[DIYbio] Re: [diybio] a "biohacking village" at DEF CON

Awesome. Unfortunately I will not be there due to illness, but there should be a handful of people including a few DefCon staff & of course there should be some sort of meeting as there seems to be a good amount of interest.

For anyone else who cannot make it, you can expect a biohacking mailing list to go up on DefCon biohacking village.org, just make sure I have your email & I will make sure to add you to the list.

Also please keep in mind that not everyone at the meeting will be a biologist or engineer, although clearly engineering methodology is core to constructive unconventional use of biotech. Also, not everyone is interested in Synthetic Biology, even though I find it to be compelling enough to include in the biohacking conversation. Right now the idea is maybe it can be a two day event, if there is enough space, where one day is about biohacking humans (from cyborgs & singularly to simple life hacking type stuff or diet, and the other day is about hacking anything else in nature. It seems there is both an interest in practical (diet, health, bodybuilding even, haha) & future/science/policy stuff (long view topics including ethics & biosecurity) when I've asked some of the "DefCon regulars" and staff who know little about biology, and I've had an alarmingly high range of responses. It is good that biohacking is a diverse concept with lots of incarnations, but it is discouraging in the sense there may not be enough common ground for any one topic. So... Right now my idea & response to this notion is to be as all-inclusive as possible, however I've had a few "how is that biohacking?" comments when pitching ideas for talks. We can't and don't want to change the DefCon community, the idea is to tap into the demographic & see if we can find common ground.

FYI, Russ, a DefCon Sr. Goon, will hopefully attend the meeting & I plan to have a friend show up on my behalf. If you meet him, please thank him for bringing up the idea over twitter, after which was the first time I ever considered the idea. Since I have a few friends that are both software hackers/coders & biologists who would be going to DefCon each year anyway, I decided to reply and put together an early proposal. Nothing is for sure yet, but if the space can be found and the community wants it, this DefCon biohacking village idea is likely to materialize. I have no idea if DT is showing up, but I can tell you that every senior staff I've talked to is excited. My initial idea was for an only synthetic biology tech village for a day, but that seemed limiting and wouldn't include the human-computer interface research people are very excited about. A two or three day village would increase the odds of having more volunteers, more equipment, more time for speakers of all relevant topics... a one day event would be an easy start.

So for anyone at DefCon, I hope you are having loads of fun & please make *your* voice heard at the meeting. I might be conferenced in by a friend who will be there as a communication proxy for me.

Thanks for your interest to anyone reading this!
-Frazier (nulltone)

On Jun 15, 2014 7:47 PM, "Asher Silberman" <ashersilb@gmail.com> wrote:

I'll be at defcon too if you need help :)

On Jun 15, 2014 8:14 AM, "Frazier Cunningham" <frazier@cal.berkeley.edu> wrote:

Hello everyone,

My name is Frazier, and I've only been to one LA-biohackers meeting.
This is partly because I live in Orange County, but mostly because I
haven't done much research since leaving academia a couple years ago.
Nonetheless, I've met Cory and I thought the space in downtown LA
had/has lots of potential, and I haven't been there in about a year,
so I'd love to stop by again sometime soon...

That said, I'd like to raise a topic and pose a question to anyone
reading here. As you may no, biohacker spaces are somewhat like hacker
spaces, and in fact LA-biohackers used to be housed at Null Space
Labs, the primary Los Angeles hacker space. Now, some of you may have
heard of DEF CON, the world's largest hacker convention in Las Vegas
every summer. This year is the 22nd year and it is August 7th thru
10th this year. Now I can't promise anything yet, but I am in
(somewhat last minute) talks to do a "biohacking village" along with
their hardware hacking and lockpicking villages. The "village" concept
is basically a corner of a big room in DefCon where you can do
whatever you want... so, imagine like your booth at SCALE (which I
unfortunately missed), but with perhaps a larger budget and probably a
lot more interested people. Most hackers I know are both fascinated
and terrified by biohacking, and as we know there are many
interpretations of the word. For this, I'm leaving a broad definition,
the one used on Wikipedia, "Biohacking is the practice of engaging
biology with the hacker ethic."

So, lets have a "show of hands" moment. Who could free up a Thursday
thru Sunday off their schedule so they can go to the world's largest
hacker conference in the world and be the first official
representatives of the biohacker movement at DEF CON. One of the
conference organizers and long-time friend of mine has asked for a
biohacker village, and I thought the LA-biohackers group would be a
good fit to help me make this a reality, as LA Is not too far from
Vegas, and as some of you may know Null Space Labs (although they
recently moved away from downtown)

I won't get into too many specifics, but we would be doing tech demos,
tech worshops, we would need to borrow some equipment for this, we
would have a few people give presentations on topics from
health-hacking like life extension and "parasite therapy" or even
simply microbial "probiotics", a field in which I have done much
interest, and then we would have talks more about biohacking spaces
and DIY bio, how a lab is kindof like a fancy kitchen, and maybe
someone can talk about the promise of bioinformatics, systems biology,
synthetic biology, and how hackers may find themselves becoming
biohackers for fun/profit/survival over the next few generations...

Any thoughts? Who would be interested to go to DEF CON? I can probably
get one free froom for 2-4 people from LA-biohackers to run the
booth/village area, which is larger than just a booth. We need 2
people plus myself at least, ideally 3-4 people. The village itself is
a one day commitment, then the rest of the time you get to wander the
conference (for free?!?!!) and see lots of cool stuff....

so, whose with me? :D

-Frazier

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "LA Biohackers" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to LA-biohackers+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "LA Biohackers" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to LA-biohackers+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "LA Biohackers" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to LA-biohackers+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.