Hackerspace
A hackerspace is a community-operated, often "not for profit", workspace where people with common interests, such as computers, machining, technology, science, digital art, or electronic art, can meet, socialize, and collaborate. Hackerspaces are comparable to other community-operated spaces with similar aims and mechanisms such as Fab Lab, men's sheds, and commercial "for-profit" companies.
History
In 2006 Paul Böhm came up with a fundraising strategy based on the Street Performer Protocol to build Metalab in Vienna, Austria, and became its founding director. In 2007 he and others started Hackerspaces.org, a wiki-based website that maintains a list of many hackerspaces and documents patterns on how to start and run them., the community list included 1967 hackerspaces with 1199 active sites and 354 planned sites.The advent of crowdfunding and Kickstarter has put the tools required to build hackerspaces within reach of an even wider audience. For example, Bilal Ghalib and others used such tools to bring the hackerspace concept to the Middle East.
Worldwide, a large number of hackerspace or makerspace facilities have been founded. Nicole Lou and Katie Peek reported that from 2006 to 2016 the number of active or planned spaces increased to 1,393, fourteen times as many as in 2006.
The US federal government has started adopting the concept of fully open makerspaces within its agencies, the first of which resides at NASA Ames Research Center.
Activities
In general, hackerspaces function as centers for peer learning and knowledge sharing, in the form of workshops, presentations, and lectures. They usually also offer social activities for their members, such as game nights and parties. Hackerspaces can be viewed as open community labs incorporating elements of machine shops, workshops, and/or studios where hackers can come together to share resources and knowledge to build and make things.Many hackerspaces participate in the use and development of free software, open hardware, and alternative media. They are often physically located in infoshops, social centers, adult education centers, public schools, public libraries, or on university campuses, but may relocate to industrial or warehouse space when they need more room.
File:Maker tutorial on configuring a Raspberry Pi 2.png|thumb|Naomi Wu demonstrating how to configure a Raspberry Pi 2
Most recent studies of hackerspace in China—where Internet access is heavily censored—suggest that new businesses and organized tech conferences there serve to intervene in the status quo "from within". The first hackerspace in China, Xinchejian, opened in Shanghai in 2010. Thereafter a network of hackerspaces emerged, nourishing an emerging maker culture. By designing open technologies and developing new businesses, Chinese makers make use of the system, make fun of it, altering it and provoking it. DIY makers often bring and align contradictory ideas together, such as copycat and open source, manufacturing and DIY, individual empowerment and collective change. In doing so, they craft a subject position beyond the common rhetoric that Chinese citizens lack creativity. As a site of individual empowerment, hackerspace and DIY making enable people to remake the very societal norms and material infrastructures that undergird their work and livelihood.
Facilities
The specific tools and resources available at hackerspaces vary from place to place. They typically provide space for members to work on their individual projects, or to collaborate on group projects with other members. Hackerspaces may also operate computer tool lending libraries, or physical tool lending libraries, up to and including creative sex toys in some instances.The building or facility the hackerspace occupies provides the physical infrastructure that members need to complete their projects. In addition, most hackerspaces provide electrical power, computer servers, and networking with Internet connectivity. Well-equipped hackerspaces may provide machine tools, sewing, crafting, art fabrication, audio equipment, video projectors, game consoles, electronic instrumentation, electronic components and raw materials for hacking, and various other tools for electronics fabrication and creating things. Specialized large-format printers, 3D printers, laser cutters, industrial sewing machines, CNC machine, or water jet cutters may be available for members to use. Some hackerspaces provide food storage and food preparation equipment, and may teach courses in basic or advanced cooking.
Organization
The individual character of a hackerspace is determined by its members. There is a lot of variety in how hackerspaces are organised.- Some hackerspaces are governed by elected boards selected by active members in good standing. Elected officers may serve predetermined terms, and help direct decision-making with regards to purchasing new equipment, recruiting new members, formulating policy, conforming to safety requirements, and other administrative issues. London Hackspace, for example, is governed by an elected board of trustees.
- Others, such as , are led by a single Benevolent Dictator For Life. This is a common governance structure for hackerspaces which are founded by a single person on their own property.
- There are also more anarchist governance models such as a Do-ocracy, in which people receive the authority over a task by doing it. This model is often combined with other structures such as elected boards or consensus-driven meetings, as is the case in Noisebridge.
There is a loose, informal tradition at many hackerspaces of welcoming visitors from other similar organizations, whether across town or internationally. Free exchange of ideas, skills, and knowledge are encouraged, especially at periodic gatherings sometimes called "build nights", "open door" or "open house" days.
Makerspaces are increasingly being included as learning spaces in schools, learning commons, and other educational facilities.
Ethic
Hackerspaces are widely defined on hackerspaces.org as “community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects”. The exact functioning of the space varies from place to place and is determined by its members and while there is no blueprint or set of guidelines to create a hackerspace, they generally follow a “hacker ethic”, which “include freedom, in the sense of autonomy as well as of free access and circulation of information; distrust of authority, that is, opposing the traditional, industrial top-down style of organization; embracing the concept of learning by doing and peer-to-peer learning processes as opposed to formal modes of learning; sharing, solidarity and cooperation”.Hackerspaces have also been described as physical manifestations of the peer production principles.
Equity and justice-centered making
Large opportunity gaps in science and engineering persist for youth growing up in poverty, and in particular for African American and Latino youth, and have become a focus of STEM-rich Making. The evolving maker movement has generated interest for its potential role in opening up access to learning and attainment in STEM, with advocates arguing for its “democratizing effects" – with access to a makerspace, “anyone can make... anyone can change the world”. Makerspaces potentially offer opportunities for young people to engage in STEM knowledge and practices in creative and playful ways, where “learning is and for the making”.However, an explicit equity-agenda has been fairly absent in the maker movement, especially as it relates to sustained engagement in making. The movement remains an adult, white, middle-class pursuit, led by those with the leisure time, technical knowledge, experience, and resources to make. Even with the growth of community-based makerspaces, users of these spaces tend to be white adult men. The median salary for those involved in the maker movement in the US is $103,000, with 97% of those who go to Maker Faires having college degrees. Only 11% of the contributions to Make Magazine are female. Thus, as the maker movement has become formalized, the powerful knowledge and practices of communities of color or of low-income communities have not yet become central to its discourse.
Emerging research has begun to address how the maker movement might address equity concerns broadly. There is recent research in this area, which is challenging the field to consider new directions in the design of maker spaces, in maker space programming and pedagogies, and in how to make sense of the outcomes of making. These include: 1) Expanding what counts as making; 2) Design of makerspaces that foster an open, flexible and welcoming atmosphere to youth; 3) Maker space programs and pedagogies that support an equitable culture of making, the incorporation of participants’ cultural knowledge and practices, a focus on new literacies; and valuing multiple iterations and failing-forward; and 4) Expanding the outcomes of making to include agency, identity, and the after-life of maker projects. Cutting across these areas are specific attention to gender and computer science, indigenous epistemologies and maker activities, and how makerspaces may ground STEM-rich making in the lived experiences and wisdom of youth of color and their families and communities.
One emerging area of studies examines the production of an equitable culture in making, including in-depth longitudinal cases of youth makers in community settings, how youth and community co-design for equitable learning opportunities and outcomes.