Do-ocracy

A hackerspace (also referred to as a hacklab, hackspace, or makerspace) is a community-operated, often "not for profit" ( 501(c)(3) in the United States), 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

Hackerspaces with open membership became common throughout Germany in the 1990s in the orbit of the German Chaos Computer Club (CCC), with the c-base being probably an example. The concept, however, was limited to less than a dozen spaces within Germany, and did not spread beyond borders at first. Most likely this was because initial founding costs were prohibitive for small groups without the support of a large organization like the CCC. From 1997, Chicago's Autonomous Zone Infoshop hosted "Unscrew U", an early hacking and repair program that met weekly.

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 (founded 2009) has put the tools required to build hackerspaces within reach of an even wider audience. For example, Bilal Ghalib (who had previously worked on a hackerspace documentary) 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 (SpaceShop Rapid Prototyping Lab) 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.

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 mate