The Omni Commons is a group of nine collectives in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a region of California surrounding and including San Francisco Bay, and anchored by the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose. The Association of Bay Area Governments ...

devoted to DIY and community education. It traces its inception to the

Occupy movement The Occupy movement was an international populist Social movement, socio-political movement that expressed opposition to Social equality, social and economic inequality and to the perceived lack of real democracy around the world. It aimed primar ...

, specifically

Occupy Oakland Occupy Oakland refers to a collaboration and series of Demonstration (people), demonstrations in Oakland, California, Oakland, California, that started in October 2011. As part of the Occupy movement, protesters have staged Occupation (protest), ...

, and was founded in 2014 on the principles of "community, positive creation and radical inclusion".

Building

Constructed in 1933, the building at 4799 Shattuck Ave in

Oakland Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major West Coast port, Oakland is ...

was conceived as the meeting hall for The Ligure Club, the Italian garbagemen's social club. The 22,000 sq. ft. building hosts a 4,000 sq. ft. ballroom, a large foyer, a Disco room with formerly-illuminated floors, a children's play room, a large industrial kitchen under renovation, and many more spaces of varying sizes.

Collectives

The Commons currently consist of 9 member collectives ranging from activist groups to

hackerspace A hackerspace (also referred to as a hacklab, hackspace, or makerspace) is a community-operated, often "not for profit" (501(c)(3) in the United States), workspace where people with common interests, such as computers, machining, technology, sci ...

s, each of which have a representative in the Omni Commons' Delegates Council, the decision-making body of the group. Collectives include:

Counter Culture Labs

A biohacker and

citizen science The term citizen science (synonymous to terms like community science, crowd science, crowd-sourced science, civic science, participatory monitoring, or volunteer monitoring) is research conducted with participation from the general public, or am ...

lab in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood, Counter Culture Labs serves as a community

laboratory A laboratory (; ; colloquially lab) is a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific or technological research, experiments, and measurement may be performed. Laboratories are found in a variety of settings such as schools ...

and hackerspace for people of any skill level.

Sudo Room

An open-membership

in Oakland with an emphasis on community

outreach Outreach is the activity of providing services to any population that might not otherwise have access to those services. A key component of outreach is that the group providing it is not stationary, but mobile; in other words, it involves meetin ...

and service. Active projects hosted by Sudo Room include a weekly hardware hack night, regular programming hangouts, and People's Open Network, a

community wireless network Wireless community networks or wireless community projects or simply community networks, are non-centralized, self-managed and collaborative networks organized in a grassroots fashion by communities, non-governmental organizations and cooperatives ...

being developed by

Sudo Mesh () is a shell command on Unix-like operating systems that enables a user to run a program with the security privileges of another user, by default the superuser. It originally stood for "superuser do", as that was all it did, and this remains ...

, in the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a List of regions of California, region of California surrounding and including San Francisco Bay, and anchored by the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose, California, S ...

References

External links