We want to encourage your interest in technology and provide a way for all of us to exercise our radical politics. We'd love to be working with more awesome folks who feel comfortable expressing their geeky, playful, intellectually-curious side. We play around with servers and software and programming and robotics and building stuff. We teach people and create infrastructure for the radical community.
If you’ve ever soldered something and enjoyed it, or if you’ve ever learned a programming language and felt brilliant, or if you’ve ever designed something that worked perfectly, we'd like to share more of that with you in an environment where men, women, and trans folks can connect.
See our list of current and past projects and the tools we use.
UBEW Apprenticeship Program
We offer an apprenticeship to those geeky rad people who'd like to work with us. The apprenticeship is as much about learning to work in collective, consensus-based projects as it is about learning technology. We are often solving problems that are new to us, so we are learning the technology together. Apprentices often become UBEW members. For transparency's sake, Below is a detailed description of the apprenticeship process.- One or more UBEW members bottomline the apprenticeship process, check emails, shepherd apprentices through the process, check on progress, etc
- Potential apprentices are asked to answer a few questions as an introduction to staff
- Before a potential member becomes an apprentice, they meet the collective and are agreed on via consensus
- A current member agrees to sponsor the new apprentice and guide them through things, train them, check in with them, answer questions, etc
- Apprentices and sponsors regularly report back on their training progress during weekly work meetings
- After a month of more of training, an apprentice becomes a full member only when the apprentice and the rest of the membership feel they are ready, agreed via consensus.
Questions for Apprenticeship Applicants
If you are interested in the apprenticeship program, we have some questions for you. Please don't feel intimidated or like there are "right" answers. This is our attempt to get to know you, so answering honestly and candidly is more important than any efforts to impress us. When you are ready jump to our apprenticeship application.- Can you tell us a little about yourself? What gets you excited?
- Can you tell us what stuff you've been involved in, especially if you've worked on projects in the radical community?
- Have you been involved in any other techy/geek projects, particularly local ones? Tell us about that.
- What draws you to work with UBEW? What is your understanding of what we do? How familiar are you with UBEW history?
- Tell us about your technical experience, include any experience with web stuff, programming, design, project planning/management, software configuration, etc.
- We are all both teachers and learners. Are you comfortable learning from other members and sharing what you know?
- Though it's not a requirement that people we work with identify as 'anarchist,' this is a radical project with anarchist roots. Do you have any thoughts or feelings about anarchism?
- UBEW is a collaborative project in which we work together closely, communicate frequently with each other about the work we do, and make decisions via consensus. Do you have experience working in a collaborative or collective project?
- UBEW works on projects we assign ourselves, set our own deadlines, meet weekly for 8am work meetings with occasional evening work meetings. What was the last geeky/techy project you worked on outside of school or work?
- What kind of a commitment are you interested in making to UBEW? How available are you? How long do you plan to be living in Santa Cruz?
