I had the great opportunity to make it to Berlin (my first overseas journey) for Chaos Computer Congress and Berlin Sides. The ability to attend was based on the generosity of friends from Ding Fabrik (for the highly-sought-after pass to 27c3 and a place to crash, along with being fabulous hosts in general), Nick Farr of Hackers on a Plane offering me a plane ticket at a crazy price, and my role as the first official employee of GWOBorg.

I spoke at Berlin Sides before I had even been in Berlin for 24 hours (hellooooooo, jetlag!). No recordings take place at Berlin Sides due to the number of 0day talks that happen at B-Sides events, but the conversation was lively and the global community of hackers seems keen to engage in linking spaces to each other and to humanitarian organizations. Later that same day, a gentleman spoke at 27c3 about Ushahidi and mapping elections. Professional video will be up later, but in the meantime you can find copies of the livestreams to (legitimately) torrent here.

As always, the real scheming happens in the hallways and at the after parties. At C-Base, after a fantastic round-table for signal.hackerspaces.org (a hacker radio show – you can listen to this specific one here), several facilitators of spaces across the globe and I ranted about how important good tools are. Kids from Sweden, Germany, England, Japan, and America all rubbed shoulders and clinked beer necks while we talked about building better tools.

See, most of these humanitarian organizations only get help when a disaster actually occurs. And then it’s a huge, frantic push. Thousands of work hours go into solving problems. And it’s welcome … but it’s not sustainable. The infastructure built in these conditions is difficult to work with even in the best of times – hobnobbed together by people of varying skills and backgrounds, often influenced by sleep deprivation and major stress. Until it’s cleaned up, it’s difficult to improve, to build upon, or even to use for anything but the very specific need it was designed towards. And when people are dying, any extra second you spend on figuring out the tools at hand counts.

So let’s make better tools.

We’re starting at Jigsaw Renaissance (the maker space I’m director of), in Seattle, to hold events called Hack for Good. These will happen the third weekend of each month, in tamdum with the hackerspaces.org synchronus hackathon. We’ll have a class the Wednesday before each, so people can brush up on their skills and make sure everyone has the most recent build. I encourage you to join us as we work on more of RHoK’s problem definitions. Ping me if you’re care to join in.

Cheers, and happy making!

The drizzling and gray rain that greeted us in Los Angeles was not at all what GWOBorg expected after the cold but sunny weather in Portland and Seattle the days before – we were finally in Southern California after all, it should be warm and sunny! Though the weather seemed to work against us (Shannon was particularly looking forward to thawing out after two weeks traveling through the north!) that didn’t deter the excitement of rounding out the entire 101010 tour with a final presentation at Jeff Pulver’s #140 Character Conf in Los Angeles (a Twitter conference) .

The 140Conf Back-story of Geeks Without Bounds

Six weeks previously, Diggz presented at the #140Conf in San Francisco and that was the very first time that Geeks Without Bounds was mentioned publicly. Though Diggz had been slowly forming the idea for years Jeff Pulver gave him the stage in San Francisco and that audience was the first sounding board for Geeks Without Bounds – the idea was now public.

And when Pulver mentioned the opportunity to speak yet again, this time at the #140Conf LA, it seemed so fitting and an almost poetic way to end the whirlwind 101010 tour that took the team through 11 different cities and 13 very different hacker, macker, and co-working spaces: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, Louisville, Atlanta, NYC, Washington DC, Boston, Portland, and Seattle.

Presenting and Playing at #140Conf

So we braved the rain and found ourselves in the dimly lit interior of the Music Box in Hollywood interacting in the land of social media influencers. GWOBorg forged new friendships and alliances (shout-outs to Couchsurfing Ori, Captain Crunch, and others) on that first day of the conference.

Day Two was our presentation day, a ten minute slot to once again present the idea and call to action for Geeks Without Bounds, and nerves were humming as Diggz and Willow pared down the presentation to fit into the 10 minute slot.

They rocked it. GWOBorg has spent the past six week touring the US, asking questions, meeting others in the crisis response space, and forming a more complete and honest picture of this community than we ever thought possible. And with those lessons in mind the presentation not only highlighted the hackathon, but also the need for long-term consciousness and support from those who understand the power of social media.

A sincere thanks is order to Jeff Pulver, not only for the chance to once again present about GWOBorg before all of the characters at the conference, but for also asking Johnny Diggz to rock the #140Conf party with his mad piano skills!

The brisk cool air and flaming saffron colored leaves on the Northeast were left behind as GWOBorg said adieu to Boston and flew to Portland, Oregon for the final three stops on the 101010 tour: Cyborg Camp in Portland, Jigsaw Renaissance in Seattle, and the #140 Character Conf in Los Angeles.

NedSpace in Portland was our initial plan, but when they mentioned the weekend Cyborg Camp was in session we took they up on the offer and opportunity to present during the camp to a larger and more diverse group that we could have reached at NedSpace alone. The top floor of the Cyborg Camp venue was bustling and John and Shannon’s plane landed just in the nick of time– we metro-ed it into the city and set up GWOBorg’s presentation with only a few minutes to spare.

The Cyborg Camp presentation was another relative success for the team and the three of us took a gorgeous train ride up the pacific peninsula and landed in Seattle for a visit to Jigsaw Renaissance – the home space of one third of the GWOBorg trio, Willow. Willow runs the space and over the past five weeks has put some of her own hacker and maker space’s projects on hold in order to organize the 101010 tour with GWOBorg.

The scenic drive dropped us in the heart of Seattle and Willow whisked us rapidly through the quite Sunday streets of Seattle to regroup and relax on the cozy couches of Jigsaw’s common areas before our final hacker and maker space presentation of the 101010 tour (the 140 Character Conf LA got a modified presentation).

A friendly group came out for the Jigsaw presentation and we were even able to re-meet a couple of contacts and friends that we had encountered on previous legs of the tour (Seattle seems to be a pretty awesome hub of activity!).

With Seattle and Portland done just one more event, the LA #140 Character Conf, loomed on the calendar before GWOBorg buckled down into final preparation mode for the 101010 hackathon event.

Recapping of the 101010 tour continues to yet another eclectic hacker and maker space, Artisan’s Asylum near Boston. This space is actually located in Somerville (just over the river from Boston proper) and the trip from NYC to Boston could not have been any easier. The Boltbus has faithfully taken us on several legs of the tour at this point (NYC to DC and back again, then NYC to Boston) and all three of us have loved the ability to take the bus and then get work done during the commute thanks to the free wifi, intermittent at times, but there!

GWOBorg landed in Boston with our email inboxes cleared out and ready for the tour of the warehouse size Artisan’s Asylum space. The coordinators of the space greeted us with smiling faces when we stepped off of the local bus and they quickly led us inside.

Artisan’s Asylum has a lot of neat development projects; it’s a fairly new space so each section is still being shaped and built to accommodate the growing community.

I really loved the bike section – another testament to the fact that none of these spaces are even remotely alike. Some Artisan’s Asylum members morph their bikes into “super bikes” with modified handles, wheels, and frames – you can tell that creativity wins points and many of the bikes were strikingly different from each other.

A solid crowd turned out for the presentation and the questions asked at Artisan’s Asylum were some of the hardest hitting ones yet. Insightful and perceptive, we used these questions to really flesh out the GWOBorg message that has developed so strongly every single day over the past six weeks so that our last two stops of the tour, back to the US’s West Coast would end with a strong and succinct message.

The hackathon may be over, but there are still a handful of spaces we visited in the ramp up to the 101010 Hackathon last weekend that deserve acknowledgement.  We owe a humble thanks to both Buffalo Lab and AlphaOne for their understanding in accommodating our schedule when we passed through New York last week; we did our first GWOBorg remote broadcast from AlphaOne Labs to a full room of Buffalo Hackers who came out to their space in Buffalo, NYC to hear the GWOBorg presentation since we weren’t quite able to make it that far north in New York.

Presenting to a crowd on the other end of a video camera is an entirely different feat than presenting to a full room of expectant faces – the energy was very different and Willow and John had to change the pace of the presentation to better manage the dual presentation aspect: the handful of Alpha One-ers in the room in relationship with the laptop displaying the images of Buffalo Hackers.

Confused yet? We were!

There were at least three live streaming web cams involved in this presentation and so the focus was split and boy was it confusing at points.

But, again, the question phase went really well and that’s where we were able to actually use some of the information we had just gleaned from the Crisis Commons meeting with Heather to massage GWOBorg’s message and the details about the this recent Hackathon before heading to Boston the next day.

It’s been about six weeks since we first started talking publicly about the idea of focusing the collective power of Geeks to help people.  Since August we’ve met with dozens of groups: geeks, individuals and organizations all over the United States with a passion to help others in times of need.  We’ve met many allies along the way, and continue to meet new ones every day who are excited as we are about empowering citizens and communities, finding and building better ways to enable them communicate their needs and matching them with solutions.

Initially, the name “Geeks Without Borders” seemed to succinctly cover what it was we were aiming toward:  building a community of problem-solvers that transcends nationality, religion, race and culture.  Without creating any formal organization, just verbalizing the name was helpful to get the wheels turning as the idea began to germinate in our minds and those of the groups with whom we were talking.

As time progressed, it became apparent there were issues with the calling the project “Geeks without Borders”:  multiple groups were already using the name, including a non-profit 501(c)3 organization in Oregon. And furthermore, we discovered that Médecins Sans Frontières (AKA Doctors Without Borders) is very protective of their trademark, and specifically the “_____ without Borders” moniker.

We have a tremendous amount of respect for the Doctors and the work they do, and rather than spend our time getting entangled in legal nonsense, we decided a change of name was warranted.  After all, we didn’t have that much time or money invested in the name (yet) and we felt our efforts (and those of the people we’re asking to help us) would be best served if we simply changed our name.

We noodled over this name change for a few weeks, and feel we have come to a consensus on a great new name that allows us to still use the GWOBorg brand, keep using our GWOB.org domain name and perhaps describes our mission more succinctly (with a wink-wink to our  math geek friends).

We are now: Geeks Without Bounds.

The possibilites are endless. ;-)

P.S.  The name change has necessitated that we start a new Facebook Page (Facebook, for a variety of reasons does not allow you to change a “Page” name once it’s created).  We’re phasing out the old “Geeks Without Borders” Facebook Page.  Please help us out by “Liking” the new Geeks Without Bounds Facebook Page

Diggz put together this video of the first couple weeks of the 101010 tour covering California and the mid-west. The music courtesy of the Kloud Kollectiv. Enjoy!