After decades of tyranny, sanctions and war, Iraq has a better reputation for destroying things than building them. That's why an Iraqi-American who's trying to create the country's first hackerspace believes it'll take "irrational optimism" for Iraqis to remember they were among the planet's first maker cultures.
"I realise the ridiculousness of what we're trying to do," says Bilal Ghalib, a 27-year-old geek who, in a month, will return to Iraq, the country of his parents' birth. He wants to convince Iraqis they can reverse the brain drain resulting from Iraq's long, searing experience with political violence and "own their world" again. It starts next month in Baghdad with a two-day pop-up hacker space, where entrepreneurs, builders and nerds can fabricate everything from a heart-rate monitor to a sense of national unity.
By: Spencer Ackerman, Edited by: David Cornish
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via Wired.co.uk
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-09/19/iraq-hackerspace
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