CADR hackerspace: Made with secret technology

Good day, habrasoobschestvo.

In Nizhny Novgorod, the CADR hackerspace will soon open its doors - the first in the city, although not the first in Russia.
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The CADR name is formed from two basic Lisp operations - car and cdr, the cadr operation returns the second element of the list passed to it. In hackerspace, we plan to actively use the secret alien technology and apply the hacker approach for learning, studying, creating and communicating.

But for starters, what is a hackerspace?

What is hackerspace?

Hackerspace (English hackerspace ) is a physical place (as opposed to the virtual space) for creativity and work, for the exchange of knowledge, experience and communication of people with similar interests. As a rule, hackerspaces provide, in addition to the physical space itself, an interesting community, necessary equipment, infrastructure and, of course, a creative atmosphere.

Most hackerspaces are technically oriented — there’s no problem finding a twisted pair, free computer, soldering iron, electronic distribution, the necessary technical literature, or getting help from a person who has a black belt in Git-Fu, Bash-Fu, Emacs-Fu and other combat IT arts. This favorably distinguishes hackerspace from various anti-cafes and, even more so, from ordinary cafes.

At the same time, hackerspaces hold not only IT events. For example, Noisebridge has a full-fledged kitchen and at one time regularly held cooking classes with the practice of compiling ingredients into various dishes. Many hackerspaces have zones not only for the work of the head, but also for the work with “hands” - where you can saw off, drill, cut and polish.

In addition, the creative atmosphere that reigns in hackerspaces helps a person to open up and create - this is an extremely important point, as people are often in situations that do not contribute to the creative development of the personality.

However, there is a well-established, but incorrect opinion in the media that a “hacker” is a computer villain. Therefore, we must restore justice and define the meaning of the word "hacker."

What is a hacker?

The image of a hacker is far from the image that is distributed by the media - where the term “hacker” is used as a synonym for “hacker” in conversations about computer crimes. In fact, hacking is a solution to problems in a non-standard way, the desire to comprehend the essence of things in order to more effectively use them and improve them.

The most appropriate definition of the differences between hackers and burglars, in our opinion - from Eric Raymond, the famous hacker. He says the following:

The main difference between crackers and hackers is that hackers create things, and crackers break them.

There are different ideas about what can be considered hacking. Richard Stallman, revered in the free software community as an outstanding hacker, defines hacking as a playful cleverness, exploring the boundaries of the possible.

State of hackerspace in Russia

In Russia, hackerspaces exist in almost every major city - Neuron in Moscow, HackSpace-Spb in St. Petersburg, etc. According to the reports one can see about the almost identical way of development of hackerspaces - at first someone has the idea of ​​“creating the same thing”, then the authors are overgrown with like-minded people - meetings are organized, discussion and discovery takes place.

This wave did not go around Nizhny Novgorod either - the CADR hackerspace was formed in April of 2013, but it was not possible to repeat the typical way: it was difficult to find a sufficient number of people interested in creating hackerspace. The community was too small in number - this led to a forced termination of the lease a year later due to unprofitability. Only after one and a half years have we managed to form a sufficient community to try again.

To coordinate the movement of hackerspaces in the world, there is a hackerspaces.org site that supports not only the list of active hackerspaces, but also contains a lot of useful documentation (mostly in English) on organizing hackerspaces and solving problems that arise in the process. One of the recommendations from the site - you need at least 4 people to start the real work on organizing a hackerspace, and at least 10 people to start.

Projects

The best way to draw attention to the community is to demonstrate its work. To this end, several internal projects were invented, with a “Just For Fun” type of implementation.

The first project was the IRC-bot cadrobot , which we settled on our IRC channel (irc: //chat.freenode.net/##cadr). We decided to take the finished bot as a basis, the only condition was that it was written in Lisp (Scheme) - firstly, the name of the hackerspace obliges, secondly, we could finish it to the desired state if something doesn’t suffice . Soon we taught the bot to write the logs of the IRC channel, which are now available for reading .

The next idea, which seems to be for implementation, was the Indicator project. The indicator is an LED panel controlled by Arduino. Of course, the Arduino and the panel are managed through a daemon written in Scheme. There is a working prototype , later we want to associate it with a cad. By the way, the project is named after the eponymous character of the famous Soviet cartoon The Mystery of the Third Planet, which gave us the idea.

Current status

A couple of months ago, a preliminary agreement was reached on the provision of premises for the needs of hackerspace by the Nizhny Novgorod Radio Engineering College (NRTK), which showed interest in the activity of the participants in the hackerspace. The condition for cooperation was the absence of doing business. Those. participants do not pay for visiting hackerspace, but also do not implement commercial projects.

We are planning to collect funds for the needs of hackerspace on a voluntary basis.

Due to the work schedule of the school, access to the hackerspace in the evening and night is not possible, and on weekends it is limited. This narrows the audience, but in our opinion is not a big hindrance at this stage.

Now we are preparing the premises, we deliver the equipment, we are preparing for the official opening, which we will write about separately.

Co-author of the article - Artem Poptsov

This article is available under the license CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0, as well as the contents of the hackerspace site.