2026-07-09 –, Linden Theater
Mitch Altman is sometimes called the "Johnny Appleseed of Hackerspaces." He's devoted his life to starting them. Seth Frey has launched or led Co-ops throughout his life. As a professor at the University of California at Davis, he's made a science of self-governance, community, and other collective behaviors.
In this fireside chat, Mitch and Seth will draw from their lifelong personal experiences as a community organizers to show why community is so important to all of us and our future -- individually and collectively. They will share some of what they have learned, the very real challenges, and how we can all live better lives when we teach and learn and share within communities of our choosing.
Mitch Altman is a hacker and inventor, known for inventing TV-B-Gone, a keychain that turns off TVs in public places. He co-founded a successful SillyValley startup and did pioneering work in Virtual Reality. He is an author and teacher, and goes around the world giving talks and workshops. He also performs spacey noise music on his self-made synthesizers. Mitch promotes hackerspaces, open source hardware, and mentors others wherever he goes. He is a co-founder of Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco, and is founder of Cornfield Electronics.
Dr. Seth Frey is a computational social scientist and cognitive scientist who studies commons governance, collective action, and other complex social phenomena. He specializes in using online communities as model systems for emergent institutional and organizational phenomena. His expertise is in computational approaches to self-governance and the cognitive science of collective behavior.
He is an associate professor in Communication at the University of California Davis, an affiliate of the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, and a Research Director at Metagov. He was a behavioral economist at Disney Research in Walt Disney Imagineering, and a complex systems scholar at NECSI. Seth holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Informatics (complex systems) from Indiana University and a B.A. in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley.
Seth’s research has appeared in PNAS, Nature Scientific Reports, and Proceedings of the Royal Society. It has been covered in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and TEDx. It has been funded by the NSF, NASA, and the Ford Foundation.