The Hack Factory

I visited The Hack Factory in Minneapolis on Wednesday night.  It was awesome!  They’ve got a full wood shop, welding tools, loads of free stuff sitting on shelves, a super-cool sound system.  Everything you’d need to express your creativity, really!

The space used to be a lot more cramped, but they’ve recently expanded to take over the entire building they rent for what has to be an ungodly sum.  Still, the community seems to turn out in droves on Wednesday nights for Liquid-Nitrogen ice cream and podcasting;  They chug craft beer and homebrew by the gallon!

Even with the extra space, they’re still having junk-management issues.  They’re starting to use a “parking ticket” system to manage space and keep abandoned projects from piling up.  And there’s more than a few projects to improve the infrastructure itself;  they’re working on building a better antenna rig for their ham radio station, and a few folks are building better computer-controlled machine tools for the community to use!  Woot, programmable matter!