Meeting Hub afterthought, galleries, video and feedback

On September 8-11 Platform4 hosted the big hacker-conference Platform4.0.Future Meeting Hub #1 where 7 hackspaces and creative groups - as well as a list of individual tinkerers and speakers - congregated with the Platform4 community to discuss, talk, make, build, hack and tinker for four straight days in a meet-up that was part conference, part maker lab, part think tank and part anarchic craze.

After some much needed sleep, we can now look back on a really inspiring and really awesome weekend. In the spirit of Platform4 the event was kept really casual, and all participants and audience members drifted between, on one hand, the long list of talks and workshops on four stages (in Platform4 and FormuLab) and, on the other, the mega-maker-lab diy-landscape in the big hall, where all the hackspaces had set up camp for the weekend. During the event several really amazing projects saw the light of day; for instance an almost-finished hand-built segway, several pressured air water cannons, a twitter-and-arduino-driven megaphone (the 'tweet crier'), a video mapping project using game engine Unity and....a plethora of QR-barcodes including some build in wood, pearls and even some knitted with yarn! Night and day people went at it.
On the more art-interprets-technology side, the spontaneous art piece 'Slide To Unlock' took shape (courtesy of FAT Labs-activist Evan Roth).

In the talks and workshop program people exchanged lots of information, insight and experiences. From numerous discussions on everything 'open' - data, culture and technology - to digital graffiti and the hacking of time. Workshops included ao. shoot-from-the-hip prototyping, QR-code treasure hunts with cell phones around the area, facebook browser hacking and learning micro-circuit soldering like a pro - just to name a few - and Saturday morning a transatlantic breakfast was successfully made in collaboration with friends and professionals from New Zealand using Skype and recording software.

In the café people hung out, listened to music and drank Limfjordsporter and other local curiosities. Each night hosted social events with dj's and improvised sessions that included impromptu dj-performances by invited speakers and lots of playing around with the Platform4 flame-thrower.

In the aftermath of the event plenty of material has been made available online; blog posts, videos, documentation and lots of photos. Check it out here:

Nuno Alexandre's photo galleries - part 1 and part 2.
A handful of shots by @tbx
Thoughts by Henrik Chulu on Frikultur.dk - and his photos.
More shots by GeekPhysical, CynicDesign and a laptop-art gallery
by Evan (+ his photos).

To our great joy, we've received tons of positive feedback from both participants and audience members. It seems that the casual not-so-typical conference program with tons of non-conform creatives in combination with a huge electronics playground was quite popular, and we've many times had to reply to requests of doing this again next year. So, guess we better consider that :)

UPDATES:

Check out this overview from the FAT Labs blog.

And this video by Jonas Öberg (feel free to remix or sample - licensed under CC BY-SA):