This year at HOPE, the biennial hacker conference in NYC, several incidents led to a statement of no-confidence in HOPE's code of conduct. You can read more in the statement itself, but the gist is that there were a small number of far-right attendees, including a self-described "nationalist", who were disrupting and intimidating both talks and attendees. The staff didn't handle it well. This is unfortunately consistent with my own experience.

CW: refers to sexual assault

"The internet has become increasingly centralized, with large corporations like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon controlling the most-used services and placing all of us under surveillance. We’ll discuss FOSS tools that can help replace centralized corporate services with community-based alternatives." (slides)

"Groups like Occupy in the US and Podemos in Spain have created large-scale movements without a traditional, top-down leadership structure. But are they successful? (Spoiler: yes, just in different ways.) These “leaderless” -- or more accurately “leaderful” -- movements have been able to grow quickly and create large-scale demonstrations without needing grants or full time staff. How’d they do that?

Somehow, you've found yourself deep in the woods, and a storm is coming. It's dusk, the rain has started, and you know it's going to get a lot darker and a lot colder. So you and your companions decide to make a fire. You've seen other people do it. How hard could it be? You pile some sticks and logs together, throw a match on them, and watch a tiny flame catch, smolder, and disappear. Watching the tiny wisps of smoke fade away after a few more false starts, you come to understand the popularity of lighter fluid.

Donald Trump won the 2016 US Presidential election a few hours ago. Since then, the most common thing I've heard from my friends is: "Now what? What can I do now?" They are, like me, disgusted by the bigotry, misogyny, and xenophobia that Trump represents. My answer: organize. And I don't necessarily mean start a new nonprofit. There are plenty of those doing great work already, which is good, because that means you don't have to start from scratch. I'm talking about something bigger.

My scientific education was committed at the hands of physicists. And though I've moved on from academic physics, I've taken bits of it with me. In MIT's infamous Junior Lab, all students were assigned lab notebooks, which we used to document our progress reproducing significant experiments in modern physics. It was hard. I made a lot of mistakes. But my professors told me that instead of erasing the mistakes, I should strike them out with a single line, leaving them forever legible.

A friend of mine and I have a running joke that everyone who starts a hackerspace should get a free copy of Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Rosenberg was a psychologist who started his career as a mediator, for example, helping resolve conflicts in recently-integrated schools in the U.S. South after the end of racial segregation.