Organizing collective events is an important moment in the life of a hackerspace. The /tmp/lab was happy to organize a new edition of HSF on the 7th and 8th of February 2020.
A number of people helped us for HSF2020, we would like to thank all of them in no particular order or exhaustivity : Choisy’s city employees, participant hackers, lab’s members, and of course everyone who came.
Speaking of audience, the success of such an event is often measured by the attendance. Well, we chose to move that target.
We decided early to respect a few principles for this edition. These were presented as No stress, Auto organize, Party Time, Less conferences, No budget.
Turns out the event was generally perceived as welcoming and had few material constraints. The suburbian city of Choisy-le-Roi, which hosts the /tmp/lab, lent us for free a nice and well equiped room with an additional place for storing and restoring staff. We had no sponsor and required no entrance fee, other than a small “tip box.”
It was globally perceived as a success.
We had a good amount of visitors who appreciated the contact quality, having the time to speak with exhibitors and speakers who themselves liked the relaxed atmosphere and the self-organisation.
Of course, not everything worked perfectly. For example some exhibitors expected we would have more attendance. Some people felt the Friday+Saturday format was a bit short and would have liked a Sunday prolongation. Food for Thought.
So, What About Next Time ?
This event wasn’t too much effort —you know what we mean if you’ve organized such events yourself— nor too costly, which means it can be done more often. But it’s even better if we collectively organize these events in different places every time and this leads us to an interesting effort we associated the HSF2020 event with: the interhackerspaces cooperation.
People from ~10 hackerspaces came and we had a nice panel about how we could do more together. A few notes and links can be found on this pad.
Amongst other proposals, we presented this PDF document which explains what hackerspaces are, how they work and some of their today’s goals.
Future events:
- 19th – 22th of Feb. Université de matin d’hiver (Toulouse)
- 20th – 24th of May Université de rouleau de printemps (Toulouse)
- 4th – 7th of June Rencontre des Monnaies Libres (Paris)
Medias
HSF2020 Website with full program