Hello, world! Here we talk from Garoa Hacker Clube, the first Brazilian hackerspace, based in a dungeon in São Paulo city. And we aren't joking when we say a dungeon: our place is a basement of a castle:
Ok, it is not really a castle, but you'ĺl agree it looks like one. This is the CCD - Digital Culture House - who host us in their basement as long as we pay the extra insurance fee. Good news is that today we bought our very first fire extinguinsher.
Ok, enough about our dungeon. We are a very young hackerspace, founded last September, and we have about 20 active members. Among us there are engineers, security analists, students, artists, programmers, mathematicians, and some other stuff. Experience spans from a very young grasshopper who is still unconvering his kung-fu to experienced engineers who wrote assembly book in the 80's.
GHC is thrilled by participating in GGHC. This is our debutant party in the hackerspace universe, being young and just now having enough tools for a project like this. Not that we don't have the skills: some of our members study technology application on education - two have even worked in the OLPC (AKA $100 laptop) project. Actually, they could not record the video because they were working on a science and engineering fair for high-schoolers they help promote every year. <link para febrace>
Death by math
Our first decision was not what project to do... but why to do it. Brazil is one of the worst countries in math, starting from the children to the top. Local studies show that soon Brazil will have a shortage of skilled technicians, and researchers, due to the lack of motivation and basic education on math.
We already have a nice idea of our intentions, and will show it in the following days. Beware: next post will be a visit to our dungeon (still uploading the video, hold still)!