What is a Hackerspace?

This is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately.  I did a podcast interview on Evadot today for Hackerspaces in Space with my friend Greg.  During the interview the host, Michael Doornbos, asked us this question: “what is a hackerspace?”  We gave Michael several half-answers about what we do at a hackerspace, but in the end, came up a little short of a real explanation.

The problem, I think, is that we were trying to explain what hackerspaces do, when we should have been talking about the people who join hackerspaces.  That is, hackerspaces are defined not by what they do, but by the people they are comprised of and the ideals they embody.  I’d like to borrow some language from the free culture movement:

A free culture is one where all members are free to participate in its transmission and evolution, without artificial limits on who can participate or in what way. The free culture movement seeks to develop this culture by promoting four things:

• creativity and innovation;
• communication and free expression;
• public access to knowledge;
• and citizens’ civil liberties.

I think that’s pretty spot on.  Hackerspaces are communities of people who seek ownership of their culture through creation.  The key is, when someone asks you what sort of things a hackerspace builds, the answer is basically: anything.  We build anything.  The idea is to build, and in doing so, to take back a little piece of culture from McDonalds or Walmart every time.  How refreshing, especially in a world of credit cards, the “toss it and buy a new one when it’s broken” attitude, and mass production.

Tags: free culture movement, hackerspaces, hackerspaces in space, workshop 88

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.