Last Tuesday Dan Toliaferro dropped by the Ubuntu Pennsylvania channel (#ubuntu-us-pa on irc.freenode.net) and asked if anyone would be interested in a new “Linux Night” in Philadelphia. We began discussion his venue, Hive76, a new hackerspace on Spring Garden Street. I proposed a collaboration with PLUG. He invited the folks from the Philly Linux Meetup.com group and myself down to their Open House night the following evening.
Wednesday night I headed down and had the pleasure of meeting Dan and several of the Hive76 members. I also was finally able to meet several of the Meetup.com Linux people. After an hour or so of casual discussion, Dan brought everyone who was attending and interested in organizing the Linux Night together to discuss the specifics.
It was a great discussion. The traditional PLUG meeting was of the format of: 1 hour of general Q&A, 1 hour of presentation per meeting. But Hive76 is a different sort of venue and culture, so we felt a looser format would be more appropriate. Plus, they have project space! The wild brainstorming began, and by the end of the night we were all pumped for our new “Linux Night” to be everything from laid back Q&A sessions to the building of Linux robots. It was also decided that this would become the new Meetup.com group monthly meetup, a collaboration I was hoping would occur.
Since that meeting, Dan, Adam Grossman, Khalil Hudson from Meetup and I have developed the details for the chapter. The result? In addition to a semi-private group wiki page where there is already brainstorming about the RISC board we want for the robot (grin), we have:
- About: PLUG Into Hive76
- Location: PLUG Into Hive76
- Announcement: [PLUG] New PLUG Chapter: PLUG Into Hive76
- Announcement: [Hive 76 Discussion] PLUG Into Hive 76!
We will be hosting our meetings on the 4th Thursday of each month, our first meeting is scheduled for a month from now, on August 27th at 7PM.
Oh, and Dan gets credit for the amusing name :)
Tuesday, Jul 28th, 2009 at 4:49
Wow, excellent article!