Busy week! We got the electronics lab organized on Tuesday, with the benches in place and power run to almost all of the benches. We got our first donations of tools and parts the same day as well. On Wednesday, we gave a tour of TechSpace and the electronics lab to a bunch of people who came over after Lunch 2.0 at OTBC and people told me they really enjoyed it. Thursday, we got some things from Tektronix, and will be getting more stuff from them.
As of now, the space is actually usable, with a few tools (more coming soon), a soldering station, two scopes, several cabinets full of parts, a magnifying lamp, several cabinets full of parts, and a couple of boxes of random useful things (including a bunch of Legos).
You can see photos here: http://leler.com/gallery/v/lunch2/P1156086.JPG.html
I’ve been doing some reading on Open Space Technology. In addition to the name similarity, Open Space Technology and Open Tech Space share some underlying philosophy, based on self-organizing systems. This is discussed in the Wikipedia page on Open Space Technology.
The four underlying principles of Open Space Technology are:
- Whoever comes is the right people (because they cared enough to attend)
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have (don’t worry about what happens)
- Whenever it starts is the right time (the lack of schedule or structure emphasises creativity and innovation)
- When it’s over, it’s over (which also means that if you aren’t getting anything out of a meeting, you should leave)
The basic ideas of both is that if you get people interested in a shared idea together and give them the freedom to interact openly with each other, then great results will happen. For Open Space Technology, this is applied to meetings. One example of meetings that use the precepts from Open Space Technology are unconferences (also called BarCamps). The same concepts also apply to things like “water cooler conversations” and other situations that encourage serendipitous interaction.
Similar ideas are the foundation of our Open Tech Space project — the creation of common spaces that allow people who are passionate about specific projects to interact in random ways.
For further reading on Open Space Technologies see the Wikipedia page,
http://processarts.wagn.org/wagn/Open_Space_Technology or http://www.openspaceworld.org/cgi/wiki.cgi?AboutOpenSpace
