[hackerspaces] Hackerspace drama, oh my!

[David Potocnik]

There's another perspective to this.
I guess Torrie & the hackers of Ackron are going to be okay - they
started a new space right? They moved their stuff and got another
lease and all is well?

"Advice I give most folks starting a hackerspace, start a community
first.  Find the people you want to start the space with.  Worry about
that.  because at the end of the day, even if you don't have a space,
that community is worth way way more."

...Or just simplify building spaces (sharing protocols & know-how),
build a lot of them and cross-pollinate (travel, hang out). Fork,
collaborate, merge. Set up varieties, name them and setup
instances of them. Find and argue about good practices and patterns
with whoever comes to this platform.
As the thing progresses on we'll keep having a clearer and clearer
cartography of different hacker belief systems, and a better idea of
how they can and cannot coexist.

There is the more stable isotopos: Coworking spaces, Makerspaces, Fablabs.
I believe Hackerspaces and Hackbases (live-in hackerspaces) should be
unstable, and definitely not without politics.
They should be, and sometimes are, avantgarde experimental political machines.

David
from CHT#1 hackbase /\/ http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Cyberhippietotalism


On 2 July 2014 04:07, Ryan Rix <ry at n.rix.si> wrote:
> matt <matt at nycresistor.com> writes:
>> I think this boils down to the dichotomy of hackerspace vs co-working
>> space.
>>
>> If you build up infrastructure and expect a community to show up in
>> it, don't be surprised if more than one community shows up, or the
>> community that shows up is not one you want to be a part of.
>>
>> Noisebridge suffers the tragedy of the commons in a pretty severe
>> way... having had mole people living in their basement and bi-polar
>> homeless people show up and and claim they are 'sleep hacking'.
>>
>> That's not what I am talking about. What I am talking about is the
>> last line in that piece :
>>
>> "A lot of this can be traced to our collective inability to remember
>> our core pillars of consensus, excellence, and do-ocracy. There is no
>> one person or event that can be blamed. As a community, we failed to
>> hold close the values we had. We were hacked by policy hackers."
>>
>> Now I don't know anything about synhak... so I am just going to speak
>> to the perspective brought forth by the person who wrote this piece.
>> This is a person who enjoyed the community that arrived at synhak in
>> the early days. As the space grew and changed and time went on, so did
>> the culture and so did the community.
>>
>> I think Torrie is talking specific solutions but not seeing the forest
>> through the trees. When torrie talks about common values along side
>> mission statement, and limiting growth of new membership. What she is
>> really talking about is fostering a community rather than
>> infrastructure. She's focusing more on being with the people she wants
>> to be with, than focusing on building a space.
>>
>> And I think that has worked out very well for NYC Resistor. We like
>> each other. We've liked each other with fairly decent success for 5-6
>> years. And while folks have grown apart and there has been some
>> inevitable culture shift. The community has remained strong.
>>
>> So, the answer is simple. Synhak like noisebridge built a space. And
>> communities fought for it, and some took it and some lost it. Much
>> like noisebridge. NYC Resistor built a community in a coffee shop...
>> everything else came later.
>>
>> Advice I give most folks starting a hackerspace, start a community
>> first. Find the people you want to start the space with. Worry about
>> that. because at the end of the day, even if you don't have a space,
>> that community is worth way way more.
>
> Well written, Matt.
>
> r
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