It’s taken a while to get around to it, but on the 5th the Midsouth Makers went to visit one of our sister groups in Nashville, the Hacker Consortium. The HC guys were unbelievably generous, they did a lot in a little time to prep for our visit. Quite often for the few days before we arrived, their IRC channel was littered with chores being doled out to clean the place up. No offense, but it was likely a waste of time as we were just so mesmerized by everything. They probably could have had every piece of junk they could find scattered on the floor and we wouldn’t have noticed. On top of doing what they could to make the place presentable, they went so far as to fix an impressive lunch. I personally had never had “Beer Can Chicken” before, but I’m already wanting more. Hopefully we’ll be able to have our own cookout and make the same thing before too long. The trip really served as a good chance for the people here in Memphis to see what we could potentially have and to motivate them to push for the same.

As for more details about the space, we’ll just say that it is unbelievable. If you take a look at what they have now and compare it to what they started with, you almost wouldn’t believe most of it. They had tons of tools everywhere, an impressive server room, and had even just finished their learning lab. They have roughly 2000 square feet of space and have done an excellent job of laying things out. The best thing you can do is just take a look at the Flickr account and see for yourself.

Ok, so I don’t know how many people have heard, but we’ve been invited to Nashville to check out the Hacker Consortium’s space. The current agenda is for us to leave at 8 AM on June 5th, meet up with the guys at HC, hang out with them and checkout the shop, stay the night, and come back on Sunday morning. The Nashville hackerspace has specifically asked for a headcount, and really we need one anyhow for the logistics planning of the trip. We have a potential for some “discounted” hotel rooms courtesy of Hilton. So the one catch is that we need to know how many people are going two weeks in advance to make use of this offer on rooms.

In short it would be preferable to not turn in the request right on the two week marker. So please everyone who wants to go can, but we need to know no later than this Wednesday May 19th. We will be putting in the request on Thursday, so if you don’t let us know before then we’re terribly sorry and hope that you might join us on the trip to Huntsville a few weeks later. Feel free to send in an e-mail to the mailing list, or send in one to info@midsouthmakers.org and let us know.