Hacker Spaces

= Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects. [1]

Description

From the Wikipedia:

"A hackerspace or hackspace (from Hacker and Space, sometimes referred to as a makerspace in reference to Make Magazine.) is a real (as opposed to virtual) place where people with common interests, usually in science, technology, or digital or electronic art can meet, socialise and collaborate. A hackerspace can be viewed as an open community lab, workbench, machine shop, workshop and/or studio where people of diverse backgrounds can come together to share resources and knowledge to build/make things." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackerspace)

Discussing the definition, by Jarkko Moilanen:

"A simple and compact definition is still missing even among the persons who a involved in Hackerspaces. Yet some discussion about this has occured among the participants. I participate in the discussion list of hackerspaces since I’m a founder and member of our local Hackerspace (5w) in Tampere, Finland. I began to browse the discussion archives of ‘Hackerspaces General Discussion List‘ which is publicly available here. The archives included discussion sbetween Jul 20th 2008 and Nov 16th 2009. I expected to find some hints and thoughts related to the question ‘What is a hackerspace?’. Very soon after looking at the archive content I noticed that there is a lot of discussion about this topic. It seems that the community is still defining the meaning of hackerspace." (http://extreme.ajatukseni.net/2009/11/14/viewpoints-to-the-development-of-hackerspaces/)

Discussion

Jarkko Moilanen:

"In this post I will try to define hackerspaces by comparing them to traditional, larger hacker culture and community. The idea for this post came to my mind while writing the “Viewpoints to the development of Hackerspaces”. Every hacker group and other computer related groups or clubs can not be called hackerspaces. Some groups that would look like a hackerspace don’t even want to be labelled as hackerspaces. Some hackerspaces avoid using the word itself in the groups name or in the descriptions of their group. Reasons for avoiding the word hackerspace vary but the most common is related to the uncertainty of how ‘others’ will react to anything that includes or refers to ‘hacker’. This fear of the opinions of other is an example of how communities are shaped, defined and identified also by others than the members of community. Jordan and Taylor (1998) have written an article about hacker communities (“A Sociology of hackers”) and I will use that article as the main starting point.

According to Jordan and Taylor the ‘imagined community’ of hackers can be described with six internal aspects and through exploring the community’s boundary between itself and the others(Jordan & Taylor 1998, 762-775). In this post community is understood as Jordan & Taylor so neatly put it: “[...]collective identity that members of a social group construct or, in a related way, as the ‘collective imagination’ of a social group. Both a collective identity and imagination allow individuals to recognise in each other membership of the same community.”(Jordan & Taylor 1998, 762-763). Previously mentioned 6 internal factors are: technology, secrecy, anonymity, membership fluidity, male dominance and motivations." (http://extreme.ajatukseni.net/2009/11/17/sociological-view-of-hackers-and-hackerspaces/)

Detailed discussion of six factors here at http://extreme.ajatukseni.net/2009/11/17/sociological-view-of-hackers-and-hackerspaces/

More Information

1. Specialized wiki at http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hacker_Spaces
2. List of spaces at http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces
3. Hackerspaces, members and involvement (survey study) at http://extreme.ajatukseni.net/2010/07/19/hackerspaces-members-and-involvement-survey-study/