meetup.md

Open source is a philosophy of creating with the intention of sharing. Our ability to create rests on a three-legged stool of Freedom, Privacy, and Security. We, Open Source Hackers is a community for we the hackers, who believe in the value of those principles, as we build technology to liberate ourselves and our users from walled gardens and panopticons.

We are nondiscriminatory. We welcome all skill levels. We hope you join us.

Pizza and beer will be delivered. This is supported out of pocket by the meetup host (me). If you can afford, cash donations (10-20€) will allow me to continue to do this. If you cannot afford, Don’t Panic. You too are welcome to the pizza and beer.

The format of the meetup: every-other-week informal meetups where we discuss and share what we’ve built and tools we’re using. If there is interest, we may have talks at the beginning of meetups to give short (5-30m) lectures about whatever the speaker is interested in or passionate about. The only requirement for your talk is that you found something interesting, and would like to teach or share it. Examples of great talks:

1. You learned some git feature, and you want to share it. Awesome. If you can talk about it for a couple minutes, expanding on your thought process along the way, or any related features that you found interesting, you’ve got a talk. The audience may even teach you something you didn’t yet know.
2. You wrote some code you’re proud of (anywhere from 5 to 50,000 lines), and you want to share it. Killer. Upload it somewhere we all can see it (Gitlab, Bitbucket, Github, etc.), and tell us what you did.
3. You have thoughts about how action X by company Y affect the freedoms of their users, and we, the broader ecosystem of hackers? Great, you’ve got a talk.

Note that this is a new meetup, an experiment in creating a community around shared Open Source values. The format of the meetup is not set. Your input, toward defining what the meetup should be, is highly valued. If you are interested in becoming a co-host of the meetup, I look forward to hearing from you.

The present host is a cryptographer embedded in the Zero Knowledge Cryptography and Blockchain space. He primarily writes cryptographic code, smart contracts, and microservices in Rust. He uses Emacs as his editor, and Linux as his operating system. He is not a zealot of any one true path to technological enlightenment, but enjoys these. Most of all, he wants to create a community for hackers of all levels to gather and share.