Hack the planet - meeting in Amsterdam

I was in Amsterdam for an ElasticSearch training, and, as a matter of fact, on Thursday evening, there was a meeting about hacker communities with the very inspiring Mitch Altman, a hacker leading woman in Netherlands, and the journalist who wrote the book Hackers.

Discussion with the guests and the attendees was also interesting.

This highlights the great cultural contexts in hacker communities, the joy of learning, experimenting, sharing, helping, failing and starting again. I really feel this deep in me, and it relies on authentic experiences, social interactions, science, learning, passions.

Mitch exposed nicely how capitalism and seekers for always more profit are harmful, wrong, and miss the authentic fun of life. Building hacker communities is very important cultural context, and cultural context is very important into how we design and use technology.

Being involved in a hacker community brings several fundamental values into the light:

• We are much more powerful than we might think
• Learning what we want is much fun
• We start to consider power collectively, not anymore isolated
• We have all to learn from others, and teach to others

Hacking is much different that what considers usual journalists, media, politics… Hacking is a full mindset, a way of living, and is much broader than the guy in a hoodie, in a dark room, typing on a keyboard.

Hacking is about curiosity, experimenting, learning, failing and starting again. We only learn by persisting after failing.

Hackerspaces are active all over the world, and new are coming, you can also build your hackerspace in your area and community.

Hacker is not the stereotype painted by journalist such as:

Hacking looks like this:

Building positive cultural context in hacker communities with science and technologies lead to build positive technologies for the users, not enslaving them, not for aggressive use. This also brings building technologies for real needs of users, not less, not more. Technologies that can respect the user, consider right tools for right usage, away from marketers that just seek to sell products.