October 25, 2010
 

The Berks CoLab

Reading (it's pronounced Redding, btw) in lovely Berks County Pennsylvania.  A place perhaps most famous for having a Railroad on the Monopoly board game, The Shopping Outlet Capital of the World, or the fact that a giant glowing red Japanese Pagoda has inexplicably been sitting on a nearby hill for the past 100 years overlooking a mostly German and Pennsylvania Dutch countryside.  Oh yeah, I think it was also recently rated in the top 25 most dangerous cities in the US.  Hopefully one day it will be known for having an awesome hackerspace, which is what I've been putting a lot of energy into lately.  What's a hackerspace?  This is one of my favorite videos that describes it pretty well.

It's been something that I've been thinking about for a while, but I never seemed to have the time.  Plus, Berks County isn't exactly the most progressive areas and I thought the odds of forming one around here was pretty unlikely.  The nearest hackerspace is over an hour away in Philadelphia which means although I might visit, it's too far to go to very often.  Then one night I was browsing the hackerspaces wiki map and noticed another marker in Reading - someone else (who turned out to be the little brother of friend of mine I went to highschool with) was trying to start a hackerspace in Reading too - inconceivable!

Then I went to the World Maker Faire and got really excited.  While we were there, Amy went to a talk about starting a hackerspace and she got really excited too.  So when we got back we started contacting people and getting serious about it.  A month later we have 10 people interested and 6 people who have been serious enough to meet every week for the past month, we've decided on a name - Berks CoLab and have started down the road to forming a non-profit.

So, if by some even more amazing odds, you are from the Berks County area and would like to help drag Reading kicking and screaming into The Future - you're welcome to join us at our weekly meetings.  (plus: someone usually brings chocolate Mmm)  We meet every Tuesday at 6:30pm in downtown Reading.  You can get the details here.  We're also planning to meet once a month on Saturdays to work on a project.  We haven't decided on a project yet, but it will probably involve robots and lasers, RepRaps or MakerBots and a whole lot of awesome!

Filed under  //   berkscolab   hackerspace   makerbot   reprap  

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