What I Have Been Up To

You may wonder why I haven’t been blogging lately. The reason for this is because I have been busy helping to set up a hacker space. I came up with the idea for creating a Hackerspace in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne several months ago. I had been doing lots of research talking to others (mainly Andy Gelme a founder of CCHS), but still didn’t really have an idea of how to achieve my goal. I heard good things about MeetUp.com, so I thought screw it lets just make a group and see what happens.

So I started the group Eastern Suburbs Hackers Group. On the day after creating the group I had 20 people I now have 58. "I" had very much become "we". Obviously I had to hooked into a vibe - many people wanted a Hackerspace out this side of the city. A group member one of the first to join Peter O came up with a vastly better name Melbourne Eastern Suburbs Hackers which becomes an easily pronounceable acronym - MESH!

I also got very excited by the number of people who were involved so I decided to register a domain name. I tried several and then eventually found easthack.com which was available at the bargain basement price of $4.95. I already have a web server so it does not cost me anything to host it.

I wanted to find a date from my first meeting and another member Lachlan (who has been indispensable) created this lovely graph that shows the best date and time for us to meet. This made it a no-brainer to have our first meeting on Sunday, 20 July 2014. My mother offered to cater to the meeting for free and the meeting went better than my wildest expectations. After this things happened very fast. But unfortunately I got sick - in fact my place was full of sickies. The second meeting was originally going to happen at my place again and I was seriously thinking about cancelling it. Thankfully, Lachlan got our second meeting at the Ringwood Trade Training Facility (RTTF) which is on the site of Ringwood high school - a perfect location for a hacker space.

Our second meeting was even better than the first. For us to continue meeting at the RTTF we really need to be an incorporated body. Being incorporated will also make it easier to apply for insurance and protect members from being personally liable is something goes wrong. An incorporated body is an entity in its own right - it can own property, have a bank account, etc. It is quite easy, and only $33.10, to become incorporated. Consumer Affairs Victoria provides generalised model rules that any aspiring incorporated body can adopt with only a few modifications. If an organisation wishes to seriously modify the rules it costs $192.00 as someone would need to read through it and check if it complies with regulation.

Anyway, this Sunday starting at 6:30 PM we will be meeting to officially become an incorporated body. All this is happening way faster than I ever thought it would.

This whole thing proves something to me. If you have a goal in life it could be creating a hacker space or making a robot or writing a novel, even if you don’t know how to reach your goal you just need to start. I think there is this myth in our society that there are born leaders - that great people always going to be great no matter what the circumstances. And that is takes a certain class of person to be a Mining Magnate, a Prime Minister, a Steve jobs or Bill Gates. That idea is the biggest pile of bullshit that has ever been dropped on the human race.

This is a truth that certain powerful people have done their best to hide throughout human history. The real truth is - we are all capable of greatness. It is just that some people through circumstance or through dogged determination actually go out there and do something. They don’t let society tell them their proper role in life and they don’t worry about failure.

I have one message to the 7 billion people on this planet - pull your head out of your arse and show the world what you are made of!