![]() DU's logo is a Unicode symbol with two nested sets | |
A paper workshop at Double Union | |
Abbreviation | DU |
---|---|
Formation | 2013 |
Purpose | Hacking, Feminism, DIY culture |
Location |
|
Membership | 150-200 |
Founders | Liz Henry, Valerie Aurora, Amelia Greenhall, and others on founding committee |
Website | Official website ![]() |
Double Union is a San Francisco hacker/maker space. [1] Double Union was founded by women in 2013 with the explicit goal of fostering a creative safe space. The organization's mission is to be a community workshop where women and nonbinary people can work on projects in a comfortable, welcoming environment. [1] [2]
Members hold public and members-only events for activities and workshops like zine making, paper circuits and electronics, coding, sewing, 3-dimensional printing, lightning talks, print making and many others. [3] Key-carrying members are allowed to invite guests of any gender.
DU was founded in 2013 by a group of about ten women including Amelia Greenhall, Valerie Aurora, Liz Henry and Ari Lacenski from their connections at other hackerspaces; at The Ada Initiative's feminist unconference, AdaCamp; and through Geekfeminism.org, collecting initial funding through an Indiegogo campaign. [4] Later that year, Lacenski left the group, claiming that two unnamed cofounders practiced a form of activism that she considered too aggressive. [5] There is a board of directors and a structure in place for voting in new members; as of 2015, there are around 150–200 members.[ citation needed ]
DU's logo is a bright pink Unicode character (U+22D3), from the Mathematical Operators block.
Originally located in the Mission district at 14th and Mission in the Fog Building, [3] Double Union relocated to the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco in fall 2015 after their building was sold by the landlord. To fund the move and several equipment purchases, Double Union undertook an Indiegogo campaign, which finished at 106 percent of its goal. [6] They stayed in Potero Hill until September 2020, when they temporarily closed due to the pandemic. In September 2021, they reopened at a new location in SOMA. [7]
Several Double Union members have created an app for managing hackerspace membership applications, Arooo. Arooo is free to use and is licensed under the GNU GPL. [8]
Double Union created the Open Diversity Data project. [9] The project aggregates diversity data for a wide array of tech companies. [10]
Judith Milhon, best known by her pseudonym St. Jude, was a self-taught programmer, civil rights advocate, writer, editor, advocate for women in computing, hacker and author in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Johannes Grenzfurthner is an Austrian artist, filmmaker, writer, actor, curator, theatre director, performer and lecturer. Grenzfurthner is the founder, conceiver and artistic director of monochrom, an international art and theory group and film production company. Most of his artworks are labeled monochrom.
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Valerie Anita Aurora is an American software engineer and feminist activist. She was the co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in the free-culture movement, open-source technology, and open source culture. Aurora is also known within the Linux community for advocating new developments in filesystems in Linux, including ChunkFS and the Union file system. Her birth name was Val Henson, but she changed it shortly before 2009, choosing her middle name after the computer scientist Anita Borg. In 2012, Aurora, and Ada Initiative co-founder Mary Gardiner were named two of the most influential people in computer security by SC Magazine. In 2013, she won the O'Reilly Open Source Award.
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Amelia Cousins Greenhall is an American feminist tech blogger. She cofounded feminist tech blog and publication Model View Culture with Shanley Kane. Greenhall is co-founder and Executive Director of Double Union, a feminist women-only hackerspace in San Francisco, with Valerie Aurora, and is a Quantified Self enthusiast. Greenhall is the publisher and co-founder of Open Review Quarterly, a literary journal on modern culture.
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