English

Bitraf opened on March 1st 2012, and is Oslo's largest hackerspace with a 1200 square meter space downtown Oslo. This is a community for enthusiasts of the electronic arts; programming, graphics, music, sound and electronics. We have strong ties to the demoscene and the free software movement. The space is open 7 days per week for anyone, so feel free to pop by when in Oslo!

We're open all day, but there's more member activity during the evenings and weekends. At daytime, you'll still find people at Bitraf since we offer a coworking space (includes Bitraf membership) as well, but they may not always have the time to show you around. If you're new to Bitraf and Hackerspaces, we typically recommend you drop by one of our theme-evenings such as Build Night. These evenings there's almost always someone that can show you around and tell how things work.

Organized theme evenings

• Byggekveld (Build Night) - Every Thursday you'll find Bitraf full of electronics enthusiasts, 3d printing geeks, robot builders and others making stuff.
• Armor Workshop (Cosplay & costumes) - Every Sunday, people working on cosplays will meet up.
• Hobby night - Tuesdays you'll find members working on Art and crafts projects.

There's also lots of workshops and other events at the space. Sign up at our Meetup page to follow what happens and join in the fun. Meetup allows you to adjust the amount of information you get, so we like the service for it's flexibility.

About Bitraf

Bitraf is organized as a registered non-profit organisation that has the sole purpose of providing a hackerspace in Oslo. It is free to be at Bitraf, but we encourage users to register as paying members. The paying members are what funds our space and ensures our future. We are organized as a Do-ocracy and all activity stems from members. The structure is flat, but we have a board and a manager (Thomas Winther) that takes care of daily operations.

History

There are meny ways to start a Hackerspace. Bitraf was started by Morten Hustveit as a response to the University in Oslo closed down access for Alumni members to the student organisation PING. Morten paid one full years lease from his own pocket and started Bitraf as a Non-profit in the hopes that it could stay afloat by it's own. This first space had the address Darresgate 24 and was 128 square meters. During this period, we grew to 32 members. 10 of us had our office there. The office users paid more per month and the incom split was about 50/50 between office users and ordinary members. This has remained the same over the years up until 2022 (when this is written). This first year we had lots of events (electronics, soldering, 3D printing, Arduino, App programming). Our still running Build Nights (Thursdays from 18.00) started here. We only got to be here for about a year, as the building was to be converted into apartmenents.

We wanted our second space the be closer to Oslo Central station and we found a 250 square meter space (with a greenhouse!) in the backyeard of Youngsgate 6. We stayed here for 3 years while slowly expanding to 450 square meters. In 2015, we had on average 60 paying members per month and our monthly budget was just above 50k NOK per month. While here, we got our first laser cutter and inspired by our member Jens Dyvik, we also purchased our own Shopbot PRS Alpha CNC. With these machines, we also became a Makerspace and the membership base expanded with several events that were not just computing related. We held 15 weekend meetups

Our lease came to an end in April 2016 when Kulturhuset took over as the new owner of the entire building. This ended our lease with Olav Thon (Oslo's largest office space firm & owner of "half of Oslo"), but we ended up taking a new lease with Thon in Pløens gate 4. Our intial space was 450 square meters, but over a time of 5 years, we slowly expanded to 950 square meters taking over more and more of the building. In the end we had the lab in the first floor, the workshop on the second and the primary office space on the 4th floor as well as a side-wing on the 3rd floor.