I would avoid the computer fair. It’s too much work. Seems like you have to go with intro topics and then ask if people want more advanced lectures later in the week. I would start at 17:00 or 18:00 any day. Check hackerspace schedule first. They should be promoted at least 4 days in advance.
I agree. Computer fair is too much stress. I would like to do a
hardware donation drive and install fest that can be fun and easy.
Install fest is a great idea, I will help.
We have to be careful with donation drive. Perhaps Altin can inform us here how much of a use we’ve been able to make of hardware donations so far. My guess is not much, partially due to space limitation and partially to harware being outdated. We need a plan to make them useful and give them away. Leftover needs to be recycled somehow.
A truckload computers was recently delivered (donated, I'm pretty sure)
to the hackerspace. They're in the basement.
But I think the most useful donations are the small single-board
computers because they are small and use very little power. We still
have at least the following available.
* Raspberry Pi 0
* Raspberry Pi 1 (I want to use this for the tor bridge.)
* Raspberry Pi 2 (It is currently running the print server, but we can
put the print server together with the tor bridge.)
* Another Raspberry Pi 2
* Udoo Quad
* NanoPi K2
We are not going to get those nice things donated, only old crap. We
can get money and buy nice stuff.
So lets take the old crap and try and build some linux boxes from
them during the install fest, people will be able to dig through the
stuff and pull machines together. We can then sell them for 20$ + a
usb disk for storage for example if they are running linux and usable.
That would be one thing we could do as a learning experience.
Or we can build a OpenStack environment with the old crap.
It would be a good idea to at least go through and see what is usable
and get rid of the rest. If we could build 20 machines and then use
them as a cluster of some form, it would eat a lot of power but if we
put those 20 machines into 20 home everyone could donate a little
power. If there was a way to connect them with tor/p2p network it
could be used for a flossk grid.
We could make an OpenStack environment for fun and only turn it on once
in a while.
ok that sounds like a great hackathon and it should be growable. We
could use freenas as well.
I’d say openfiler is much simpler 
That looks fun. So we have
* OpenStack
* Openfiler
* FreeNAS
I got some more ideas for infrequently used computers:
* Patchwork pub
* Plan 9 (https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/supported_pc_hardware/index.html)
* OpenStreetMap
* PC-BSD (to go with FreeNAS)
And actually pfSense would actually be very useful for the hackerspace,
as the present router gets slow periodically and I don't think we have
a good explanation as to why.