Formation 2007 | Purpose Hacking | |
Motto "Be Excellent to Each Other" Founder Jacob Appelbaum, Mitch Altman, volunteers Location San Francisco, California Affiliations Pumping Station: One, Chaos Computer Club, Metalab, NYC Resistor and similar | ||
Noisebridge is an award-winning anarchistic educational hackerspace in San Francisco, inspired by hackerspaces in Europe, like the Metalab in Vienna and c-base in Berlin. It is a registered non-profit California corporation, with IRS 501(c)(3) charitable status. According to the Noisebridge website's Vision page, "Noisebridge is a space for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring, and of course, learning. Noisebridge is also more than a physical space, it's a community with roots extending around the world." It was organized and began regularly meeting in 2007 and has had permanent facilities since 2008.
Contents
Membership
Noisebridge encourages participation by anyone who feels they can contribute, and non-members are welcome at the space at any time. All workshops and activities are free, with some exceptions for materials costs, and all are open to the public.
Research
Noisebridge members have been involved with major award-winning research projects. This includes winning the best paper awards from top tier academic conferences such as Usenix Security Conference and CRYPTO
Noisebridge previously operated a lights-out cloud computing lab with more than 100 computer cores and contributed resources to several open source projects, including the GCC compile farm.
Community participation
Noisebridge members regularly speak at events around the world such as Defcon, Blackhat, The Chaos Computer Club's Chaos Communication Congress, CCC Camps, HOPE, and more, as well as present at local events such as Maker Faire, and contribute to the founding of hackerspaces elsewhere. It is well known for its Five Minutes Of Fame event as well as hosting the local San Francisco Dorkbot. Furthermore Noisebridge is a member of the torservers.net network, an organization of nonprofits which specializes in the general establishment of Tor anonymity network exit nodes via workshops and donations.
Spacebridge
Noisebridge had a near space exploration program, which launched weather-balloon probes exploring altitudes of nearly 70,000 feet, carrying a variety of smartphones and digital cameras for imaging and altitude sensing using a GPS system. Altitudes reached have exceeded the operational limits of consumer level GPS systems.
Media coverage
Noisebridge won the SF Bay Guardian 2010 Best of the Bay award as "Best Open Source Playground"; the review concluded, "the vibe is welcoming and smart." In 2011 the SF Weekly awarded Noisebridge Best of San Francisco as "Best Hacker Playground", describing it as "the ultimate in DIY ethic" and noting its "distinctive sense of humor." Noisebridge has been covered by international media for a myriad of projects involving their membership, on NPR and the BBC, and in Wired, The New Yorker (which covered burgeoning digital privacy and security workshops in the wake of the 2016 United States presidential election), The Guardian, CNET, Le Monde (which covered biohacking classes), Heise Online, ORF, Irish Times, Die Welt Online, Die Zeit Online, Der Standard, and elsewhere.
Noisebridge policy is open access for all.
The hackerspace features prominently in Cory Doctorow's fictional 2013 novel Homeland.
Physical space
During most of 2007 and 2008, Noisebridge was a group of people meeting in new locations weekly. In October 2008 the Noisebridge group began renting a commercial property in San Francisco's Mission District, but it quickly outgrew that location. In September 2009 Noisebridge moved to a much larger facility a few blocks south on Mission Street. The current space has a machine shop, optics lab, two classrooms, a 1Gbps uplink, areas for electronics work and sofas for laptop work and socializing.