Noisebridge - User contributions [en]

Meeting Notes 2013 01 29

2013-01-30T23:18:47Z

216.239.45.67: /* Membership Binder */

You should read the [[meeting instructions]] forthwith!

These are the notes from the [[Category:Meeting_Notes The 251st Meeting of Noisebridge]]. Note-taker: [[User:flamsmark|Tom]]. Moderators: Joshua Berkowitz & MCT.

= Short announcements and events =
* Reverend Myk is holding a Workshop this Friday at 8: '''Anarchy 101'''.
* '''[https://cryptopartysf.org Cryptoparty II: Enciphered Boogaloo]''' is happening on March 23 at Langton Labs. Go sign up to [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEdJaTI0OWJEbXAyR3JFLVhlNldvQXc6MQ learn] or [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFVXTEU1WXdMVkhlMm9aWUY0RFNlSlE6MQ teach]!

= [[ Membership Binder ]] =
* Ka-'''Ping''' Yee ([https://twitter.com/zestyping @zestyping] [http://zesty.ca zesty.ca]). Week 1. Sponsor: MCT.
* Reverend '''Mik''' McAllister. Week 3. No sponsors.
* James "'''JC'''" Cooper. Week 3. Sponsor: Danny.

= Financial Report =
* Funds in bank: 13121.47
* We have paid rent and have no pending large expenses, but still: this number is too low. It should be larger.
* We need more folks to make [[Donate|recurring donations]]. Even as little as $5 a month make a huge difference.

= Consensus items =

== [[ Consensus Items History | Proposals from last week ]] ==
* It is the consensus of Noisebridge that Danny send the [[DreamworksReply]] on Noisebridge's behalf.
* It is the consensus of Noisebridge that Ping is authorized to send FOIA requests on behalf of Noisebridge for records related to Noisebridge.

== [[ Current Consensus Items | Proposals for next week ]] ==
* [[User:Flamsmark|Tom]] would like to propose that <some people> send <some> FOIA requests on Noisebridge's behalf.
** If you have suggestions about how this might work, please get in touch with Tom, either by email, or in person. We shall work out the exact details at next week's meeting!

= Discussion Notes =

== Scud & Chrissie ==
* Scud is present, and apologies for his abuse of the space.
* It is agreed that the consensus item will remain open while Reverend Myk mediate the concerns that Miloh, Rob Benson, and RAYC have with Scud & Chrissie. The results of that moderation will be reported at a future meeting before we complete consensus on this item.

== Board Elections ==
We talked about [[Board/2013_Nominations|the nominations]]. The first part of the slate-locking is now complete, for consensus next week.

= Attendance =
* Joshua Berkowitz is from new york, likes hyperlinks & python
* Felix likes Linux, Noisebridge, webdev
* Yan likes linux and Noisebridge and calculating machines
* Adam likes computers as he hopes they will be, and self-driving cars
* David likes software and flufflyware
* Leif is counter-anti-dis-intermediation [member]
* Melissa loves building computers
* Reverend my like software that makes random numbers
* Snail is here [member, president]
* Karl is visiting from Berlin likes node, and especially nodecopter
* Ken uses Mac OS, and his favorite software is Textedit
* Tom is the high priest of Consenso (all praise be upon hir)
* Michael
* Dan has been coming here a few months, and likes C
* Josh knows dumb ways to die
* Monad tinkers, and is applauded for his infrastructure development
* Micheal finally admits to being a techno-wanderer

[[Category:Meeting Notes]]

Aaron Swartz Memorial Hackathon

2013-01-29T19:57:29Z

216.239.45.67: /* Schedule */

In memory of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz Aaron Swartz], and in coordination with a [[Worldwide Aaron Swartz Memorial Hackathons|world-wide effort]], Noisebridge will be hosting a hackathon starting '''Friday, January 25th''', and continuing through '''Sunday, January 27th'''.

== Intro ==

Aaron was a hacktivist and friend of many in our community. He helped create RSS 1.0; contributed to Creative Commons; was an early builder of Reddit, where he's often acknowledged as a co-founder; created the [http://webpy.org/ web.py] framework; and more recently, became a data liberator, first with PACER and then with scholarly articles from JSTOR, both of which got him into trouble with the law.

Aaron's [http://demandprogress.org/ Demand Progress] project helped stop SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act in the US, which threatened to have far reaching unintended consequences.

Aaron Swartz committed suicide on Jan. 11, 2013, but his work on making the world a better place should not die with him. Join us for two days of understanding his work and contributing to keep his memory and projects alive.

(This section adapted with permission from the [http://hacknight.in/hasgeek/aaronsw-memorial Bangalore hackathon].)

== Event Details ==

'''When''': 7pm Jan. 25 - 7pm Jan. 27

'''What''': Come learn new skills and work together on projects that Aaron would have liked. Themes include open information access, sharing and preserving human knowledge, hacking for social/political justice, and techno-activism.

'''Organizers''': [[user:yan | yan]], [[user:Turkshead | shannon]], [[user:Mct| mct]]

'''Remote collab''': [https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front mailing list]

The event is free, but we'll have donation boxes for purchasing food and project supplies. BYO-snacks-and-energy-drinks.

== Projects ==

Post and gather volunteers for project ideas [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ai2JAMm86EJbdFg1TW5tenNJSUt3X2dVVmQ3M08xSlE#gid=1 on this spreadsheet]. Most of them need someone to volunteer to be the point of contact.

Major projects hacked on on Friday:
*Open Journal (mek)
*Cleaning up http://www.data.gov (Yan, Robert, Eric, Connie, Ian, Evan, David)

In addition, lots of suggested ideas were added to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ai2JAMm86EJbdFg1TW5tenNJSUt3X2dVVmQ3M08xSlE#gid=3.

Things that people did on Saturday:
*Continue data.gov project
*Look into FOIA-type requests to liberate academic journals/datasets
*Scrape websites and stuff
*Learn LaTeX
*Discuss academic publishing reform
*Work on porting Recap to Chrome
*A bunch of talks (see below)
*BACE timebank
*Open Library
*Chromatest and Eric played some sick DJ sets!

Things that people did on Sunday:
* Studied the possibility of open access via California's public-records law: http://piratepad.net/Q7zUeEbi0E
* Cents Us Dollars Them. (Exploring the distribution of wealth in the United States with data from the US Census API for the Aaron Swartz Memorial Hackathon : http://cents-us-dollars-them.herokuapp.com/ https://github.com/cgcardona/cents_us)

== Schedule ==

Talks are relatively informal, supposedly fun, and probably won't go for an hour each.

Scheduled talks/demos (tentative):

'''Friday'''
*7 pm: Hackathon starts, Yan probably says some words and asks for money.
*8 pm: '''Keynote on Aaron's life and work''' by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_O'Brien Danny O'Brien]

'''Saturday'''
*4 pm: '''Step 1: FOIA, Step 2: ??, Step 3: Profit''', [[user:zestyping | Ping]]. How to write Freedom of Information Act request letters to do good things for the world.
** Slides by Nate Cardozo, EFF: [[Media:EFF_FOIA_Club.pdf]]
** Here's an example of a [[FOIA letter]], asking the FBI for their records on Noisebridge.
*5 pm: '''Hacktivism: On social justice movements''', [http://twitter.com/bitgangsta Daniel Jabbour]. A brief history of social justice movements, and my own experience with policy reform and hacktivism.
** Slides available online [http://amoe.ba/presentations/hacktivism here]
*6 pm: '''Principles of Low Power Design''', [http://dolemite.wuli.nu/ Alex Newman]. Hardware you have never heard of for more low power.
*7 pm: '''Improving the Scientific Process through Software''', [http://www.hertzfoundation.org/dx/fellows/fellow_profile.aspx?d=1205 Jacob Steinhardt]. Learn about existing open source projects to improve science, and others that should exist but don't.
*8 pm: Part two of Danny's talk

'''Sunday'''
*4 pm: '''Data hacking: Machine learning + NLP''', [https://twitter.com/turian Joseph Turian]. I will answer questions about machine learning, NLP, scraping, data hacking etc.
*5 pm: '''Scrape ALL the data!''', how to scrape info from web pages with just a little Python, [[user:zestyping | Ping]]
** Get the scrape module here: http://zesty.ca/python/scrape.py
** Tutorial and documentation here: http://zesty.ca/scrape/
** Example of a scrape script that gets your watchlist on the Noisebridge wiki: http://zesty.ca/python/noisebridge_wiki.py
** Example of a scrape script that tells you how many users are reading a particular subreddit: http://zesty.ca/python/reddit_users.py
** Run this script periodically for a week to get a .tsv file, load it into Google Spreadsheets, make a chart out of it, and you get this: [[Media:Reddit-users.png]]. Now you know exactly when to post your cat photos to maximize the eyeballs on it!
*6 - end: '''Project demos!''' Show us what you've worked on this weekend.

'''Unscheduled / Unconfirmed Events'''
*DJ set by [http://www.chromatest.net/ Chromatest J. Pantsmaker]
*DIY Book Scanner workshop
*Field trip to look for hidden cameras in public places around the Mission
*[http://www.hotlux.com/angel.htm Ilsa Bartlett] is a "crisis counselor for highly intelligent people (geeks) who need someone to talk to and creates a container of quiet for people to fill with their issues." She will be around to provide counseling during the hackathon.
*[http://ipadportraits.blogspot.com/ David Newman], ipad portrait artist, showed up and started painting portraits of people hacking on Saturday.

If you'd like to give a talk/workshop, add it to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ai2JAMm86EJbdFg1TW5tenNJSUt3X2dVVmQ3M08xSlE#gid=2.

== Who's going? ==

(There's also a [https://www.facebook.com/events/119075571602113/ Facebook Event], if you are so inclined. Sadly, a Facebook login is required to access that page.)

[[user:yan | yan]]

[[user:Turkshead | shannon]]

[[user:Mct| mct]]

[[user:Davidme | davidme]]

[[user:judytuna | judytuna]]

[[user:Lizzard | Liz]]

[[user:zestyping | Ping]]

[[user:gardner | gardner!!]]

[[user:unixjazz | felipe]]

[[user:Bernie | bernie]]

[[User:Christie|Christie]]

= Demos =

Notes from presentations on Sunday, Jan 27

== improving access to data.gov ==
*Project participants:
**chris , dev
**connie, product
**eric, dev
**evan, dev
**ken, ux
**neil, dev
**paul, design
**robert, dev/product
**yan, product
*created in 2008 to provide access to public data
*what data does data.gov have? not immediately clear
*build an alternative portal?
*experimental new portal already in progress at alpha.data.gov
*built new tag cloud explorer for data.gov this weekend, presently at http://data2.me/

== book scanner ==
*participants:
**David Nelson
**Adam Kraft adam at media.mit.edu
vaccuum-powered page-turning arm for book scanner, built out of random parts that were laying around. NOT the Dany Q one, that one costs $1500 (and is awesome) but this one is under $100. It isn't actually scanning books yet so far, just turning pages. Interested in feedback on mechanism & software.
== RECAP ==
http://recapthelaw.org/

Ping demonstrates PACER, the US federal court's paywall for public-domain legal documents, and how it charges $0.10 per "page" for everything (including search results!). The RECAP browser extension uploads PACER results to the Internet Archive so that others will not have to pay the fees. If you are about to pay for a document which someone else has already uploaded, it allows you to retrieve it from archive.org instead. There are 854,711 items in the archive.org RECAP collection so far.

The RECAP browser extension for Firefox is at: http://github.com/citp/recap

The hackathon project was to develop RECAP for Chrome: http://github.com/zestyping/recap-chrome

Currently, RECAP for Chrome checks the Internet Archive to see which documents are available, and adds links to the page so you can get the documents for free instead of paying to download them from PACER. It doesn't upload documents to the Internet Archive yet, though -- that part still needs to be done.

== Fork the law ==
* Christie introduces in-progress new website for disucssing and editing laws.
** https://twitter.com/Fork_the_Law
** http://forkthelaw.org/ (not live yet)
* Fork, edit, test, commit.
* Commenting on law.
* Use as preparation for speaking with your lawmakers.
* Can participate in direct action, if you do not want to suggest specific changes.
* Backend uses http://www.co-ment.org
== Perception Society, Inc. (PSI) (paul) ==
* Chatroulette for mental health.
* Meant to address gap in mental health care for people who fear being diagnosed/labeled and thus don't go to hospitals or support groups
== Bitcoin Pogs (also paul) ==
* YES.
* Bitcoin dollar design featuring Neil DeGrasse Tyson, geometric shapes and shit, chipmunk QR code, LHC
* Then made Bitcoin pogs w/ Felix the Cat
* Kittycoin: bitcoin printed on a lolcat face
* Other designs for trillion-dollar francium bitcoin, etc.
== aaron's blog (Sid) ==
* you should read it
* sid talks about his study on the ideation of suicide and its relation to Aaron's blog posts. we chat about some of the ethical issues involved
* Resources for hackers to get help: www.saizai.com/depression
== Knowledge for Good (Aviv) ==
http://knowledgeforgood.referata.com/wiki/Knowledge_for_Good
Working together to improve the way people create, organize, and distribute important knowledge.

Aaron Swartz Memorial Hackathon

2013-01-29T19:56:37Z

216.239.45.67: /* RECAP */

In memory of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz Aaron Swartz], and in coordination with a [[Worldwide Aaron Swartz Memorial Hackathons|world-wide effort]], Noisebridge will be hosting a hackathon starting '''Friday, January 25th''', and continuing through '''Sunday, January 27th'''.

== Intro ==

Aaron was a hacktivist and friend of many in our community. He helped create RSS 1.0; contributed to Creative Commons; was an early builder of Reddit, where he's often acknowledged as a co-founder; created the [http://webpy.org/ web.py] framework; and more recently, became a data liberator, first with PACER and then with scholarly articles from JSTOR, both of which got him into trouble with the law.

Aaron's [http://demandprogress.org/ Demand Progress] project helped stop SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act in the US, which threatened to have far reaching unintended consequences.

Aaron Swartz committed suicide on Jan. 11, 2013, but his work on making the world a better place should not die with him. Join us for two days of understanding his work and contributing to keep his memory and projects alive.

(This section adapted with permission from the [http://hacknight.in/hasgeek/aaronsw-memorial Bangalore hackathon].)

== Event Details ==

'''When''': 7pm Jan. 25 - 7pm Jan. 27

'''What''': Come learn new skills and work together on projects that Aaron would have liked. Themes include open information access, sharing and preserving human knowledge, hacking for social/political justice, and techno-activism.

'''Organizers''': [[user:yan | yan]], [[user:Turkshead | shannon]], [[user:Mct| mct]]

'''Remote collab''': [https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front mailing list]

The event is free, but we'll have donation boxes for purchasing food and project supplies. BYO-snacks-and-energy-drinks.

== Projects ==

Post and gather volunteers for project ideas [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ai2JAMm86EJbdFg1TW5tenNJSUt3X2dVVmQ3M08xSlE#gid=1 on this spreadsheet]. Most of them need someone to volunteer to be the point of contact.

Major projects hacked on on Friday:
*Open Journal (mek)
*Cleaning up http://www.data.gov (Yan, Robert, Eric, Connie, Ian, Evan, David)

In addition, lots of suggested ideas were added to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ai2JAMm86EJbdFg1TW5tenNJSUt3X2dVVmQ3M08xSlE#gid=3.

Things that people did on Saturday:
*Continue data.gov project
*Look into FOIA-type requests to liberate academic journals/datasets
*Scrape websites and stuff
*Learn LaTeX
*Discuss academic publishing reform
*Work on porting Recap to Chrome
*A bunch of talks (see below)
*BACE timebank
*Open Library
*Chromatest and Eric played some sick DJ sets!

Things that people did on Sunday:
* Studied the possibility of open access via California's public-records law: http://piratepad.net/Q7zUeEbi0E
* Cents Us Dollars Them. (Exploring the distribution of wealth in the United States with data from the US Census API for the Aaron Swartz Memorial Hackathon : http://cents-us-dollars-them.herokuapp.com/ https://github.com/cgcardona/cents_us)

== Schedule ==

Talks are relatively informal, supposedly fun, and probably won't go for an hour each.

Scheduled talks/demos (tentative):

'''Friday'''
*7 pm: Hackathon starts, Yan probably says some words and asks for money.
*8 pm: '''Keynote on Aaron's life and work''' by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_O'Brien Danny O'Brien]

'''Saturday'''
*4 pm: '''Step 1: FOIA, Step 2: ??, Step 3: Profit''', [[user:zestyping | Ping]]. How to write Freedom of Information Act request letters to do good things for the world.
** Slides by Nate Cardozo, EFF: [[Media:EFF_FOIA_Club.pdf]]
** Here's an example of a [[FOIA letter]], asking the FBI for their records on Noisebridge.
*5 pm: '''Hacktivism: On social justice movements''', [http://twitter.com/bitgangsta Daniel Jabbour]. A brief history of social justice movements, and my own experience with policy reform and hacktivism.
** Slides available online [http://amoe.ba/presentations/hacktivism here]
*6 pm: '''Principles of Low Power Design''', [http://dolemite.wuli.nu/ Alex Newman]. Hardware you have never heard of for more low power.
*7 pm: '''Improving the Scientific Process through Software''', [http://www.hertzfoundation.org/dx/fellows/fellow_profile.aspx?d=1205 Jacob Steinhardt]. Learn about existing open source projects to improve science, and others that should exist but don't.
*8 pm: Part two of Danny's talk

'''Sunday'''
*4 pm: '''Data hacking: Machine learning + NLP''', [https://twitter.com/turian Joseph Turian]. I will answer questions about machine learning, NLP, scraping, data hacking etc.
*5 pm: '''Scrape ALL the data!''', how to scrape info from web pages with just a little Python, [[user:zestyping | Ping]]
** Get the scrape module here: http://zesty.ca/python/scrape.py
** Tutorial and documentation here: http://zesty.ca/scrape/
** Example of a scrape script that gets your watchlist on the Noisebridge wiki: http://zesty.ca/python/noisebridge_wiki.py
** Example of a scrape script that tells you how many users are reading a particular subreddit: http://zesty.ca/python/reddit_users.py
** Run this script periodically for a week to get a .tsv file, load it into Google Spreadsheets, make a chart out of it, and you get this: [[Media:Reddit-users.png]]. Now you know exactly when to post your cat photos to maximize the eyeballs on it!
*6 - end: Project demos! Show us what you've worked on this weekend.

'''Unscheduled / Unconfirmed Events'''
*DJ set by [http://www.chromatest.net/ Chromatest J. Pantsmaker]
*DIY Book Scanner workshop
*Field trip to look for hidden cameras in public places around the Mission
*[http://www.hotlux.com/angel.htm Ilsa Bartlett] is a "crisis counselor for highly intelligent people (geeks) who need someone to talk to and creates a container of quiet for people to fill with their issues." She will be around to provide counseling during the hackathon.
*[http://ipadportraits.blogspot.com/ David Newman], ipad portrait artist, showed up and started painting portraits of people hacking on Saturday.

If you'd like to give a talk/workshop, add it to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ai2JAMm86EJbdFg1TW5tenNJSUt3X2dVVmQ3M08xSlE#gid=2.

== Who's going? ==

(There's also a [https://www.facebook.com/events/119075571602113/ Facebook Event], if you are so inclined. Sadly, a Facebook login is required to access that page.)

[[user:yan | yan]]

[[user:Turkshead | shannon]]

[[user:Mct| mct]]

[[user:Davidme | davidme]]

[[user:judytuna | judytuna]]

[[user:Lizzard | Liz]]

[[user:zestyping | Ping]]

[[user:gardner | gardner!!]]

[[user:unixjazz | felipe]]

[[user:Bernie | bernie]]

[[User:Christie|Christie]]

= Demos =

Notes from presentations on Sunday, Jan 27

== improving access to data.gov ==
*Project participants:
**chris , dev
**connie, product
**eric, dev
**evan, dev
**ken, ux
**neil, dev
**paul, design
**robert, dev/product
**yan, product
*created in 2008 to provide access to public data
*what data does data.gov have? not immediately clear
*build an alternative portal?
*experimental new portal already in progress at alpha.data.gov
*built new tag cloud explorer for data.gov this weekend, presently at http://data2.me/

== book scanner ==
*participants:
**David Nelson
**Adam Kraft adam at media.mit.edu
vaccuum-powered page-turning arm for book scanner, built out of random parts that were laying around. NOT the Dany Q one, that one costs $1500 (and is awesome) but this one is under $100. It isn't actually scanning books yet so far, just turning pages. Interested in feedback on mechanism & software.
== RECAP ==
http://recapthelaw.org/

Ping demonstrates PACER, the US federal court's paywall for public-domain legal documents, and how it charges $0.10 per "page" for everything (including search results!). The RECAP browser extension uploads PACER results to the Internet Archive so that others will not have to pay the fees. If you are about to pay for a document which someone else has already uploaded, it allows you to retrieve it from archive.org instead. There are 854,711 items in the archive.org RECAP collection so far.

The RECAP browser extension for Firefox is at: http://github.com/citp/recap

The hackathon project was to develop RECAP for Chrome: http://github.com/zestyping/recap-chrome

Currently, RECAP for Chrome checks the Internet Archive to see which documents are available, and adds links to the page so you can get the documents for free instead of paying to download them from PACER. It doesn't upload documents to the Internet Archive yet, though -- that part still needs to be done.

== Fork the law ==
* Christie introduces in-progress new website for disucssing and editing laws.
** https://twitter.com/Fork_the_Law
** http://forkthelaw.org/ (not live yet)
* Fork, edit, test, commit.
* Commenting on law.
* Use as preparation for speaking with your lawmakers.
* Can participate in direct action, if you do not want to suggest specific changes.
* Backend uses http://www.co-ment.org
== Perception Society, Inc. (PSI) (paul) ==
* Chatroulette for mental health.
* Meant to address gap in mental health care for people who fear being diagnosed/labeled and thus don't go to hospitals or support groups
== Bitcoin Pogs (also paul) ==
* YES.
* Bitcoin dollar design featuring Neil DeGrasse Tyson, geometric shapes and shit, chipmunk QR code, LHC
* Then made Bitcoin pogs w/ Felix the Cat
* Kittycoin: bitcoin printed on a lolcat face
* Other designs for trillion-dollar francium bitcoin, etc.
== aaron's blog (Sid) ==
* you should read it
* sid talks about his study on the ideation of suicide and its relation to Aaron's blog posts. we chat about some of the ethical issues involved
* Resources for hackers to get help: www.saizai.com/depression
== Knowledge for Good (Aviv) ==
http://knowledgeforgood.referata.com/wiki/Knowledge_for_Good
Working together to improve the way people create, organize, and distribute important knowledge.