Captain's log, Stardate 8.20.13
The starship needs-to-finish-his-thesis has just landed at its home port in the greater LA area. I come back from Chicago bearing photos, stronger bonds with people that were friends on geekhack and now are so much more than that, and lessons, so many lessons..
The goal of my time as part of the rudder team of the starship geekhack has been to make the community both stronger and more sustainable. Some difficult decisions will need to be made to make that happen, just as they had to be made every month over month in this past year, and I, among other community members have taken some big risks to do what we can to make that happen.
Boilermaker at techkeys is one of those people, and I absolutely commend him not only for the awesome job he and mashby did with Keycon this past week, but also for his continuous and unceasing support of the community via sustainable group buys, donating his time and effort to do fulfillment for my early efforts at funding the geekhackers foundation, and for continuing to provide for the production of cool stuff within the community and publicity of that cool stuff outside the community to help it grow.
mashby and cptbadass are also among these people; their efforts at aggregating and making accessible the immense amount of knowledge spread across our community's many many members is to not only be encouraged but lauded. It is hard tiring work that pays only in a job well done.
And of course, with them, I must mention our dearly missed friend and family member SmallFry. He not only helped drive their efforts but was their mentor into our community and many many other peoples' mentor into our community. It is a testament to his strength, his caring and his intelligence that he continues to draw people into our community after his passing.
What I have learned from this visit is that it is people and community that not only make geekhack what it is, but that make society the generally pleasant place that it is, and that the greater geekhack community is just every one of us out there that likes to tinker, that likes to be an artisan, that likes geek out and hack up what is needed to make stuff happen; and that, frankly, is just about every person out there.
We are all friends and family, whether we are inside or outside of the community. SmallFry believed this with every fiber of his being, and as a continuing rudder team member, I'd like to make a few commitments publicly that I think will help keep me focused on this goal.
The first commitment is small but meaningful. It is that his mystery key three symbol aka the friends and family key, which I now believe to be the intermingling of vectors of current, electrons finding each other in the dark passageways of a conductor, will always be our flag, our call to action, and our sign of unity. The geekhack family of sites and the geekhackers foundation will all bear this icon as a reminder.
The second commitment is to grow this community to any limits we may find together, then to break those limits down and grow past them.
The third commitment is to never let an individual in the community suffer needlessly when something can be done to help them.
The fourth commitment is to never let money take advantage of the community. We are not a commodity. We are not for sale. We are happy to collaborate with commercial interests, to become small commercial interests ourselves, but we are a community of intelligent, caring, and strong individuals, not just some nameless sources of revenue.
That's what I learned at keycon, I think. You're obviously free to discuss because, as I've been saying a lot recently, that's kind of the point of this place.
