Current TEC Initiatives
Our initiatives aim to foster community and give both people interested in tech and advanced technologists a fully-equipped place for education, working on projects, collaborating, and honestly just sometimes hanging out with awesome, interesting folks.
Some of our current initiatives include:
- Introduction to Linux Workshop- Coming in May, a once weekly three-part workshop aimed at helping people totally new Linux learn to use its most common operating systems and explore it as a viable OS alternative.
- Ham Study Group & Meetup - This current cohort meets twice monthly for two hour sessions to prepare to take the FCC's Amateur Radio Service Technician Class license exam.
- Right to Repair Workshops - We invite people to come in once monthly to use the lab's iFixIt repair hub (the only fully equipped R2R hub in the Phoenix valley). TEC provides the expert to guide attendees and marketing and facilitation of the event.
- Personal Privacy Information & Education Meetup (Privacy PIE) A monthly talk covering today's most salient privacy topics. Past topics have included smart cities, carveillance, EULA Never Believe What You Just Agreed To, What the FISA?! (Pts. 1 & 2), basics on staying relatively anonymous while shopping online, and more. We are always in need in qualified professionals to speak at this event and welcome volunteers to do so.
- TEC Trips TEC facilitates tours to various technological centers in the greater Phoenix metro valley. Prior field trips have included PADT, ASU's Dreamscape Learning Lab, and most recently Iron Mountain Data Centers.
- The TEC Talks Podcast (you're already familiar with this one a bit, lol): We host our TEC Talks podcast on the FOSS platform Castapod. We have two podcast formats. In our What Does a [Technologist] Do? segments we ask a professional technologist with real life experience five questions about what their actual day-to-day looks like. The questions stay the same but the answers are almost always wildly different than what we expect.