Tour of Noisebridge

A tour of the physical space of the Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco, and a brief introduction to how we work.

Hello. Welcome to Noisebridge.

This is a hackerspace in San Francisco,

and I'm going to give you the tour that I give to everyone who's new here.

So, first off, the physical tour. There's bike racks here.

You can hang your bikes, and have a safe space to put them.

We have a bunch of tables here where you can hang out and compute.

The desks are reasonably wide. There's plenty of electrical sockets.

Right here are a couple pads to nap on. They're not meant for sleeping.

Sleeping is not allowed at Noisebridge.

But sometimes you do need to take a nap.

This is actually a very recent addition.

We have a bunch of things where you can make stuff out of plastic, so,

this, for instance, is a large-platform-style machine.

It's all made out of PVC and other kinds of plastic.

Here you see several other machines.

Here, for instance, is a laser cutter.

So here's a laser cutter.

You can do things like simple signs.

And you can also do more complex stuff.

So, for instance, this engraving of this wood.

That's all stuff you can easily do on the laser cutter.

And if you want to learn how to do that,

just come here and someone will teach you.

Over here we have sewing equipment.

So we have everything from sewing machines, to a serger, to more sewing machines,

to random scrap cloth, and you're welcome to use all of it.

This actually used to be a sewing manufacturing plant,

until we took it over and repaved the whole place.

These are member shelves.

So, generally speaking, everyone is welcome to use and hack and

reuse everything that's in Noisebridge, whether or not they're a member.

There are a couple exceptions. One of them is maker shelves.

They are not yours. They do belong to someone.

Don't touch, please.

Ditto for everything that you find on the tables.

Those all generally belong to someone specific.

Like it's someone's laptop, or someone's project that they're working on.

Please don't mess with it without asking.

However, there is stuff you can mess with without asking.

So, over here, we have the hacker's alley,

which is essentially a whole bunch of electronics.

People donate all sorts of electronics to us,

and you are welcome to take them apart, break them, remake them,

turn them into a robot, do anything creative you like with any of this stuff.

And in order to do that, we actually have quite a lot of tools.

So here, for example, we have a pretty fully equipped toolbox

that's got, more or less, everything you could want to do electrical engineering.

There is soldering equipment down here,

there is more stuff that you can hack on right here,

there's third hands to make it easier to solder,

there's literally a whole ton of soldering irons

which you can burn in.

We have oscilloscopes,

including fancy electronic oscilloscopes over here,

we have all sorts of tiny electrical supplies

that are relatively well labeled.

What else?

We have a pretty good library of all sorts of stuff.

Everything from hardcore computer science,

to stuff about hacking,

to stuff about politics, et cetera.

You're welcome to come and read any of it. If you have contributions, please bring it by.

Please categorize them and help stack them.

Yeah, so, free for use, but not for the taking necessarily.

T-shirts. You're welcome to just take a t-shirt.

We do ask that you donate at least $15 to compensate for the cost.

Noisebridge operates entirely on donations and on trust.

There's no lock. You can just take the shirt, donate your money.

It's a trust-based system.

So, over here we have the machine shop.

It's mostly a wood shop.

We have here safety equipment,

we have saws, pliers, vices, hacksaws, handsaws, bandsaws,

random really large machinery. I don't even know what that is.

It's a metal mill.

A metal mill. Okay.

So we're not that well equipped for metal.

Some places are, like TechShop, but we're really well equipped for wood,

and you can get a decent amount done with metal here as well.

A simple rule is please clean up after yourself, please be safe,

and close the door when you're working so that the noise and the dust doesn't go out into the general area.

So, next, we have a couple classrooms.

One of them is the Turing classroom, where is here.

It's used for some classes,

and also, if you want a quieter work environment, you can sit there.

It has a little bit of noise isolation.

Here's a green screen. It folds out.

If you want to make green screen videos, you can just fold it out,

stand there, shoot the video. Very useful.

Speaking of video, we also have a fully equipped darkroom and optics lab.

So it has everything you might expect.

Enlargers, chemicals, everything.

If you see that red light on,

please don't go in. Or knock really hard before entering.

But, yeah, you're welcome to use it.

What else? We have first aid equipment in case anybody gets hurt.

That doesn't happen very often, but it's there just in case.

Behind this door is a supplies closet.

It's got things like toilet paper and extra medicine and whatnot.

We have a fully equipped kitchen,

including industrial dish washers and stuff like that.

Working ovens, et cetera.

The way Noisebridge works for food is generally people just bring food by,

bring ingredients by.

Like here for example, we have some carrots, some apples,

I don't even know what else we have around here. Some limes.

And people volunteer to make food for others.

If you see food on this counter that's prepared,

generally that means it's free to eat.

You're welcome to enjoy.

We do ask for donations, but donations are not required.

That applies to everything, and I'll get to that in a sec.

Back here we have some more supplies, mostly for art-making.

And, by the way, over by the sewing supplies, we also have screenprinting equipment.

We have two bathrooms, one of them is ADA-accessible, the other one is not.

We of course have recycling, and compost, and garbage, please sort accordingly.

Here is one of the other classrooms.

This is the larger classroom. It has a projector.

As you can see, there is a class going on right now.

We're not going to disturb them too much,

but if you want to run a class,

just post on the mailing list, post on the wiki.

People show up, and you get to run a class. That's really pretty simple.

Up there, we have some microscopes,

including a functional scanning electron microscope.

If you want to learn how to use that,

just ask on the discussion list and someone will teach you.

So yeah, that's the tour of the space.

The way that Noisebridge operates is pretty much on a "trust, but verify" system.

We operate entirely on donations.

If you want to donate, there is a box at the front where you can donate money.

You don't have to be a member to use any of the space.

Membership is a process that takes about a month to do.

You fill out a membership application,

then that's read in meetings once a week for four weeks.

After four weeks, and after you've gotten two members to sign off on you

saying they know who you are, they know you've done cool stuff,

and they think you're a fit for the community, you get to become a member.

Oh, here is an EEG machine, by the way.

Yes, it works, more or less. There is a whole list for that.

Here's some cubbies, where you can store stuff temporarily while you're here.

There's also games like Go and so forth.

If you want to donate, there's a box right here.

Put your money in the box.

Put your money in here, please.

You can also PayPal us, you can also send us money via Bitcoin.

The links are all on the website.

If you want to become a member, that requires a consensus process.

Noisebridge works on two somewhat competing processes of how we do things.

The formal process is called consensus,

which means that members get to meet every Tuesday.

Non-members can participate too.

But they all get to talk; they don't get a block.

And if we need to make a formal decision on behalf of Noisebridge,

things like adding a new member, using official Noisebridge funds, stuff like that,

that requires consensus.

Anyone who is a member can block consensus.

And that's pretty much how it goes.

However, the vast majority of what happens at Noisebridge operates on "do-ocracy",

which is pretty simple.

If you want to do it, please do it.

Please do something awesome.

You are welcome to use all of our tools, you don't have to be a member.

You're welcome to use pretty much everything here

except something that belongs to some individual,

in that case you really should please ask.

And if you don't like what someone else has done, you can undo it.

But please follow just one rule.

If someone has undone something that you did, don't do it again. Bring it up for consensus.

'Cause that's an indication that there's some disagreement,

and that's something that we need to decide upon as a group.

Otherwise, welcome to Noisebridge.

You're encouraged to use the space however you like.

The one rule here is "be excellent to each other".

And, yep! Welcome. See you later.

So, there is one other rule.

Which is, people here are pretty protective of their privacy,

so if you're going to take pictures, video, or anything like this,

like the video I'm taking here,

please make sure that you first ask everybody who is going to be in the frame

whether or not they're okay with being in the frame.

If they're not okay, you are not allowed to take pictures of them at Noisebridge.

Just make sure you clear it with everyone.

It's not that hard, I did it with everyone here.

There were about four people who preferred not to be in the frame, and we avoided having them.

So, yeah, be cool.