USCA hacker house

[nibot]

Chateau co-op really is a special place in Berkeley. I don't know if I would want to live there myself, but I think it's the sort of place we need. You can spend hours there just absorbing the drawings on the walls. Unfortunately Chateau is the biggest headache for the USCA as well, with twenty-two neighbors banded together in an evil conspiracy to take Chateau off the map. And there are clearly problems at Chateau; very few people have taken contracts to live there in the fall.

Some of the proposals are patently ridiculous — such as to convert it to grad student housing or women-only housing. This would destroy Chateau, and there are already too many female vacancies in the USCA. Better plans involve various plans for "revitalization," which might or might not work. Protagonists cite Casa Zimbabwe as a success story; antagonists cite renovation at Cloyne as less-than-sucessful. Another proposal is to split the house — which is physically three houses, side by side — into three distinct co-ops, which would have the advantage of boosting personal responsibility in any given house. But I have not gone to any of the meetings about the Chateau situation, so I don't know what is being seriously considered.

I can't help but think this might be a good opportunity to put one of my pet project ideas into the general consciousness: designate one of the Chateau houses as a hacker house engineering theme house. We have a grad student house, two women-only houses, an african-american themed house, a queer house, and a vegetarian house. I think an engineering house could be particularly interesting. We don't have one (although CZ might come close in spirit). Engineering/tech themed houses have achieved considerable success and notoriety at other schools. MIT has ΤΕΦ. Caltech has Blacker House. Brown University has Technology House.

An engineering themed house would provide an environment (a great place) in which the housemates would collaborate on their assorted crazy projects. This could even be a resource for the USCA, as such a house could be a development center for useful co-op technologies, such as solar energy, or the planned co-op to co-op wireless network. The main resource at the house would of course be the collaborative powers of the residents, but I am sure the ensuing accumulation of equipment (tools, components) would also be very handy. Combining the house with an arts theme could have particularly interesting results. A major goal is to foster engineering culture.

I think that it would be great to have such a house in Berkeley, and as part of the USCA in particular, and perhaps the situation with Chateau is a good opportunity to begin talking about this idea, even if it's not implemented at Chateau. (As I said, I think Chateau itself is an important place that needs to preserved, and not razed from the face of this city, as the neighbors would have it.)

P.S. Check out this awesome directory of bay-area cooperative housing. PS2. On another note, why don't we have any kind of inter-coop electronic bulletin board / mailing list, so that we can correspond easily with the coopers at schools nearby (UCSC) or far away (UMich co-ops)?

Psst! Party at Oscar Wilde tomorrow!

Comments

[janviere.livejournal.com]

Wrong side of campus. Ridge and Cloyne are as close to engineering theme houses as you're going to get. Now, the Cloyne nerd spirit is pretty cool, but they already have a house, and it's 30 seconds from where they need to be.

The other problem with Berkeley is that there is no engineering spirit. Most of the cool and creative engineers (you excepted, of course) to go real schools, like MIT and Caltech. An engineer house here would look like Cloyne and be as interesting as Foothill.

[blackrock.livejournal.com]

Except I go to Caltech, am a member of Blacker, and all the engineers are in other houses. We're full of physicists who like to think they're engineers, I guess, because we do have the reputation of building cool stuff.

Good but...

[(Anonymous)]

Any USCA nerd house would have to be on northside to be close to Soda and Cory Hall. Most nerds would probably not appreciate being so close to People's Park either.
I lived in Cloyne for 4 years and was part of the "nerd crue" and I have to say that Cloyne and Ridge are as close to a nerd house as the USCA gets.

Dumb idea.

[channel6.livejournal.com]

I've been to Riddick, Blacker, Ricketts, those places are total anti-social festerpits. Total sociopathic breeding grounds. It's bad enough "hackers" think they're better than everyone and use complexity to hide their laziness at designing decent computer interfaces. If you isolate engineers away from (face it) their CLIENTELLE, you're going to get issues like unusability of products, sociopathy, which could have disastrous results (http://www.livejournal.com/users/zestyping/31555.html#cutid3). I say the opposite infact should be true; you should FORCE engineers to realise that although engineering is important, it's not the only way to make bling bling in the world, and thus they really should learn to design for a !engineer clientelle.

Also, you're on the wrong side of campus to snarf free wavelan from Soda. And the chateau pool is disgusting. Ridge is better and has hotter chicks (tm). Kidd hall is your best chance, if you move in 9 ppl into kidd hall you have majority bloc.

[erinmack.livejournal.com]

I've thought of living in the co-ops (F & I probably won't live together if/when I go to Berkeley), but I'm so anal about clutter and cleanliness that I don't think there's a good one for me -- I've heard that Loth, the veg co-op, is among the filthiest in the system.

Geek Haus would be great

[(Anonymous)]

This is a really cool idea. As a former coop resident and Berkeley alum, I would love to see something like this happen because it's the sort of house I would want to live in. The cool thing about geeks is that, given a bunch of them and the right combination of personalities, they begin to create at a phenomenal rate. Sure, some of the things built will be silly or inane, e.g. transistor radio cat stun guns, but some of the things will be the seeds of amazing technologies we all take for granted, e.g. the GIMP or Google.

This raises two questions for me. First, how do we achieve the necessary critical mass of geekdom? This is of particular concern given the issue that some expressed with the distance between Chateau and the campus engineering buildings. Second, how can we optimize the house social structure to encourage creative geekery? Bi-weekly or monthly hack sessions perhaps?

Regardless, if you build it, they will come. Though in the case of a geek haus, I think it's more like, if they come, they will build!

(Dan)
dans@csua.berkeley.edu

[cheeseparade.livejournal.com]

hmm i seem to have stumbled upon this post after a series of haphazard clicks on the berkeley wiki...

and i think a geek/nerd/hacker/whatever-you-want-to-call-it house is a great idea. and i'm only a cogsci major. i would live there because i think that stuff is cool, i just dont want to major in it. i would also appreciate having friends who know more than i do about computers because it will make me smarter, and having lots of fun gadgets laying around to play with. however, it must strive to remain inclusive of the lesser nerds (e.g. those of us not in EECS and/or strictly the "hard sciences"), because i get intimidated by being the only relatively "fuzzy" person in a highly "techie" environment. in conclusion, i think you are way cool, and the wiki just gets better and more amusing with time.