.

Turns out there was recurring LAN party that operated out of the high school’scommunity center building called the Outhouse.

It was a place students could use to hold events, throw parties, etc.It was really cool and made me realize how useful community centers were...

And they packed this place full of gamers. It was the biggest LAN party I’d seen then. But what’s more was these people were really cool. Not just gamers, but manywere proto-hackers. And it was a lot of fun. In fact, a lot like Dojo in the kind of funwe’d have -- not just with games, but with pranks and silly projects.

The organizers knew their shit. They had donated Cisco hardware andthese fancy cable snakes. The guy in the white, Tom Harrison, was the main organizer.I became friends with a lot of them, including Tom. In fact, Tom is currently my neighbor.

2004By 2004 LGLAN died out. I would invite people over to the apartment I lived in with Andy Smith. Just geek out, maybe to reformat or play Starcraft.

2004But I also started invited people over to where I was working at night to work on our sideprojects. Here’s Adam (works on Sailbox project at Dojo) when we wereworking on a game. We ended up changing gears and building another game

called AjaxWar. It was a realtime strategy-action game in the browser we did withDHTML and PHP... it was actually using Comet, but before Comet had a name.But these “devlans” were getting at something I was really into. It was like a LAN party,but we were making stuff...

Also around that time, I learned about this guy. David ran Community Colo, which is wherethe LGLAN server was hosted. David also threw parties.

He threw big parties at a house in hillsborough that he shared with a few others.

They were so big that they eventually got shutdown by the neighborhood.David then started throwing a small scale movie night instead.

So I went to one of them. I brought Andy and his new friend Chris Messina.There I told David about this idea for an event where people would bring theircomputers and build stuff. No common purpose, not a contest... just hang out and hack. He didn’t get it strangely, but eventually he decided it was worth a try.

2005The first devhouse was probably less than 20 people

Andy Smith there on the left brought more of his new friends, including Matt Mullenweg, who had build Wordpress, and Chris Messina there under the hat.Other people that showed up because of Andy were Tantek Celik and Scott Beal.

David really liked the event because by the end he had launched PBwiki.In fact, here is the first wiki page about PBwiki on the DevHouse wiki.

2006It turned out to be such a cool service, the team grew and soon Brian Klugwas hired from Virginia to work on it.

We kept doing DevHouses and they kept getting bigger.

People really liked it. And I knew why. Because it brought together thisenergy and enthusiasm for building stuff with technology. Mostly software,which happens to be convenient, but we all loved all kinds of things.That was very different from user group meetings that were all about one technology...

At shdh 4, Kitt appeared. She started contributing to DevHouse quite a bit.

by late 2005, barcamp had started growing as a world wide phenomenon after the first onein palo alto that year.

2005it was organized by these guys (and eris), all which attend devhouse. as legend goes, barcampstarted from tantek saying there should be an open foocamp. it turns out this conversation waswith ryan king there (in stripes) on their way home from SHDH 2. At the first barcamp (over 200 attendees), tantek’s closing remarks mentioned devhouse and our “ragtag” approach as being a major influence for barcamp.

At some point somebody invited Doug Engelbart.

This was a trip because here’s a guy that lead the development of mostof the technology in the room, including the mouse, GUI, hypertext...just sitting at a table with the rest of us, beer in hand.

the guy that got him to come is the guy in the background: Brad Neuberg. Separately, Brad had been talking about this “co-working” idea and the first coworking spacecalled the Hat Factory, which was based on capturing the same kind of casualcollaboration he saw at DevHouse. Now Coworking is another worldwide phenomenon.The other big SF Coworking was co-started by Chris Messina.

Soon we got press coverage and I happened to mention being inspired bythe Homebrew Computer Club that I learned about when I was 12... I said I wantedto try and recapture the spirit of that (even though I had never been, I just assumed itwas sort of like what I experienced with lan parties and other cool, smart people)

This got the attention of Lee Felsenstein, who led a lot of the Homebrew meetings.He ended up showing at DevHouse fairly often. We even met with him outside of DevHouseto learn about what Homebrew could have been and how we could apply that to DevHouse.

2007The DevHouse organizing team got bigger. Joel there in the middle, responsible forour last Microsoft sponsorship, was also hired by PBwiki and moved here to be a partof this culture. Tom Harrison from LGLAN, to the left of Joel, started helping out around SHDH 4 and pretty much ever since.

2007The DevHouse organizing team got bigger. Joel there in the middle, responsible forour last Microsoft sponsorship, was also hired by PBwiki and moved here to be a partof this culture. Tom Harrison from LGLAN, to the left of Joel, started helping out around SHDH 4 and pretty much ever since.

SHDH 30Jan 2009 @ Sun

Eventually we reached our 30th DevHouse, which took place at Sun because one of theirVPs attended DevHouse and invited us to have one there. This was our biggest event,and David decided to pitch the idea of “DevHouse all the time” -- Hacker Dojo.Part of the idea was it could be a place where SHDH happens, but also be infrastructurefor others to start things like SHDH, hence the events at Dojo.

From there things happened quickly. The next day he made a wiki, then a Google group, then we were meeting, looking at spaces, incorporating. In the first 2 months,we were featured in Mercury News, then on Fox News... obviously an amazing snowballeffect...

Education

Hacker Culture

A hacker is expert in their field, whether hobby or

professional, that pushes the envelope of what’s

possible through hands-on exploration, driven by

relentless curiosity and a desire to challenge the

status quo.

peer learning

learn by doing

inspiration

mentorship

teaching toolsfree classes

But back when it was still an idea... Brian talks about how we had no ideawhat it would turn into, but I’ve got to say it’s not far off from what I envisioned, and I’m sure for David too. There were two things about DevHouse I wanted to be moreexplicit in Hacker Dojo...

“The place of the way of the hacker”

Now, obviously, Dojo has almost a mind of its own, and the collective membershipcan decide how it is the place of the way of the hacker, and continue to spread this hacker culture that is so important to me, and hopefully a lot of you.