Our friend Simon Klose that lives here in Malmö have been follow the people around Piratbyrån and The Pirate Bay for some years and now he need some help to get some money for his project so he can rent a studio and an editor. Check out his own video that he have on Kickstarter.
(and btw, they have also been filming at our hackerspace)
Local cultural festival Möllevångsfestivalen is running on its fifth year. Their IT person’s moved to Stockholm, so Forskningsavdelningen stepped up to the task of dusting the cobwebs off their web presence.
Var med och skapa festivalen — Möllevångsfestivalen är den folkliga kulturens plattform, ett öppet forum för folket att uttrycka sig med kulturen som redskap. Alla lokala artister, konstnärer, kreatörer och kulturarbetare är välkomna att delta. Var med och skapa en folkfest där gränsen mellan skapare och betraktare suddas ut och vi blir alla medskapare till en festival av folket för folket!
It reads like a maker’s manifesto. If you can read Swedish. So, we like the festival.
“By maintaining the existing web platform, theming, and editing detailed information we support and enable local culture, while building upon the efforts of other volunteers” hackerspacer Mikael says.
He muses: “When we work for free, we get to choose our tools, and set our own pace. It’s quite liberating. We meet for work parties, and we’re unburdened by organization. We named Olle our contact person for this project, that was it. Now we have CSS code and images for the theme, and a Git repository to share the information. We can get this done while having fun and learning new things.”
Forskningsavdelningen does this work pro bono. Our wiki page about that explains how “working for free” works.
Festival resources:
Previous years’ photos on the festival’s Flickr page and festival movies at Youtube.
Comics artist Mattias Elftorp designed the logo. Interview with the artist.
What happened?
At 20.45 on Saturday the 28th of November the police raided the social centre Utkanten in Malmö, where the hackerspace Forskningsavdelningen is housed. Twenty officers in full riot gear and ski masks broke into the space through the entrance and a backdoor, using crowbars. Shortly thereafter twenty to thirty more showed up, mostly dressed as civilians and some of them IT technicians from Länskriminalen (county police), who are suspected to be interested in the hackerspace. They stayed in the building for about six hours.
The official reason for the raid was to do a “pub check” because of the suspicion that there was illegal selling of alcohol going on. The allegedly illegal club activity was a punk concert, with about 40 guests at the time of the raid. After the raid the cops evacuated the building, searched through it and confiscated a lot of stuff. The police was indiscriminate as to whose effects were removed, taking a lot of equipment from Forskningsavdelningen and peoples personal computers, even though the hackerspace was unaffiliated with the group arranging the concert downstairs.
At the time of the raid there were about five people at Forskningsavdelningen. All of us were searched and photographed. Those who criticized the harrasment were threatened to be taken to the station for “drug tests”. Overall the police seemed hostile.
What did they take?
We have gone through our stuff and made a list of what is definitely missing, but since the cops havent given us a list of what they’ve taken we might have missed some stuff.
- 3 laptops
- 1 media computer, refurbished
- 2 office computers, refurbished
- 1 gaming computer, 6500 SEK
- 1 digital camera, Canon Powershot
- 1 external 2.5″ hard drive
- 2 key cutters
- lock-picking practice locks (cut-away)
- 1 network router (Linksys WRT-54G)
- 1 wlan dishes antenna
- 1 pocket calculator (casio)
- 5 bottles of rum (Bacardi)
- blank keys, to a value of 200 SEK (not more?)
- material for building metal lockpicks
- metal files
- 1 backpack
We need your support!
We all feel really offended by this and some of the confiscated equipment is going to be hard to replace. If you want to help us there are some things you can do:
- Publish an open letter of support and send us the link
- We’re gonna need to replace some equipment. If you have any of the following stuff and want to donate it, please bring it on tuesday or send us a mail.
- any “modern” pc to use as an office computer, we’re gonna need a couple of them (we still have two or three monitors and, plz, no CRT’s
- some kind of wifi router
- Do fun stuff with us, we’re gonna meet on tuesday as always. Come and help us make the place even better than it was before the raid and bring fun stuff to play with
.
It is common in Sweden that the police never return computers once they have been raided. If they give it back, it will usually at least take some years, the computers will be old by then. If you want to support us finacially you can donate money to a swedish account or a paypal one. All donated money will go to replacing the lost personal and collective hardware.
Please donate
Clearing#: 9159
Account#: 109.068-9
Bank: Skandiabanken
Account#: 109.068-9
Bank: Skandiabanken
or use PayPal
URLs
(in swedish)
http://sydsvenskan.se/kultur-och-nojen/article568467/Det-finns-inga-sparrar-allt-gar-att-knacka.html
Please slashdot, digg and pusha:
