Editing HackTheLeft (section)

== How should we go about this? ==

Glad you asked, because there are a few things to talk about.

Hack the Left is intended to mobilize leftist hackers around our shared politics, building momentum and community. Start something ambitious and keep it going. Make a few comrades. While this event clearly has a much stronger theory component to it than most hackathons, the emphasis should be on shared politics and building things. Some amount of dissent is inevitable, but it would really bring joy to my heart if less than 10% of the event was spent debating the political merits and demerits of individual projects. This is not to say that we should be uncritical -- it's hugely important if a bunch of participants think your project sounds fascist, because they're probably right -- but that we shouldn't spend much time arguing those points. People who are way too loud and just won't let up will be asked to take it elsewhere.

While this event centers on class struggle, we hold feminist values dear, and hold that meaningful class struggle must include, non-exhaustively, struggle against patriarchy, white supremacy, cissexism, heterosexism, and ablism. Attendees will be expected to help uphold these values. Attendees who e.g. make racist, misogynistic, or transphobic remarks will be unceremoniously booted. We're working on (picking) a Safer Spaces policy, which will be linked before the event.

While we aren't big fans of the law or cops, we intend to not do anything illegal at this event. So while "my project is to write a virus that steals from the rich and gives to the poor" might be great anticapitalist praxis, it's not something you're gonna do at this event, and we won't condone or allow it.

Everything we develop at the event will be open source. If you want to do something closed source at the event, get in touch, and we'll probably tell you why you should open source it. If you prefer to open source on the darknet, that's fine.

This event was inspired in part by the Al Jazeera special about Rabble, titled [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7TXT9H3MVQ Rebel Geeks: Steal From The Capitalists]. The idea is that capitalists are really, really good at building technology, and a lot of their techniques are politically agnostic. Like Hackathons. So we encourage you to steal ideas from your corporate gig -- design thinking, Agile, Lean, all that shit -- and allow it to inform you in the process of fighting capitalism.

Though we have pretty strong principles underlying this event, we're really open to suggestions you might have. Please feel free to [mailto:brandonesbox@gmail.com get in touch] and share your ideas.