Garoa Hacker Clube:About

About
Country	Brazil
City	São Paulo
Snail mail	Rua Vitorino Carmilo, 459 - Santa Cecília - São Paulo, SP, Brazil - CEP 01153-000
Founding	2009-06-23: on-line community 2010-08-26: space opening 2011-02-20: official foundation
Members	~20 official, ~400 on mailing list
Membership fee	R$80-40, but open to non-members
Size	12m² basement
IRC	#garoa at irc.freenode.net
Mailing list	hackerspacesp@googlegroups.com
Twitter/Identi.ca	@garoahc, !garoa
Status	active

We are in the basement. You can see us through the window behind the plants. Just ring, knock or yell! If the lights are off, we are probably not there.

Garoa Hacker Clube is a hackerspace in São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil and South America.

Garoa is an open and collaborative infrastructure provider for technology enthusiasts that create projects related to many areas such as security, harware, electronics, robotics, modelism, software, biology, music, arts and whatever can be imagined.

In other words, it is a community-run laboratory where people can exchange knowledge and experiences, meet, socialize, collaborate and share.

Our root principles are:

• free and universal access to knowledge generated under our premises
• self-funding through our member fees and community donations
• guarantee of free enterprise on our members in proposing and implementing individual or group projects

Being discussed since mid-2009 and building since August 2010, Garoa Hacker Clube is now officially up and running. We are currently running projects and activities. Since Nov 18 2010 there is be a weekly Arduino night. We have been in a permanent space since September 2010, and it is constantly being improved. We still need to purchase lots of equipment. We have a Cupcake CNC, Arduinos and other embedded platforms, basic electronics, power supplies, a function generator, an analog oscilloscope, soldering irons and PCB manufacturing tools, old hardware, books, oldschool video games and a homebrew pinball machine. On February 20th 2011 we have setup a non-profit association to support our finances and organization.

Location

Garoa is located at the basement of the CCD (House of Digital Culture), in Santa Cecilia district, downtown São Paulo. The hackerspace is currently active. Some members have the key to the space, and we usually hang out there on weekends and at night on special days during the week.

Inauguration of our space

On Saturday, August 28th 2010, GHC (Garoa Hacker Clube) was inaugurated in a small room at Casa da Cultura Digital (House of Digital Culture). We stayed there from 10am until approx. 8pm and around 11 people attended. We have done some maintenance work in the room, installing power outlets and better ambient illumination. We also installed a new shelf in one of the walls where we intend to accommodate some instruments (oscilloscope?) in the near future.

There was a lot of conversation and ideas exchange. We also had short informal tutoring on digital electronics and soldering.

Events

We run a few regular events:

Every 3rd Tuesday, 7:30pm BRT - General Meeting

Thursdays, 7:30pm BRT - Arduino Night learn, teach, build and hack Arduinos

Saturdays, from 10am BRT - Open Hack Day Saturday seems to be the day with more people hanging out at the space, but is not a regular activity. Just ask on the mailing list.

Garoa always welcomes visitors. It is an open space. Just check if there will be somebody there to open the door for you.