Double Union

Last updated

Double Union
AbbreviationDU
Formation2013
Purpose Hacking, Feminism, DIY culture
Location
Membership150-200
Founders
Liz Henry, Valerie Aurora, Amelia Greenhall, and others on founding committee
Website Official website OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

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]

Contents

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.

History

Tools and supplies Doubleunion-electronics.jpg
Tools and supplies

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]

Projects

App

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]

ODD

Double Union created the Open Diversity Data project. [9] The project aggregates diversity data for a wide array of tech companies. [10]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jude Milhon</span> American hacker, writer, editor, advocate (1939 - 2003)

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monochrom</span>

Monochrom is an international art-technology-philosophy group, publishing house and film production company. It was founded in 1993, and defines itself as "an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science and political activism". Its main office is located at Museumsquartier/Vienna.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Johannes Grenzfurthner</span> Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

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.

Westar was a fleet of geosynchronous communications satellites operating in the C band which were launched by Western Union from 1974 to 1984. There were seven Westar satellites in all, with five of them launched and operating under the Westar name.

c-base Non-profit organization and hackerspace in Germany

c-base e.V. is a non-profit association located in Berlin, Germany. Its purpose is to increase knowledge and skills pertaining to computer software, hardware and data networks. The association is engaged in numerous related activities. For example, the society has had stands at large festivals, such as Children's Day, where they introduce young people to topics like robotics and computer-aided design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mitch Altman</span> American hacker and inventor

Mitch Altman is a Berlin-based hacker and inventor of TV-B-Gone. He is a featured speaker at hacker conferences, an international expert on the hackerspace movement, and teaches introductory electronics workshops. He is also Chief Scientist and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hackerspace</span> Community organization

A hackerspace is a community-operated, often "not for profit", workspace where people with common interests, such as computers, machining, technology, science, digital art, or electronic art, can meet, socialize, and collaborate. Hackerspaces are comparable to other community-operated spaces with similar aims and mechanisms such as Fab Lab, men's sheds, and commercial "for-profit" companies.

TOG is a hackerspace in Dublin, Ireland. tóg is a word in the Irish language; one of its meanings is 'to build or construct'.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maker culture</span> Community interested in do-it-yourself technical pursuits

The maker culture is a contemporary subculture representing a technology-based extension of DIY culture that intersects with hardware-oriented parts of hacker culture and revels in the creation of new devices as well as tinkering with existing ones. The maker culture in general supports open-source hardware. Typical interests enjoyed by the maker culture include engineering-oriented pursuits such as electronics, robotics, 3-D printing, and the use of computer numeric control tools, as well as more traditional activities such as metalworking, woodworking, and, mainly, its predecessor, traditional arts and crafts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Noisebridge</span>

Noisebridge is an anarchistic maker and hackerspace located in San Francisco. It is inspired by the European hackerspaces Metalab in Vienna and c-base in Berlin. Noisebridge describes itself as "a space for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring, and learning". Outside of its headquarters, Noisebridge forms a wider international community. It was organized in 2007 and has had permanent facilities since 2008.

The Ada Initiative was a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in the free culture movement, open-source technology and open culture. The organization was founded in 2011 by Linux kernel developer and open source advocate Valerie Aurora and open source developer and advocate Mary Gardiner. It was named after Ada Lovelace, who is often celebrated as the world's first computer programmer, as is the Ada programming language. In August 2015, the Ada Initiative board announced that the organization would shut down in October 2015. According to the announcement, the Initiative's executive leadership decided to step down, and the organization was unable to find acceptable replacement leaders.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Valerie Aurora</span> American computer scientist and activist

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.

shackspace is a Stuttgart hackerspace run by shack e.V., a non-profit association, established in 2009. Originally located in North Stuttgart, it moved to Stuttgart-Wangen in March 2011. It is among the largest and fastest-growing hackerspaces in Germany, with over 110 paying members. The mission of shackspace is to foster an environment where people can collaborate on ideas, share knowledge and talents, and explore aspects of life including science, technology, software development, arts and crafts and anything else members express an interest in. shackspace views itself as not only a physical workspace, but also a community of like-minded people.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Esta Noche (gay bar)</span> Bar in San Francisco, California, USA

Esta Noche was the first Latino gay bar in San Francisco and notably contributed to queer Latin culture. It operated from 1979 to 2014, and was located at 3079 16th Street between Valencia Street and Mission Street in San Francisco, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Liz Henry</span> American blogger, author, translator, technologist and activist

Liz Henry is an American blogger, author, translator, technologist, and activist. She is a co-founder of the first women's hackerspace in San Francisco, Double Union, where she is still active. She is also an advocate for disability technology and hacking existing technology for use by disabled people.

Mothership HackerMoms is a nonprofit hackerspace/makerspace in Berkeley, California, founded in 2011. It was the first all-women hackerspace.,

Liberating Ourselves Locally is a makerspace/hackerspace in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California. It is part of the Bay Area Consortium of Hackerspaces (BACH).

The Omni Commons is a group of nine collectives in San Francisco's Bay Area devoted to DIY and community education. It traces its inception to the Occupy movement, specifically Occupy Oakland, and was founded in 2014 on the principles of "community, positive creation and radical inclusion".

References

  1. 1 2 "About". Double Union. Retrieved 12 March 2016.
  2. Cassandra, Rachel. "Meet San Francisco's All Women Hacker Space, Double Union". Bitch. Bitch Media. Retrieved 12 March 2016.
  3. 1 2 Greenfield, Rebecca. "Why Silicon Valley Needs The Coder Grrrls Of Double Union, The Feminist Hacker Space."
  4. Fleishman, Glenn. BoingBoing. New Disruptors 56: Doubling Down with Amelia Greenhall.
  5. Lacenski, Ari (12 September 2013). "Shaming, doxxing and making culture". Tumblr. Archived from the original on 12 October 2016. Retrieved 25 September 2016.
  6. Doctorow, Cory (25 September 2015). "Double Union Woman Hackerspace Needs Help with Funding Finding a New Space". BoingBoing. Retrieved 12 March 2016.
  7. "About". Double Union. Retrieved 15 August 2024.
  8. "Arooo - A Room Of One's Own". 11 December 2021 via GitHub.
  9. Brownstone, Sydney. "Publicly Shame Companies that Won't Tell us How Un-Diverse They Are". Fast Company. Retrieved 12 March 2016.
  10. "Open Diversity Data". Open Diversity Data. Retrieved 12 March 2016.

37°45′02″N122°23′44″W / 37.7506°N 122.3956°W / 37.7506; -122.3956