In a house not far from Davis Square in Somerville, MA, just outside of Boston, there's a garage full of equipment, a library full of books, and a group of people full of passion. They're called sprout.
The goal of sprout is to create a "community college," which I put in quotes because they mean it in a much more literal sense, not the traditional sense. They mean a place of learning, fueled by a community that is equally driven to learn and to share knowledge. Or as they put it, "We're united by a passion to reclaim science as a richly personal and creative craft."
One of my favorite features at sprout is their spaghetti dinners around various themes. When I visited, they had just held one on Gender and Fashion. Other topics have included Haiti, What Now? and Performance and Public Space. To me, the spaghetti dinners really show the spirit of sprout--an intersection of creativity and science, art and hardware. For example, the photo at the top of this post, with an accordion a few feet away from tools, is titled on Flickr, "peter buchak's presentation on the fluid mechanics of accordion reeds." You can look through photos from other spaghetti dinners on sprout's Flickr stream.
Listen to Alec Resnick, one of the founders, explain more about sprout:
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