[General] gmc does america

[Koen Martens]

Dear makers local 256,

My name is Koen Martens, also known as gmc. I'm from The Hague,
The Netherlands, Europe. I'm generally involved with the hacker-
community, having organised or having been implied with the
organisation of some hackercons out here in Europe. For example,
I was one of three main organisers of HAR2009, been implied
with Brucon for the past 2 years and recently founded a
hackerspace in my home town (http://revspace.nl/). I'm also
supporting hackerspaces in .nl through my boardmembership of
the Hxx foundation (the foundation behind HAR2009).

I'm currently on a 6 week trip through the states, mostly
to visit all the hackerspaces out there. I'm blogging about that,
as well as doing a weekly radio show type of thing on Signal, the
hackerspaces radio (http://signal.hackerspaces.org/).

I plan to be in Chicago from november 30th till december 1st
and I hope I can
include your space in this unique way of reporting on the state
of hackerspaces in the US. I'm excited to visit all these hackerspaces
and any other places of interest that you can suggest that are
(slightly) related to hackerspaces in the broadest sense. I hope
a visit to your space is possible, I'm very much interested in the
diversity of hackerspaces in your country.

In addition, to keep costs down, i'm hoping to be able to crash
on couches along the way. So if any of you are willing to put me
up for a night, I'd be very grateful. As a small token of gratitude
I'd be happy to cook you dinner! I've been picking up ingredients
along the way and making home-cooked meals with fresh ingredients
from markets along the route.

Just to elaborate a bit more in this short introductory email,
the general was to start in Seattle, then go down to LA,
Las Vegas. That I have done. From there I continued to the
general area of Chicago and Detroit. I also went on
a small side-trip to Toronto, Canada and then head off
to Boston, New York, and finally down again to Miami.

It would be really cool if you want to participate in this
epic road trip.

Greetings,

gmc

Ps: my phone no in  the states is +12064589586
Ps2: i'm blogging on http://wordpress.metro.cx/, posting snapshots on http://foswiki.sonologic.nl/Images/GmcDoesAmerica
Ps3: i'm doing radio as well on http://signal.hackerspaces.org/, check the archive for episodes so far