[hackerspaces] Hackers in Residence, Exchanges Merge

[David Potocnik]

Hey hellekin, buzz, list,

Well this is awkward,

I helped set up this wiki mod thing 2.5 years ago, together with
Wrought (in bcc), and I'm kind of maintaining it.
My understanding of what "residencies" mean is a (third) completely
different one. I think Wrought shared this understanding but maybe
not.

For me "residencies" are:
* a plural of "residency". Dictionary: "the fact of living in a place."
* like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist-in-residence (artist
residencies), where stay (=living space) is also provided, sometimes
with the artists themselves funding their own stay expenses (This is
also the case with all the hackbases I'm aware of, including
totalism.org), sometimes not (like Tsinghua).

So to me, being a "residency: maybe/yes" hackerspace basically means
that a space is interested to welcome touring hackers in the lab +
will make an effort to find them a place to stay. This either with
some arranged place for that inside the hackspace (like I saw at
Brussels or Bologna, or of course in hackbases), or some member's
couch, or something like this.

With this understanding in mind, Hackbases are just a tightly-coupled
and optimized space for hacker residencies. (Also to me, just opening
the lab to travelling hackers is a given by both my conviction and
experience. I would never consider making this an attribute.)

----

The description was written by Wrought. Rereading, it looks ambiguous.
But, besides what I remember us two speaking, the "host" part there
and my understanding of "residencies" that's quite established at
least in the art world made my interpretation.

>From https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Residencies :
"Hacker residencies or hackers-in-residence (also hacker-in-residence
and hackbase) are programs to find, accept, and ***host*** an
individual or group in a region or single hackerspace to work on some
project, set of tasks, or open-ended benefits for a limited amount of
time. Hopefully there is some means of financial support including but
not limited to: travel fare, housing, food, general living costs, and
perhaps other costs like insurance or materials. "

---

Anyway, now we have 160 spaces that said "yes" or "maybe" to
whatever's written up there. It would probably be a good idea to clear
it up in some way, probably by:
* adding some new unambiguous attributes ("can host", etc). I've added
a "residencies_contact" with this direction in mind a few days ago.
* contacting the existing spaces and asking them what's up

But so far when I've tried actually using the list myself, it did
appear that the spaces shared my understanding.

David / totalism.org


On 8 January 2016 at 20:24, Bastiaan van den Berg <buzz at nurdspace.nl> wrote:
> it does sound pretty foreign in the ideas of most european hackerspaces, not
> really affiliated with the art world
>
> but for instance 'worm' in rotterdam has residency, and labels themselves
> (on some places) as hackerspace. for them, this means having a artist travel
> from their housing&studio to your housing&studio and work on a project
> either 'worm' picked earlier or you will determine within scope during the
> residency , as it does for most in the art space
>
> i can see something like that working well for self-housed 'hackerbases'
> which i believe hackerspaces will evolve into unavoidably ;)
>
> for instance, you could invite someone you know that has a certain skillset,
> to get a project you are working on finished faster, and fund the
> hackerspace for the made investments in that person, with profits from the
> project (in a typical nonprofit setup)
>
> whereas exchange is just more about giving your neighbours access to your
> shed for working on their bike, sorta
> --
> buZz
>
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