Presented at
HOPE Number Nine (2012),
July 14, 2012, 3 p.m.
(90 minutes)
Many of us in the geek community suffer greatly from serious depression. Enough so that several notable hackers have committed suicide over the past couple of years, including the 22-year-old co-founder of Diaspora. Moderated by Robin, a professional geek therapist, the panelists in this session will share their personal histories with depression in hopes of showing that none of us in the geek world need to be isolated with our feelings of being alone, depressed, or suicidal. Is it OK to talk about depression and suicide in the hacker community? This panel thinks it is important to make it so.
Presenters:
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Jimmie Rodgers
Jimmie Rodgers is a full-time hacker, maker, circuitbender, etc. He designs open source hardware kits, teaches a variety of workshops, and gives talks on many topics that interest him. His most popular kits are the Atari Punk Console (a simple and fun sound generator) and the LoL Shield (an Arduino shield with lots of LEDs on it). Jimmie is co-founder of Artisan’s Asylum, a huge hackerspace in Boston.
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Meredith L. Patterson
Meredith L. Patterson joined Telecomix shortly after the Egyptian government shut off Internet access to most of the country, leading a team of European and American ham radio operators in an effort to establish emergency radio communications. Although that operation was ultimately unsuccessful, she stayed on to help with other projects, including tracking down suspicious SSL certificates. She works as a software engineer at Red Lambda and pioneered the field of language-theoretic security along with Sergey Bratus and her late husband Len Sassaman. When not immersed in programming language theory or tech support for the Arab Spring, her hobbies include knitting, target shooting, and auto repair.
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Robin DeBates
Robin DeBates is chaos wrangler and treasurer for Jigsaw Renaissance, a Seattle area member-based makerspace. A hobby scientist who likes to put pointless LEDs in clothes, make stars in the microwave, and grow bioluminescent algae in her free time, Robin is a clinical social worker by training, providing emergency mental health services in King and Snohomish Counties.
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Mitch Altman
Mitch Altman is a San Francisco-based hacker and inventor, best known for inventing TV-B-Gone remote controls, a keychain that turns off TVs in public places. He was also co-founder of 3ware (a Silicon Valley RAID controller company), did pioneering work in virtual reality at VPL Research, and created the Brain Machine, one of MAKE Magazine’s most popular DIY projects. For the last many years, he has been on the road from hackerspace to hacker con leading workshops around the world, teaching one and all to make cool things with electronics and teaching everyone to solder with his open source hardware kits. Mitch is one of the co-founders of Noisebridge (a San Francisco hackerspace) and president and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.
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Daravinne
Daravinne is a ten year veteran of 2600 and HOPE conferences, and is known to publicly associate with the Noisebridge and site3 hackerspaces. She has had a long private battle with PTSD type II, anxiety, depression, and other trauma issues. Dissatisfied with the (lack of) societal and professional support available to people with these problems, she feels it is very important to start changing that.
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