Noisebridge

Noisebridge is an anarchistic maker and hackerspace located in San Francisco. It is inspired by the European hackerspaces Metalab in Vienna and c-base in Berlin. Noisebridge describes itself as "a space for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring, and learning". Outside of its headquarters, Noisebridge forms a wider international community. It was organized in 2007 and has had permanent facilities since 2008.

Locations
During most of 2007 and 2008, Noisebridge was a group of people meeting in new locations weekly. In October 2008, the Noisebridge group began renting a small commercial property in San Francisco's Mission District but it quickly outgrew that location.

In 2009, the space moved into 2169 Mission St. – a 5,200 square foot space on the third floor of the building. Early in its history, in 2009, Noisebridge had around 100 members.

By 2018, the organization was looking for a new space as its lease was under threat. A large donation in 2020 kicked off a new search.

Activities and projects
Many meetups, workshops, and classes are held at the space, including the long running Circuit Hacking Monday, San Francisco Writers Workshop, Wikipedia meetups, Hack Comedy, Five Minutes of Fame, game development groups and classes, Free Code Camp, Code Day, and the Stupid Hackathon.

Past workspaces prior to June 2018 included: an optics lab, bycology lab, biotech lab, bitchen, digital audio workstation, photo development darkroom, book scanning workshop, photo booth, and a lights-out cloud computing lab with more than 100 computer cores and contributed resources to several open source projects, including the GCC compile farm.

Noisebridge members have been involved with research projects that won the best paper awards from top tier academic conferences Usenix Security Conference and CRYPTO.

Spacebridge


Noisebridge had a near space exploration program in 2010, which launched weather-balloon probes exploring altitudes of nearly 70,000 feet, carrying a variety of smartphones and digital cameras for imaging and altitude sensing using a GPS system. Altitudes reached have exceeded the operational limits of consumer level GPS systems.

NoiseTor
NoiseTor (or Noisebridge Tor Project) was a Noisebridge initiative to create and operate additional Tor relays. The project accepted financial donations to sponsor additional nodes. The project was shut down officially by 2022.

Awards and honors

 * Noisebridge won the SF Bay Guardian 2010 Best of the Bay award as "Best Open Source Playground"; the review concluded, "the vibe is welcoming and smart."
 * In 2011 the SF Weekly awarded Noisebridge Best of San Francisco as "Best Hacker Playground", describing it as "the ultimate in DIY ethic" and noting its "distinctive sense of humor."

Controversies
As of 2013, many women have reported instances of being sexually harassed and assaulted at Noisebridge. Co-founder Jacob Appelbaum was accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment. In June 2016, amid an uptick in accusations against Appelbaum and statements from various other groups banning him from their spaces, Noisebridge did the same, stating in an official blog post that "Jacob is no longer welcome in our community, either in its physical or online spaces". In their statement, they explained that his alleged actions (as well as those of other Noisebridge participants accused of harassement), although they had occurred before its instating in 2014, were in violation of their Anti-Harassment policy.

On 24 September 2018, co-founder Mitch Altman announced that he had quietly left Noisebridge in the month of May.

Cultural references
The video game Watch Dogs 2 was reportedly influenced by Noisebridge.