In Pursuit of Mysteries

Burning Man 2008

R and I bought our tickets for Burning Man 2008 yesterday.

I bought tickets last year but wound up selling them to a friend in order for R and I to take our trip to Japan instead. That seemed like a pretty good decision and still does. I did go to Burning Man the previous year, in 2006, and wound up camping with friends of friends (or acquaintances). That was ok but turned out to be a bit more drama filled that I appreciated.

R hasn’t been to Burning Man since our trip with the Chupacabra Policia in 2001. That was also, strangely enough, drama filled. Basically, whenever you get attached to camping with a group of people that you don’t know terribly well, drama seems to ensue.

I wanted to go again this year, doing it as an every other year or so thing, but I wanted R to go with me. Otherwise, it is a lot less fun. (My wife is my best friend after all!) She agreed so I got tickets for us when they went on sale yesterday.

The vague plan right now is to camp on our own. I’d be willing to camp with other people but I want to avoid drama, for once, and have a good time. If someone had an interesting enough project, I’d like to help but I don’t know if I’m going to try for something super creative on my own.

I was looking at cheap (and I mean “cheap!!!”) vans and such yesterday. I may get a vehicle, get it worked on by a mechanic, and turn it into the anchor piece for our camping area. I’m getting a little tired of the dusty BM tent and storm experience. A few whiteouts teaches you the joy of having doors that seal.

If any friends or acquaintances are going this year, I’d love to hear about it.

New Bay Area Hacking Space Forming Now

This evening I attended one of the preliminary meetings for Noise Bridge in San Francisco. I had heard that efforts were underway to create some sort of hacking space/den/lab in the Bay Area but I thought that they were only going on in a very preliminary way. While talking to Jacob Appelbaum on Tor matters recently, he mentioned that the efforts were a bit further along and that meetings had been happening a couple of times a month recently to create a space.

This space is Noise Bridge and it is intended to fill the same sort of role that the hacker spaces of Europe do. As the wiki for the group states:

Noise Bridge is a hacker space in the same spirit as the European clubs like Metalab of Vienna, CBase of Berlin, MAMA of Zagreb, ASCII of Amsterdam. Many other clubs of a similar stripe can be found on Hacklabs. It would not be out of the question to consider Noise Bridge to be a possible San Francisco Chaostreff. Noise Bridge is a hacker space that shares a Dorkbot-like ethic and indeed many of the members of Noise Bridge are long time Dorkbotters.

Noise Bridge is a space for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring and of course learning.

The group as whole has an interest in programming, hardware hacking, chemistry, mathematics, photography, security, robotics, all kinds of art and of course technology.

It is a place for mentoring and asking questions.

This is all very much in formation and you can consider the above to be a bit of a manifesto of the vision that people wish to see realized. The first priority is to nail down the interests of people and to get the word out to those that would be interested in taking part in such a space.

A number of the attendees at the meeting this evening had just return from 24th Chaos Communication Congress (24C3), which I blogged about recently. This and similar events have inspired people, such as Jake, to think about why we don’t have  similar events here in the Bay Area and also why we don’t have a space to support people interested in hacking in the older sense of the word. Given that Silicon Valley is next door and we have one of the highest concentrations of tech people (of all sorts) in the world, it is surprising that it hasn’t happened.

This evening, there were probably about a dozen people in attendance. Meeting notes should be up soon but most of the discussion was around the idea of finding a space to rent and then of what kind of projects people would be interested in do. Everyone wanted to get a sense of the kinds of things people are interested in and where we could support and inspire each other. Jake and others discussed some of what they’d seen at 24C3 as well.

Quite a few of the people there tonight are actively involved in local non-profit organizations focused on technology or involved in open source software in some way. In some ways, it feels like very much the same sort of crowd that you see in the Mozilla community and other open source projects (though with a bit of pierced and dyed hair slant).

Right now, it isn’t clear that the group is far enough along to get a space yet since that has a fairly heavy financial commitment for people. There is an active disinterest in incorporating the group legally or forming some sort of non-profit. No one is interested in being the singular leader of a formal organization. Most people seemed to just want to see how things progressed over time and have an adhocracy more than anything else. This is a bit of a refreshing change though I do think that the requirements around getting a space may require more formality than this.

I encourage anyone in the Bay Area interested in Noise Bridge and the possibilities around it to join the e-mail list (or the announcement list), hang out on IRC, and start attending meetings. As of this week, there are going to be weekly, low-key, meetings on Tuesdays in an effort to keep things moving and to get people together. These are occuring in downtown San Francisco in the evening.

The Economics of Gangs and Urban Poor

NPR has a story that they broadcasted on Dr. Sudhir Venkatesh this last Saturday for his new book, Gang Leader for a Day. You can listen to it online. Most of it is an interview with Dr. Venkatesh and it is quite interesting to listen to if you have the time.

Dr. Venkatesh discusses his experiences, which are detailed in the book, in developing a relationship with the “Black Kings,” a Chicago gang that dealt drugs in some of the projects. I’ve very much been looking forward to this book coming out for a while now. I read one of Dr. Venkatesh’s previous books, “Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor“. That book documented the largely underground (off the books…) economy in the same area of Chicago that he lived and worked within while studying the Black Kings. I found it to be a pretty sensitive and nuanced book with a lot of insight. Dr. Venkatesh really does care about the lives of these people and gets to know them in a way that almost no academic would ever be interested in doing, even if they were able to do so.

I’m also reading the book, “The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld“, right now. This is the 1928 book that detailed the heyday of the New York City gangs in all of their terrible and awesome glory (and inspired the movie of the same name). It will be interesting to see how very different the gangs of today are from those of the previous era, when they had political support as well as a financial basis of a different sort. I expect that there are commonalities as well.

Dr. Steven Levitt did a talk at TED in 2004, which you can view below or on the page for it. This talk covers some of the same research with the Black Kings and wound up in Levitt’s book, “Freakonomics“, and Dr. Levitt discusses Dr. Venkatesh’s experiences and things learned in an interesting manner. The talk focuses on the economics of the gang and their business model but is, in my opinion, woefully brief. I would have loved to have heard much more.

You can actually read the official publication of much of this research, if you you are interested. It is “An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang’s Finances” by Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh. There is an amazing amount of material in all of this.

I wonder what other potential areas of research there are here but, beyond that, I wonder how people like Sudhir Venkatesh can take this kind of work and influence society in a positive manner with it. He learned things, effectively by both getting lucky and by treating people like actual human beings, that others have not come close to before. If we had more people doing work like this and people paying attention to it, we might begin to address some of the problems that our society is having in real ways. It is obvious that the problems that give rise to, for example, gangs and the drug trade, are not simply going to go away, nor are those of the urban poor. It is hopeful to see people tackling these issues in new ways and actually interacting with people as they lives their lives.