The Next HOPE is over, but as the closing article in the Android app said now we all go back to wherever we go to do whatever it is we do, but hopefully walk away with the spirit of the gathering. See you next year – I hope. The convention was incredibly impressive, and there are certain attributes to hacker culture that simply can’t be found elsewhere. Notably the approachability, you can just walk up to anyone and start talking about their project, and they’re normally incredibly inclined to talk – usually holed up in their offices, workspaces, in front of their terminals for days on end, then suddenly – finally – human contact. And a culture of trust and openness is pervasive – money was just left on tables for donations or purchase of hardware, laptop rigs were abandoned for hours on end while people went to a talk, and nothing gets stolen, nothing gets pinched. The culture trusts itself.

Highlights included Mitch Altman discussing “do what you love”; Alpha One Labs‘s sunrise party – dubbed “The Party”; the Hackerspaces Forever panel discussion; extensive discussions around IPv6; geotagging and GPS; and of course lockpicking!

a Food For Geeks workshop, this part of the workshop focused on sous vide cooking and using industrial equipment to regulate food temperatures:

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the Hackerspace Village where you could set up shop, hack away, solder and do other experiments, and discuss with other hackers your projects:

the Maker Faire team had a booth; that’s Becky attempting to pick a lock and Matt coding up some mad python script:

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full set of images on my Flickr