Interview by Laurel Carlson
LC: Can you say a bit about who you are, your position within HICapacity, and how you came to be involved with the hackerspace?
EK: My name is Edward Kim and I’m a Senior Software Engineer at Slickage Studios, a local consulting firm in Honolulu, Hawaii. I am a graduate of the local university (University of Hawaii at Manoa) with a Bachelor of Science degree in Information and Computer Science. I have been working in the tech field for about 10 years now. I’m also the main point of contact at HICapacity. HICapacity consists mainly of professionals, and most of our members hold employment outside of the organization. Being that we serve a community and don’t really see ourselves as a business, our members typically hold no real titles. I call myself the main point of contact mainly to share a common ground with people that are not familiar with our structure. As for the things that I do at HICapacity, I handle most of the logistics within the organization. This includes but is not limited to planning and coordinating events with both members and outside talent, handling membership fees, rules, and disputes, and general outreach with regards to our organization as a whole and as an advocate for the tech industry whether it relates to STEM education or tech awareness in regards to other industries here. I became involved with the hackerspace thanks to a old college buddy that was already aware of the organization. Through this connection, I quickly became involved with event-related duties and worked my way up through our old structure (typical business hierarchy – president, VP, treasurer) as leadership continually moved to the mainland for better opportunities.
LC: How do you define the goals of HICapacity?
EK: HICapacity’s goals are really hard to define. We constantly grow and evolve as the community evolves and we try to meet the needs of the community as that happens. We were originally a makerspace with the intention of focusing on both traditional hardware topics like arduinos and other microcontrollers but also shared a focus on a lot of software related topics like JavaScript and Ruby on Rails. Having grown in many directions at once (carpentry, t-shirt making, robotics, and more recently fashion tech and wearables), we tend to rebuild our organization and our goals as is needed. As of right now, we more broadly define ourselves as an advocate for technology within the state of Hawaii. This is a very broad goal and was intentionally picked to be so. We want to focus on both the sharing and increasing the knowledge between professionals within our community and general advocacy of technology as a viable industry in Hawaii, whether it be through STEM education outreach or setting up events that highlight the technology sector here.