Hack Bus

URL = http://hackbus.info/

Description

Hackbusses (or mobile hacklabs or hack vehicles) are a low-threshold way of bringing the culture of hacking to the people. They are migratory learning and teaching units, taking the talented hackers and their ideas out of urban centers and bringing them to people who might not otherwise be aware of the possibilities available to them.

We follow a long tradition of this nomadic approach to bring self-empowerment to the people. These units can be everywhere. And they should be everywhere."

Discussion

• skills in the 21st century

"In the digital age the skills you need for your daily life change rapidly. It was a sign of basic education 100 years ago when you were able to handle the index of a library. It was a sign of higher education 50 years ago when you were able to build a wireless remote control for your DIY model plane. It was a sign of being on the edge of education 20 years ago when you were able to program a computer. Today we have all libraries of the world readily waiting in the internet, wireless controlled model planes are sold for cheap and every child is able to play with code snippets to make a computer do things. What vanished over the years was the ability to do things with hardware. Of course the DIY movement is still alive, but most of the time it has been reduced to some kind of IKEA-like plug-and-play culture, where an industry offers everything to allow grown-up Lego-players to get their kicks.

• doing strange things with hardware

What we need is a root movement of doing strange things with hardware that was not intended to be used that way -- the real meaning of the term "hacking" -- because when we use things only in the ways they were planned nothing new can arise. Hackbusses are a low-threshold way of bringing the culture of hacking to the people. They bring the "secret labs" to the people, taking the talented hackers and their ideas out of urban centers and bringing them to people who might not otherwise be aware of the possibilities available to them. They are an easy way to bring experienced hacker, mentors and teachers to schools and villages, bringing a community to the indidvual hackers who might already be there, while giving others a glimpse of what "hacking" really means -- and maybe get people think of doing strange things with hardware in a way that was not intended.

• nomadic learning

Hackbusses (or mobile hacklabs or hack vehicles) are a low-threshold way of bringing the culture of hacking to the people. They are migratory learning and teaching units, taking the talented hackers and their ideas out of urban centers and bringing them to people who might not otherwise be aware of the possibilities available to them. We follow a long tradition of this nomadic approach to bring self-empowerment to the people. These units can be everywhere. And they should be everywhere.