A quick trip to Vestmannaeyjar

Last weekend I went with Tryggvi, Steinn, Freyr, Kári and Nicolas to Vestmannaeyjar to visit the Fab Lab there. We spent an entire weekend, mostly sans sleep, designing, laser cutting, and generally being productive.

The fallout has started to appear. Now there is talk about setting up a Hacker Space in Reykjavík. Hacker Spaces are similar to Fab Labs, the only real difference is cultural. Fab Labs are very much about technological outreach, community empowerment and education, whilst Hacker Spaces are more about unfettered creativity, hardware development, community building, Hacker culture, hacktivism, culture jamming, and that sort of thing. These cultural differences are not inherent so much as they are accidental.

So what we’re currently thinking of is the wheres, hows of setting up a Hacker Space/Fab Lab in Reykjavík. There’s already a bunch of different folks doing similar things, which is exactly what should be happening, but duplication of effort isn’t necessarily bad redundancy when things can’t be copied at zero marginal cost, as is the case with labs, but rather it adds extra slack and potentiality for synergies.

Anyway. That’s the blurb. Mostly just using this as “First post” on my new Blog (with an ‘o’!) – I’ll import the rest of the old posts as soon as I can get Vinay to find my old database…