[hackerspaces] Abuse Of Power

[Yves Quemener]

On 14/04/13 13:00, Walter van Holst wrote:
> By day I'm a lawyer and everytime a client comes up with 'I need a
> foundation/limited/incorporated' my question is: 'what is the problem
> you're trying to solve?'
> 
> If governance is the issue, a foundation tends to be a very lousy
> choice.

I don't say it often, but here I agree with the lawyer.

Here is a clear case for "make a tool that does one thing, and does it
well". As I see it, hackerspaces.org currently has two "missions" :

- Handle mailing lists. It is a simple task that is well handled by
http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/
Strangely, it seems to be solely used by French spaces, I wonder why...

- Handle the list of hackerspaces. There has always been problems and
criticism with this, arguments about what is and what is not a hackerspace,
but all in all it works fairly well as a map of "places of interest" when
you move to a new place.

These two things are not broken, so as the saying goes, don't try to fix them!

There are many more things that can be done for the hackerspace movement,
but as far as I am seeing, none of them *requires* to be hosted under the
name hackerspaces.org.

A foundation/federation/lodge/council/whatever would have as much impact on
hackerspaces-foundation.org than on foundation.hackerspaces.org. This kind
of structure has been discussed numerous times and like a lot of the
readers on this list, I doubt that one will ever succeed. Prove us wrong
and after that, its URL will really be of little importance.

Iv