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. In March 2012, 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. You can find pictures of all our spaces through the years on this Norwegian wiki page.

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. This was just a 5 minute walk from the trains and made access extremely easy. The building was full of companies making noise (sound studios, practice rooms for musicians, Cafe Mono, Cafe Sør), so that suited us perfectly. As part of this rent, we had to start our own LTD Liability firm dubbed "Byteraffineriet as" to pay taxes. This firm is 100% owned by Bitraf and handles all commercial activity such as renting the space, renting out office spaces, buying machines and running our tiny self-serve kiosk named "Bitmart". 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. In 2016, the nunber of members increased to just above 100.

While in Youngsgate 6, we got our first lasercutter 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 member base expanded with several events that were not only computing related. We had Cosplay meetups, Moulding/casting classes and much more. Up until 2016, we had organized more than 500 open events and Byteraffineriet rented out office spaces for 1.4 million NOK per year. We also hosted a long series of "3D Printer Weekend" meetups during this time, serving as a meetup place for the burgeoning DIY 3D priting community.

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. In the office section of Bitraf, you'll find people working as artist, architect, electronic engineer, programmer, knifemaker, goldsmith, SFX or VFX artist, book-binder, machine operator, product designer, furniture designer, seamster, bookbinder, sculptor and much more. Common for all is that they make something - physical or virtual.

Having office users as members has been really important. Whenever someone drops by, they'll find an office user during daytime (and often at night also) or a member that can show them around. We've always been open to non-members, so if you need to borrow one of our tools and one of our members have the time to look after you, you are free to use the space as a guest. This does not apply to machines that pose significant danger. For these tools (Laser, CNC, Lathe, table saw, pick'n'place), you'll need to complete safety training. Upon completing traning, the course will be added to your profile in our member system P2K16, allowing you to access the machine.

In 2019, we passed 320 members on our Meetup page, we has 290+ paying members (including 30 office users), we had hosted 1100+ open events and Byteraffineriet had a record 2.6 million NOK revenue. At this pace, we could finally save up a little money from month to month and that came in handy for our next expansion.

Slowly, we ate up all that space and filled it with activities and creative people. Towards the end of our 5 year lease, we had talked about finding a bigger space and a rare opportunity showed up! The beautiful red tile building in Brenneriveien 9 is our new space from September 2021. We signed the lease the day before Norway closed down due to Covid, so it's been a bumpy road, but it's working out! Our new neighbours is the concert venue Blå, the bars Ingensteds & Bortenfor, AKKS & many other spaces for bands to practice, the art school Strykejernet and the art supplies store KEM. We now have 400+ members (including office users & sponsors) and no less than 1200 square meters (13k sw/ft) just next to the Akerselva river, so please come by and visit! We'll update this article with more pictures from the new space over time.

Sponsors

Throughout the years, Bitraf has had several Sponsors. A sponsor is a firm that has purchased X non-personal memberships for a full year. A single membership = Bronze Sponsor. Two memberships = Silver sponsor. Four memberships = Gold sponsor and now we also have a Platinum option available. Sponsors pay a small annual premium, but they also get some perks back such as extra machine training.