About the Hacker Space Festival
The goal of the Hacker Space Festival is to bring together people from many cultural and technological backgrounds and from different Hacker Spaces and Autonomous zones in France and Europe (and from beyond, if they can attend) to share and show what's going on.
Hacking is not "criminal intrusion in computers". It's about creativity, people, links, sense, purpose. The Hacker Space Festival was created because we didn't have such a festival and because we needed to create link between people in Hacker Space community, awareness about projects, debate about important issues around technology, networks and creativity.
About the /tmp/lab
/tmp/lab is a hacker space in Vitry sur Seine for people doing creative things with technology, culture and arts.
It’s the first Parisian hacker space and is a project from lelab.fr initiative.
We are hosting projects, workshops, conferences and a lot of various technological activities in this 100 square meter underground space.
We aim at getting together people from the most varied horizons, making projects together and sparking new ideas for the 21st century. Various people are developping new ideas, new projects, new arts, bridging the digital divide, helping people to grasp technology in a creative manner, communicating our open vision of the world, empowering people to develop their project with new technologies.
You can reach most of us on irc.freenode.net on #frlab and make sure also to subscribe to the mailing list for information and discussion.
Why This name “/tmp/lab”?
Well… this is a lab, a hacker space, and in a temporary place which, as all temporary place, tend to be a permatemp place, staying in place for much longer than the few years foreseen. Years are already such a long time that /tmp/lab seemed appropriate as a pun and a reference to what you tend to leave in your temp directory on Unix machines.
Are you bad people?
Haha… Media have done a successful but terrible job of describing hackers as bad people. It’s just people who use technology creatively. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker for a good introduction to this matter.
Legally, how do you exist?
/tmp/lab is composed of multiple structures.
A non-profit association in France (Association loi 1901) that manages the local event in Vitry and is in direct contact with many other hacker spaces in Europe and in France to promote freedom and creativity in technology.
A US-based entity that is responsible for this website. Due to the absence of law in french constitution related to “Freedom of Information”, we chose to have all web hosting and data hosting activities in the US, under the US organization so that any complaint about the information we provide cannot be attacked in france. On top of that the retarded laws on data retention can’t apply on US-based servers.
Some activities are conducted outside of France and US, for example regarding reverse engineering, in countries where the politics where not bought out to the point of making such basic right illegal.