Hackerspaces on the rise in Ireland

Ireland now has two active hackerspaces and it has only been a year since the founding of it’s first. There are planed hackerspaces spring up all over the country. Cork, Limerick and Ennis are set to be home for the next wave hackerspaces in Ireland. Also it looks like Northern Ireland might be home its its first space soon.

Some of the members of TOG will be giving a talk in UL , entitled  “So you want to build a Hackerspace” on Saturday 27 of February.

*Edit. It now looks like Galway will have a hackerspace soon. Its called 091labs. We wish them the best of luck in getting a space soon.*

Engineers Week Roundup

Wow! What a week in TOG. For Engineers Week we ran nine events over seven days. Throughout the week we had sixty nine people attending talks and workshops covering radio , pcb’s, arduino , robots and soldering . It has been a great success for all involved, for many participants it was their first time visiting TOG, many found the talks and workshops a great avenue to furthering their interests. Visitors were encouraged by the ethos of the hackerspace and enjoyed the “hack to learn” aspect of the community.

Throughout the coming year TOG will be continuing to host a number of events to foster innovation in science, technology, modern culture and creative arts.

And then there was two….

We would like to welcome  Bitbucket to the  hackerspace community.

Bitbucket is the latest space to open up in Dublin City Centre. They are located on the top floor, at number 33-34  on  Wicklow Street. You can get in contact with them on there irc channel on irc.bitbucket.ie on #bitbucket .

(Images taken by Sean Nicholls,http://www.seannicholls.com/ . used with permission)

Happy Birthday TOG

Birthday Cake

Happy Birthday to TOG…. Happy Birthday to TOG…

One year ago on the 29th of January 2009,  17 people came together with a common goal  of setting up a shared work space.

We met in the bar area of a hotel in Dublin and started TOG.  It started with very little structure, design and almost no plan.  It was a blank piece of paper just waiting for the TOG members to design what they wanted from a workspace.

Lots of people at the time (not including our first members) that we pushed the idea to said it would never work… that it could not be done.  Sorry to all of you – we proved you wrong.  The meetings continued with no space for a few months while we created both our plans and our funding.  In May 2009 we opened the door on the first workspace.

If you look back at the minutes from the first few meetings the space has evolved into a pretty close match for what people wanted.

A BIG thank you go out to all our members for paying for the space, for working ‘on’ and ‘in’ the space and for believing in the project from day 1.

Happy Birthday…. and here’s to the next year and the years that follow.