During the past decades, hacking has mostly been associated with software development. Furthermore, most but not all hacker generations (from MIT hackers to Open source) have been introvert; participants have been hiding in cyber bush, avoiding contact with ‘great’ public, staying in virtual world. This is now changing as new walks of life are being explored with a hacker mindset, thus bringing back to memory the origin of hacking in hardware development. Hackerdom is characterised by an active approach to technology, undaunted by hierarchies and established knowledge, and a commitment to sharing information freely.

The creation of hacker/maker-spaces in many countries around the world has provided an infrastructure which might be seen as return to old skool hacking where software is not the king. This new  ’do-it-yourself’ culture has multiple forms and names: hackerspace, makerspace, fablab, 100k garage just to mention a few. You can read more about the forms from Troxler’s[1]  article. For the sake of clarity I will put all the above terms under one term: ‘Peer production’. I know it is not the best term since it emphasizes production and neglects the social aspects of hackerspaces (physical space which is center of local hacker community) . Discussion around ‘peer production’ has been active during the last years. Still, empirical information about ‘peer production’ communities has been minimal. Some scholars have done in-depth hacker interviews, but statistical data is missing.

With this survey, which has been conducted 2010 and 2011, I wish to help in filling in the gap. Intention is to do same survey every year. Results of the 2010 survey can be found from here: http://extreme.ajatukseni.net/2010/07/19/hackerspaces-members-and-involvement-survey-study/ In this blog entry I will represent 2011 results and compare those to previous results. You can do your own analysis too! Download the results (raw) from here: http://meegonetwork.fi/~kyber/research/hackerspaces/survey-2011/. The form used is also available in the same folder (defunct). Last year’s form and raw data are in separate folder: http://meegonetwork.fi/~kyber/research/hackerspaces/survey-2010/

This blog post will be part one of the analysis. Second part will be published during summer 2011.

1. Preparing and doing the survey

Just like last year, survey was conducted by using Google Documents/Form. This was criticized and I admit that critic is just. Doing surveys with tools that at least some hackers see ‘unjust’ and proprietary is not good. Some hackers did not take this survey because of that.  In the future, such surveys should be conducted with other tools, preferably with open source based. This and other topics related to future surveys will be discussed in more details in the last chapter.

Anyway, I used same google form in this survey too. I just updated the form. No major changes were made; a few new options to some questions and one new question. New question was inspired by discussion that has been dwelling in hackerspaces mailing list (http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Communication) for ages. That topic has been “What is a hackerspace? How can it be defined? Should some of the spaces listed in hackerspaces.org be removed or not? If so, based on what criteria?” Result has been almost always the same. Hackerspaces can and should not be defined rigidly, because that would create artificial boundaries and that is not part of hacker culture or values. Discussions have involved business aspects too. Some hackerspaces are more oriented to business than others. Debate has been whether so called commercial hackerspaces are seen as hackerspaces or not. This inspired me to add a new question to the survey. I wanted to know attitude towards different kinds of funding sources. Is it ok to have donations (money, devices, equipment) from companies? Or does desire to be independent rule company donations out? What about governmental support? Is that more approved? I decided to add question about funding sources. Question was with likert scale options.

Survey was launched June 16th 2011 and was closed 30th June. That left people 2 weeks time to participate. Message and link to survey was posted to hackerspaces discussion list, diybio list and some other minor hacker oriented lists. Survey was not published in social media to avoid biased participants. If twitter or other social media would have been used, some non-hackers would have most likely have taken the survey. Reminder about the survey was posted a few days before closing.

2. Results

Two hundred and fifty (250) participants (25 females, 223 males, 2 ‘no answer’; mean age = 31 years, range: 13-62 years) from 87 hacker communities (19 countries) took part in the study. That is 49 more participants than last year. Majority of the respondents were from active hackerspace (90,4%). Similarly majority was member in one hackerspace (90,8%). About 48% of the participants lived in Northern America, 39% in Europe, over 9% in Australia and 3,6% in Southern America. One participant was from Asia (China). None of the participants were from Africa. Compared to last year survey stats, percentage of European respondents dropped by nearly 9%, hackers from Australia found the survey this year (8,7% up). Low amount of Asian hackers, might be partly explained by limitations in access to all content in web (for example in China).

2011 survey seems to confirm most of the results found 2010. No dramatic changes were found. Just to make it easier to understand comparisons in the below charts and tables, here’s basic numbers from both surveys.

Table 1: Basic stats & geographical distribution

2.1. Members - age, gender and education

The results of this year’s survey seem to confirm last year’s results. The gender and age deviation of peer production community members follows the results found in FLOSS related surveys[2, 3]. Last year common member was 26-29 years old male (94%) who has college level or higher education. Nothing much has changed. According to survey results, 2011 common member is 27-31 years old male (90%) who has college level or higher education (64%). It must be noted that drawing direct connection between respondents gender and hackerspace members’ gender distribution would be dangerous.  90% of respondents were male, but it does not imply that same applies to hackerspaces in general.

Age

Figure 1: Age histogram 2011

Gender does not seem to make any significant difference when hackers are grouped by age. It must be noted that only 10% of the respondents were women. That is 4%  more women than last year.

Figure 2: Age groups by gender 2011

Education

Figure 3: Respondents education 2011

Table 2: Respondents education 2011 and 2010

The only significant change is raised amount of hackers with Master’s Degree. In 2010 it was 14% and this year it was over 20%.

2.2. Members - membership

Based on the survey results, most hackers are members of just one community (nearly 91%). Compared to last year results, memberships in two communities has dropped by nearly 7%.  Tendency seems to be member in less hacker communities. This can be seen when comparing multi-community membership counts 2010 and 2011. This might suggest that hackers have found their ‘home’ and are more engaged and committed to one local hacker community. This could be partly explained with ‘death’ of some hackerspaces, which can have caused membership concentration to strong and active hackerspaces.  Of course this is just a guess that can’t be confirmed from the data. Another option is that raised participant count in 2011 survey has caused this change.

Figure 4: Hackerspace membership 2010 and 2011

2.3. Members - interests

Member interests were asked in one question: “In general my interest with the hackerspace is MOSTLY about”. Respondents were given  a predefined group of interest areas such as software hacking, networks and building objects. Respondents were told to choose max 3 options, but some selected all. In the 2011 survey one new option was added. For some reason I did not think of social aspects of hacking communities last year (2010) and that kind of option was absent. Term ‘Social aspects’ refers to events and meeting people, which was told to respondents in parenthesis. Respondents were also given opportunity to choose ‘Other’ and give some sort of clarification.  Below is comparison chart for 2010 and 2011 results.

Figure 5: Interests 2010 and 2011

In the 2011 survey, top 3 interests seem to be building objects (82%), social aspects (67%) and software hacking (65%). Compared to last year, both mobile hacking and game development dropped. Of course, adding the new option ’social aspects’ might have partly caused the change.  Nevertheless, it seems to be clear that hacker communities are about building things. Option ‘other’ included several topics and areas, but to mention a few: learning, bio hacking, biology, biotech, energy, diybio, robotics, 3D printing, chemistry, science & math, foundry work, fabrication techniques not available at home, podcasting, fibre-crafts and chemistry & physics.  Among the above topics, term ‘Learning’ appeared several times, which suggests that learning in general is important for people (not a surprise).   Also robotics and biology related hacking were mentioned several times. This suggests that hackers are getting more and more active in diybio, which has also caught the attention of press [5, 6, 7].

2.4. Members - Motivation

Member motivation was asked in likert scale. The participants were asked to tell how signicant different reasons for contributing in hackerspace are. The question included eight claims (row) and options were presented using a five-point Likert scale.

Altruism, community commitment, meeting other hackers in real world and having fun seem to be the most important factors of motivation. About 80% (last year 77%) of the participants seem to be contributing to community without expecting something in return. About 75% feel that commitment to community is one of the most important sources of motivation. For nearly all (95%) meeting other hackers and hacker-minded people and having fun (98%) are the most important reasons to participate in hackerspace activity. In other words, the social factor of peer production communities seems to be the key element.

Table 3: Motivation for taking part in hackerspaces - 2011

When compared to last year situation, no major changes can be found. Nevertheless, something can be said. Attitude towards earning money has (only) slightly become a bit less negative. Same has happened to building reputation.

Figure 6: Member motivation 2010 and 2011 comparison

2.5. Members - time spent on hackerspace related activities

Survey participants were asked how much time they spend on hackerspace related activities in a week. Responses were in free text format, not as predefined options (which could have been better). Responses were grouped to 2-hour periods. Just a few answers were dropped away. It seems highly unbelievable (and impossible) that someone would use 300 hours or more on hackerspace activities in a week. Commonly hackers use  roughly same amount of time as last year (2011: 10,6 hours and 2010: 9,7 hours). Histogram does seem to suggest that some changes has occurred. Last year two options - 4-6 hours and 10-12 hours - were most common, while other amounts were less popular. This year distribution is more even. It seems that hackers use either a little time (2-4 hours) or a lot of time (18 hours or more) in hackerspace related activities. Values in the middle got lesser hits. This might suggest that there are two groupings: ‘the mass’ (a few hours) and enthusiasts (high amount of hours).

Figure 7: Time spent on hackerspace related activities per week - 2010 and 2011

2.6. Members - activity

Hackers participate in community related activities about 10 hours per week. What kind of things they do? Question was: “In general my projects in the hackerspace are about” which was followed with 7 predefined likert scale options. Given options were: Software development / hacking, Hardware development / hacking, Website/Web-app development, Management (financial or otherwise), Organize events/nights/sessions etc., Administrative tasks (email lists, servers, etc.) and Mobile device related hacking.

Figure 8: In general my projects in the hackerspace are about

Does gender matter?

Even though the amount of women in survey was rather low (and gut-feeling is that same applies to the amount of women as members in hacker communities), I saw important enough to do some cross tabulation and use gender as one factor. I must stress that gender is not the issue in general. It is used just for the sake of research. Keep in mind that hacker ethics does not want to use bogus criteria (such as gender, age or education) to judge people. I compared the types of activities people do in hacker communities by gender. In other words, intention was to find out is there differences between the genders; what men like to do and what women like to do. The results indicate that women (compared to men) are more often involved in website development and organizing events.

Figure 9: Women are prone to organizing events

Figure 10: Women are more prone to web related projects

Men are more prone to software and hardware hacking. Although women have strong interest in software development and a little less in hardware related projects. Mobile device hacking was not popular among respondents and it is dominated by men. Both genders are equally less involved with management and administrative tasks related projects. More profound results can be found from separate file.

2.7. Community

A few of the questions were about the community (local hackerspace/makerspace member of which respondents were).

Amount of members

Respondents were asked to give estimated amount of members in their local community. This does not correlate directly to reality, since some respondents might be less aware of the community status. In other words, answers are probably mostly given by ‘gut-feeling’. Furthermore it is somewhat unclear what people understand with member, who are included as members. Question included predefined drop-down options: 1-10, 10-20, 20-50, 50-100, 100-200 and 200 or more.  According to results 40% of local communities have 20 - 50 members. Second most common size is 50 - 100 members. It must be noted that these figures include all kind of community statuses: planned, building and active. If these answers would be cross tabulated with community status, the results would be more informative. I will do more analysis later and that includes cross tabulation of several factors. Anyway, below is pie chart and table of the 2011 survey results.

Figure 11: Member count in local hacker community (estimated) 2011

Funding

This topic was added to 2011 survey. I was curious to see attitudes towards different funding sources. Participants were given following with likert scale options: company donations (money), company donations (devices, equipment, etc.), Membership fees, Governmental sources (aid from different programs which help building and maintaining volunteer activities)  and Donations from individuals (money or other resources).

Figure 12: Your opinion about from which sources hackerspace funding and resources can/should be obtained

I must admit that I’m a bit surprised that company donations (money) were less disagreed than governmental support. It isn’t surprising that membership fees seems to be most approved source of funding. Device and other equipment donations from companies and all sorts of donations from individuals gained a lot of support. It must be noted that in some cases, if company donations are accepted, they must be without strings attached. That is required to maintain community independence from external forces. Nevertheless, it is clear that money or other kind of support in any form coming from individuals is preferred over company or governmental sources.

3. Discussion

More women and biohacking

Women seem to have found peer production communities (hackerspaces, makerspaces, fablabs, diybio, etc.). Peer production communities are still ‘man caves’, but amount of women in hacking seems to be rising. The average hacker is middle-aged male who has quite high education. The emergence of biohacking was also visible in the survey. Some of the respondents stated ‘biology related issues’ as their interest why they are involved in peer production communities.

Motivation includes social aspects

In brief: altruism, community commitment, meeting other hackers in real world and having fun seem to be the most important factors of motivation. Some of the results seem to confirm my motivation model described with last year’s survey results. Compared to motivation models created in/by Open source research, peer production communities have strong ’social motivation factor’. Below is the model about which you can read more from this blog post here.

Figure 13: Motivation model

Peer production communities have high interest towards meeting other hacker-minded people in real life (see table 3 and figure 6). Most communities aim to have physical space to function as community center. They are also known to arrange a lot of real life activities which are often related to learning, education and of course having fun. Having fun is one of the most important motivation factor (see table 3) and having fun is fundamental part of social life.  Without having fun (while doing things), there would not be any social activities.

About doing surveys

After publishing the survey, some people gave feedback about using Google products. I was told that some hackers did not participate because of this. I admit that Google is not the best ‘partner’ for doing surveys. Google products are not accessible in some countries (China, so I was told). Besides, Google is seen as ‘evil’ by some hackers. Other kind of tools (open source) would be better. Another thing that came up was the lack of different languages. Not all people understand English and would like to see this survey in other languages too. Partly I understand this language need. Nevertheless, if you want to be a good hacker, you need to learn English. It is the most used language among people and also among hackers. Nevertheless, one could start a open source project that would produce and maintain survey in several languages.

As I stated before, this blog post will be the first part of my analysis. I will post another blog entry with more cross tabulations and results later this summer. Until that, keep on hacking!

References:

[1] Troxler, P. (2010). “Commons-based peer-production of physical goods - is there room for a hybrid innovation ecology?” Retrieved Oct 15, 2010 from http://wikis.fu-berlin.de/download/attachments/59080767/Troxler-Paper.pdf.

[2] M. Aalbers. “Motivation for participation in an open source community.” http://download. org/documentation/bc2004/Martine_Aalbers/results-summary. 2004.

[3] T. Mikkonen, T. Vadén, and N. Vainio. “The Protestant ethic strikes back: Open source developers and the ethic of capitalism.” First Monday, 12(2):1-12, 2007.

[4] Baichtal, J. “What Does it Mean to be a Woman Hackerspace Member?” Retrieved July 6, 2011 from http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/07/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-woman-hackerspace-member.html, July, 2011

[5] Parijata Mackey, “DIY Bio: A Growing Movement Takes on Aging”.Retrieved July 6th 2011 from http://hplusmagazine.com/2010/01/22/diy-bio-growing-movement-takes-aging/

[6] Dave Mosher, “DIY Biotech Hacker Space Opens in NYC”. Retrieved June 9th 2011 from http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/genspace-diy-science-laboratory/

[7] James Bloom, “The geneticist in the garage”. Retrieved June 9th 2011 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/19/biohacking-genetics-research

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Hackers form a global community, which consists of multiple micro-communities (Barber, 2001, 14). Those autonomous micro-communities are constanly on the move; evolving, hibernating and dying. Hacker micro-communities have been the first to form virtual communities. Among hackers, the most common communication network and base for community is Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Hackers lurk on the channels often all the time, night and day following the text stream. Intense interactions and strong emotional ties are not uncommon among these virtual communities, the members share activities and resources with each other and interaction is supportive rather than comparative. (Whittaker et al., 1997) Rheingold has labelled those channels as “the corner pub, the caf‚, the common room–the “great good place” of the Net.” (Rheingold, 1993, 155) The participants of channels become familiar with each other without meeting in real life. The above virtual communities have been the ruling form of hacker networks for decades.

Over the past years hackers around the world, mostly in Europe and Northern America, have begun to move hacker networks and communities out of the virtuality to the real world. They have begun to form hackerspaces, hacker communities which have both virtual and real world bodies. This article attempts to define Hackerspace generation as the latest form of hacker community. In this article hacker generations are divided into two classes: introvert and extrovert generations. The description of hackerspace generation is build on comparing hackerspaces to hacktivism. The comparison is a valid tool since the two generations have shared history. Therefore both forms of extrovert generations, hacktivism and hackerspaces, are discussed in great length.

Introvert hacker generations

This article adopts Taylor’s view of hacker generations. Although Taylor’s view of hacker generations seems quite valid, it is out of date and needs to be updated to include hackerspaces as the latest generation. The updated generation model can be seen in the figure below.

Figure 1: Hacker generations. Source: Modified from Taylor (2005). Hackerspaces added by the author. Beginning of hackerspace generation is debatable. Hackerspaces emerged in small scale around 1995, but breakthrough happened around 2001-2002.

The generations are divided to two classes, extrovert and introvert generations. Characteristics of introvert generations can be identified to include at least the following. They have been satisfied to stay in somewhat closed circles. They have little or no connections at all to surrounding community and prefer to stay hidden from the public. They have formed independent small communities with little cooperation with other similar groups or communities. The extrovert generations, hacktivists and hackerspaces, in turn wish to be seen, be written and discussed about. In other words, they use the publicity to gain attention of the public. Furthermore, extrovert generations do not want to be separated from the surrounding community, instead they wish to be part of it and influence directly to it. Before discussing the extrovert generations in more details, the previous generations need to be addressed briefly.

The amount of generations varies, but most scholars agree that the first hacker generation was born in MIT during the late 1950s. These early pioneers of computing were labelled as the ‘true hackers’ or ‘original hackers’(Levy, 1984, 15-129) Phone-phreakers are often labelled as the second generation of hackers. (Gollin, 2010; Taylor, 2005; Rosenbaum, 1971; Sterling, 2002) In the 1970’s new generation of hackers emerged. Hackers like Lee Felsenstein, Efrem Lipkin, Bob Albrecht, Ed Roberts did not have access to mainframes. They had to build their own computers, which started the arise of personal computers. Games began to arise as a new form of computer applications in the 1980’s. Before this computers were mostly used merely in industry and science. (Flowers, 2008) Games and hackers have always had deep interwiened relationship. The relationship grew into new dimensions when commercial game developers enabled community based game modification or better known as modding. William Gibson’s Neuromancer and douglas Coupland’s Microserfs(Coupland, 1996) are used as the main examples of fictional portrayals of hacking. Coupland’s book is a vivid fictional (or factional) description of commercially opted hackers, microserfs, working for Microsoft. The life of a microserf is dedicated to their projects and the company. The microserf plods on at a low-level computer job and low salaries without the prospects of long-term financial success with relatively little autonomy.

The next generation, open source, is almost the opposite to ‘microserfs’. Many authors have written about the significance of hackers concerning the Open Source development, which is becoming more and more permanent part of societies as more and more official parts of societies in all levels of different institutions such as schools and administration. (Torvalds ja diamond, 2002; Lakhani ja Wolf, 2005; Lin, 2007; Lakhani ja Von Hippel, 2003; Sauer, 2007; Raymond, 2001) Hackers and open source movement have a close relationship with each other as the founder of the Open Source Initiative describes “[o]ne of the reasons that I support hackers is that they have been telling us for over 10 years that the emperor is naked.”(PBS, 2001) According to Lakhani and Wolf(2005, 6) the term hacker is a badge of honor within the F/OSS community, as opposed to its derisive use in popular media. Open source licences like GPL and it’s derivates are real world applications of abstract hacker ethic where “free exchange of information allows for greater overall creativity.”(Levy, 1984, 27)

Open source hackers began the transition from introvert to extrovert hacker communities. Their efforts gained a lot of attention and economical signifigance. Yet their intention was not to turn activities complitely ‘extrovert’. Most of the development is still more or less hidden and in the hands of hardcore hackers. Furthermore, the activities of open source hackers are not political and are concentrated in the virtual space. In the same time the transition towards more socio-politically oriented and extrovert hacker generation known as hacktivism was forming.

Politically active hackers

The term hacktivism was coined by Omega, member of Cult of The dead Cow (cDc) in 1996 (Ruffin, 2004). Ruffin was one of the main architects concerning the content or what the term hacktivism includes and resembles. What seems to be agreed in some level is that hacktivism transfers the tactics of previous activism in the real world to the realm of cyberspace. Hacktivism was borne out of a specific goal of resisting, “the commodification of the internet at the hands of corporate profiteers and violations of human rights at the hands of oppressive governments” (Manion ja Goodrum, 2000, p. 14). Such ideals are evident in the manifestos and group ideologies of hacktivist groups such as the Cult of the Dead Cow (cdc), the Electronic disturbance Theater (EDT) and the Electro-Hippie Collective. Hacktivists want to protest and disrupt; they do not want to kill or terrify.

According to one of the most public figures of hacktivism Oxblood Ruffin the first generation of the kids that “spent their time hacking soda machines” (Ruffin in McKay, 1998) in the 1980’s became middle-aged, age when people live the most active phase of their political lives (Smith ja H., 2009). The above kids were the first ones who grew up in the world which became more and more computer reliant. Furthermore, generation shares experiences of some great changes which causes sometimes fundamental changes in societies such as wars for example (Purhonen, 2007, 16). In this case the great change took place in the middle of the 1990’s. The growing importance of the Internet as a means of communication and the rise of graphical browsers can be seen as another plausible factor that fostered the formation of hacktivist generation.

Hacktivism is not a single-issue political activity. To be more precise, hacktivism is “[...] a policy of hacking, phreaking or creating technology to achieve a political or social goal”.(Fleming, 1998; TheHacktivist, 2003) It includes variety of political focuses and should not be treated as a simple entity.

In the above figure hacktivism is located in the end of the 1990’s. This might be somewhat misleading, since the creation of PeaceNet, a text-based newsgroup service, in 1986 allowed “political activists to communicate with one another across international borders with relative ease and speed.” (Wray, 1998). PeaceNet was the tool before the rise of world wide web, also known as www. To pinpoint the first incidents that could be labelled as hacktivism varies. If viruses and worms are excluded, then MilW0rms (hacker moniker) attacks against Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in 1998 can be identified as one of the first incidents. The above attack was a classical example of computer intrusion and defacement. During the same year hackers with monikers Bronc Buster and Zyklon, members of hacker group called Legion of the Underground (LoU), disabled firewalls of Chinese goverment to enable chinese people’s free access to web. Probably one of most the well-known hacktivist operation has been X-Ploit’s attack (1998) against Mexican officials, the government of President Ernesto Zedillo, with intention to support Zapatistas. In the attack X-Ploit defaced some of Mexico’s Finance Ministry and Health Ministry websites. Another group called Kaotik Team defaced 45 Indonesian websites to include message that called for independence of East-Timor. Based on these examples, year 1998 could be labelled as the birth year of hacktivism.

Figure 2: Figure 2: Significant Hacktivist organizations. Sources: CCC 2010; Still, 2005; TheHacktivist, 2003.

Some hacktivist organizations are still alive and some have ceased to exist. Two groups, cDc and CCC (see figure 2), were the initial forces to engage political hackerdom. The latter was established as early as September 12, 1981 in Berlin by Wau Holland and Andy Müller-Maguhn. Soon after that, cdc was founded in 1984 in Lubbock, Texas by three hackers. During the 1980’s CCC protested against French nuclear tests and some of the members of CCC were involved with the German Green Party. Today CCC is known for public demonstrations of security flaws of different systems. One of the latest demonstrations 2008 dismissed the security of biometric identification which can be used for example in passports. The group acquired and published the fingerprints of German Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble (Relph-Knight, 2008). The fingerprints could then be copied and used by anyone to fool fingerprint readers. CCC is the main organizer of the biggest annually held European hacker conference SIGINT. CCC also holds annual four-day conference Chaos Communication Congress. Besides the large conferences, the activities of CCC include a great variety of smaller scale conferences, own radio broadcasts and a magazine. In others words, CCC appears to have a significant role in hacking community. As it has been discussed before, hacker generations and organizations intertwine, about which the network of CCC is a great example. CCC is a large nation wide organization and it has established several hackerspaces around Germany (CCC, 2010). In brief, hacktivists have concentrated in the combination of hacking and socio-political issues both locally and internationally, yet at the same time their activities have had a significant role (see figure 3) in building the latest hacker generation which can be labelled as hackerspace generation.

Arising Public Form of Hacker Community

While the above described hacker generations are acknowledged by some scholars (see for example Sterling, 2002; Taylor, 2005) it might be missing the latest development if hackerspaces as one form of the new ‘do-it-yourself’ movement would not be added to it. Hackers are forming new kind of communities, which are quite different compared to earlier hacker communities. Hackerspaces are communities which have a physical space as a centre of the community. Since the hackerspaces as a movement is still new, a simple and compact definition is missing even among the persons who are involved in hackerspaces. Different hackerspaces use different names for their community: hacklab, non-profit workshop, Art Collective, makerspace, tech shop, fab lab and so on. The variety of names for the new ‘do-it-yourself’ communities expresses the variety and diversity of the movement, which might be best desbribed as “digital revolution in fabrication [... which] will allow perfect macroscopic objects to be made out of imperfect microscopic components”. (Gershenfeld 2007, 10)

Scientific attempts to clarify the differences of various ‘do-it-yourself’ hacking communities are rare. Even a shared understanding how to name the movement is still missing.

Troxler has adapted Gershenfeld’s (2007, 3-17) term ‘fabbing’, which is “commons-based peer-production of physical goods”. Troxler (2010, 2) Troxler uses the term as an umbrella for all forms of hacking described below. The term ‘fabbing’ might be somewhat misleading since the word is derived from fab labs (short for fabrication laboratory or fabulous laboratory), which are mostly NSF funded do-it-yourself communities. According to Troxler hackespaces are one form of ‘fabbing’. Other forms of fabbing are: fablabs, techshops, 100k garages, sharing platforms, and open source hardware. Troxler’s view of ‘fabbing’ or ‘do-it-yourself’ culture is more or less focused on the physical production of goods, which neglects the community aspects. Hackerspaces emphasize the role of community, the role of members and independence from outside influences such as funding. (Moilanen 2010) The situation is the opposite for example in fab labs, which are monitored by MIT. (Troxler, 2010, 3) The list of fab labs is maintained by MIT, which in turn is an example of control. A community can declare to be a hackerspace and list themselves to freely maintained wiki based list of hackerspaces. In other words, hackerspaces community itself regulates who can be labelled as hackerspace. Strong desire to be independent is shown in funding the space, which is often based on membership fees rather than external funding. Hackerspaces are hacker communities which apply hacker ethic and stress the value of community, while other forms of ‘fabbing’ seems to be sort of mini production networks or communities. The attitude towards business or business alike communities is what separates hackerspaces from techshops. Community which acts even slightly as a business can not be a hackerspace. dispite the limitations of Troxler’s model, it includes hackerspaces as one of the clearest form of ‘fabbing’ which has spread around the world. Furthermore hackerspaces ecosystem is the biggest form of ‘fabbing’, since the amount of hackerspaces is around 350, of which 250 active and 100 in building process. The amount of fab labs is around 100.(Troxler, 2010, 3)

Figure 3: Chaos Computer Club related Hackerspaces. Source: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/

Hackerspaces began to form during the late 90s, but the grounds for hackerspaces were constructed around the turn of the millennium in Germany by CCC. (Farr 2009) During that time, hackerspaces began to organize as assosiations or alike, became known to the public and identified hacker ethic as one of the key elements to guide activities. The year 2001 was a turning point for hackerspaces. during that time several still existing spaces were established. (Moilanen 2009) One possible reason for the growth might be the recession around the millenium, which was in general one of the ‘best’ recessions in history. The overall economical effects of the recession were relatively small.(Nordhaus 2002, 200-204) Yet it affected the IT sector and the technology bubble had just bursted in Silicon Valley. Therefore several companies were forced to reduce resources in IT expenditures and a lot of ‘hackers’ were laid off in Europe and in US. The hackers still needed a community to attach and different forms of ‘fabbing’ communities offered a new ‘place’ for them. For the above reasons I have located hackerspaces generation to begin at 2001.

Hackerspaces are hacker versions of ‘third places’ defined by Oldenburg. According to Oldenburg ‘third places’ refer to separate social settings or surroundings from the ‘first place’ (home and other similar settings) and ’second place’ (workplace). (Oldenburg, 1999) The third places are ‘anchors’ of community life, facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction. These places serve as focal points of community life, which has eroded due to commercial chains and unifunctional zoning policy.(Oldenburg, 2001, 3) In other words, we have abandoned public parks, playgrounds, schools, cafees and little local stores as places for community life. We have been growing apart from one anothers since the second World War. Third places are needed to reconnect to each other and strengthen community ties. To become a succesful third place, they must be locally owned, independent and small-scale and be based on steady-state business.(Oldenburg, 2001, 4) Furthermore, the places should be highly accessible, within walking distance, free or cheap and involve regularity. When these criterias are compared to hackerspaces, the similarities become obvious.

Eventhough a compact definition of hackerspaces is missing, some features can be assosiated with it. Firstly, a hackerspace is owned and run by it’s members in a spirit of equality. Secondly, it is a nonprofit organization, and open to the outside world on a (semi)regular basis. Thirdly, members of hackerspace share tools, equipment and ideas without discrimination even to outsiders. Fourthly, is has a strong emphasis on technology and invention. Fifthly, it has a shared space (or is working on a space) as a center of the community. Finally, it has a strong spirit of invention and science, based on trial, error, and freely sharing information. Hackerspaces are spesialiced third places for technically oriented people. Hackerspaces function to serve hackers’ “need to construct the infrastructures of human relationships”(Oldenburg, 2001, 2)

Hackerspaces want to be part of surrounding community to enhance technological knowledge and bring people together including the ones who are not so technology prone. Hackerspaces offer knowledge and skills to surrounding community and arrange classes, courses and demonstrations about various topics. They seem to rely on attraction rather than agitation. They also want to create a positive attitude towards technology and the possibilities it can offer to everyone. In this sense hackerspaces promote the hacker ethic, where one key aspect is: “You can create art and beauty on a computer.” (Levy, 1984, 43) and another one: “Computers can change your life for the better”. (Levy, 1984, 45).

Conclusions

Both generations - hackerspaces and hacktivists - have a lot incommon. Both see the possibility of real and virtual, the material and immaterial to merge and coexist. Common antagonistic division of the above worls in traditional hacker communities is blurred in hackerspaces and hacktivism.

Hackerspaces can be seen as the ‘third place’,a setting beyond home and work in which people relax, have fun and meet other hackers in some shared space and do so on a regular basis. Hackerspaces break the intrinsic nature of hacker communities, since they aim to reach to the public to lure more members, are (semi-)open to public and wish to be part of the surrounding community. Hackerspaces are extrovert version of formerly introvert and closed hacker communities. Although hackerspace can be labelled as a ‘third place’, it is a small local community which is technically oriented, not a knitting club or tee party.

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A topic which has been raised several times and in several contexts in the hackerspaces discussion list and IRC channel is what is a hackerspace. Some discussion has been about how to make a suitable division to ‘true’ hackerspaces and ‘others’. The rhetorics of this kind of discussion is about building the identity of hackerspaces. The rhetorics resembles the common identity definition process in all communities which is often related to ‘we’ and ‘others’ kind of thinking. Several kind of categorizations have been suggested. Most common categorization is about whether a ’space’ is commercial or non-commercial or  as one hacker puts it: “as to how to distinguish spaces that are not ‘Non-Profit, Member-Run’ Hackerspaces.”

Some have suggested that the financial models, governance models, real estate models, philosophical models and occupational models could be used as categories. It must be noted that the categorizations should not be seen as binary; black or white. Hardly any space is a perfect (or clean) example of any categorization. They are more or less combinations or different ’shades of grey’. In brief the division or tagging of hackerspace should describe the breadth of spaces out there, without having to get too deep into distinction between ‘we’ and ‘others’. The above suggested categories sound valid. Yet another category could be the political activity or interest to society related issues. In other words, the hacktivistic nature of hackerspace. Could some hackerspaces be seen as physical extensions of hacktivism?

While preparing my field research in Germany about the attraction of activism from the hacker perspective I gathered information about CCC (Chaos Computer Club) and hackerspaces. It should not be a big surprise to most hackers, that CCC is one of the most active hacktivist community in the world. Furthermore, CCC has been around for nearly 30 years. The image below is my interpretation of the hacktivism and hackerspaces. It needs more evaluation and research, but I find it already quite interesting.

The figure above tries to offer an overview of hacktivist organizations or communities around the world. Some communities such as EDT and Electrohippies collective do not exist anymore. Some hacktivist communities such as CCC and AHA (Activism-Hacking-Artivism) are still alive and very much active. I will not go to details about every item in the figure, instead I will discuss some of the CCC related issues. The connection between CCC and hackerspaces seems to be obvious since CCC has a lot of hackerspaces.  The hackerspaces which are ’spinoffs’ of CCC were selected from the hackerspaces.org list of hackerspaces. Therefore it might does not include every hackerspace which has some kind of connection to CCC. Furthermore, the connections with CCC and hackerspaces in the above figure have not been empirically verified.  I would be most willing to hear opinions and counter arguments about this topic from CCC related hackers. My intention is to interview (as part of my PhD Thesis study) politically active or oriented hackers during the next spring. If you are from Germany and consider your self as more or less politically active hacker or hacktivst, I would be most grateful if I could interview you. All interviews will naturally be anonymized. Send me email (note the email on the right column) or contact me in IRC (freenode.org#hackerspaces, nickname is kyb3R) and we can discuss the topic and schedules in more details.

Latest CCC activity

If hackerspaces and hacktivism can be associated, a few words about the CCC related activities is needed to clarify the nature of hacktivism concerning CCC. During the last years CCC related activities have made the news. March 2008, CCC  questioned the increasing use of biometric data which should not be part of any critical security application such as electronic passports. As an example about the security flaws of biometric data, they reproduced Schäuble’s (Home Secretary) fingerprint and published it. For most readers it is obvious that once a valid fingerprint can be reproduced the security value of it can be seriously questioned. In January, they  questioned German airports access security systems. They showed how to  outsmart the security barriers with a simple 200 € device. With this device you can read an (RFID based ) access card first - and then switch so that it emulates the card to open doors. In August 2010, CCC  hacked the new goverment ID card. ID cards inlude sensitive personal information. A report was published that indicated only a few obstacles in extracting personal information from the RHID based ID cards.

Water and oil?

The combination of hackers and politics is something that could be similar to water and oil. As we all know, water and oil is hard to mix together. They can be mixed, but oil and water tend to stay separate. Commonly hackers do not want to discuss politics or be involved in political activities (my interpretation). Nevertheless, some hackers have always been interested about the combination of hacking and politics, which can be labelled as hacktivism. To be more precise, hacktivism is a policy of hacking, phreaking or creating technology to achieve a political or social goal.  The above figure suggests that some hackerspaces are more hacktivist oriented than others. Even if a hackerspace has some kind of connection to CCC, historical or other, every member of the hackerspace does not have to politically active or oriented. The relationship between hacktivism and hackerspaces might be considered as natural since both are interested about hacking. Furthermore some hackers might see themselves as members of the both. The intensity of how politically active a hacker is varies, but the interest towards hacking (creating) is more or less static (high). Yet, politics and hacking in general is considered as water and oil, topics which normally do not coexist in hacking community world wide. Still it might seem valid to use political activity as one category.

Writings, newspaper and journal articles[21, 3, 18, 8], discussions[7], conference presentations[22, 6], guidelines[16] about and for hackerspaces has been done by several authors and hackerspace members. Hackerspaces and Makerspaces (later referred simply as hackerspaces) are here to stay. The movement has grown to include estimate of more than 300 spaces all around the world. The amount might look rather high, but keep in mind that alone hackerspaces.org lists 254 active hackerspaces[13]. It is probable that not all hackerspaces are listed in the above service. Also the amount of hackerspaces is rising (probably). In brief, hackerspaces as movement is alive and kicking.

What seemed to be missing was more detailed information about different hackerspaces and their members. This became obvious to me while I was looking for information about hackerspaces in the web. There is information, but the nature of the information is perhaps a bit abstract or higher level information which is though very much needed and used. I have also received some emails, where different people ask me where they could find more information about hackerspaces. My response was always pretty much the same:

“You might find some information and some articles about hackerspaces in the Web, but they only tend to scratch the surface of hackerspaces. Get involved in a hackerspace or possibly establish a new hackerspace, follow the general hackerspaces discussion list and browse the archives of the list. Get on the IRC-channel (#hackerspaces), keep your eyes open and participate. That’s the only way I have gained my information about hackerspaces. In brief, get involved!”

What I was looking for, and apparently some others as well, was information based on empirical survey data. Empirical data that was gathered from several hackers in different hackerspaces. This was the situation from which I got the initial idea of doing a small survey.

To fill the above described information gap, a small survey for Hackerspace members about their involvement was created. This survey did not have academic origins. Instead it was born out of author’s pure personal curiosity. Initial idea about the survey was posted to general hackerspaces discussion list June 23th with intention to find others who would be interested to contribute and to hear opinions about it. The author got some responses from people who encouraged to do the survey and expressed willingness to contribute. The results of this survey provide more detailed information about hackerspaces, which might be interesting for us (hackers) and to the rest of the world. It gives some hints about the status and orientation of hackerspaces.

1. Preparing and launching the survey

First thought was to create a simple web-application in Rails for the survey. Some people suggested that it could be done with Google Documents/Forms[5]. Another tool could have been SurveyMonkey[20]. The only problem with the latter is that you only get 10 questions and 100 responses per survey for the free accounts. Therefore it was ruled out, since the survey was expected to get more responses than 100 and the amount of questions was 18. At that time, using Google Documents to do a survey was not familiar to the author. After playing around for a while with the Google Docs, it was considered to include necessary functionality for this survey. And so, a simple form for the survey was created (by author and one other person) with Google Docs[15]. The survey was peer reviewed by one very active member of hackerspace community.

The survey was published June 26th 2010 in several hackerspace related discussion lists, which included hackerspaces general discussion list[7], DIYbio list[2], Open Manufacturing list[10] and a few minor national hackerspace lists (hacklabs-list, mode 5w list). The recipients were also encouraged to forward information about the survey to other forums, postlists and IRC-channels. A link to the survey was also added to the frontpage of http://hackerspaces.org/. A reminder of the survey was posted to the above lists July 10th. A day before closing the survey one hacker actively pushed the survey to several IRC-channels and hackerspace members, which in turn generated a spike of 30 more participants. The survey was taken off-line July 15th 2010, which gave participants 20 days to take the survey.

2. Results

Two hundred and one participants (12 females, 185 males; mean age = 30 years, range: 15-53 years) from 72 hackerspaces (20 countries) took part in the study. About 48% of the participants lived in Northern America, 47,5% in Europe, and 4% in Asia. One participant was from Australia. None of the participants were from Southern America or Africa.

2.1. About the members

There is no shared, clear and precise understanding what is the meaning of membership among hackerspaces. For some, it might include just the rent-paying and active people who participate the activities of hackerspace. For others, it seems that the number might include all possible people who are related to hackerspace activities either in real-life or in virtual world. This can be (atleast partly) explained by desire not to define hackerspace rigidly[14]. One definition of membership is given by Nick Farr, who defines “a member as a person directly involved with the upkeep and governance of a Hackerspace.”[17] The involment consists of several parts such as paying often periodical member dues to cover expenditures (rent, insurance, electricity, etc.) and contributing to several publicity and administration related tasks to keep the hackerspace up and running.

2.1.1. Age, gender and education

According to the survey results, the gender and age deviation of hackerspace members follows the results found in FLOSS related surveys[11, 1]. Common member is 26-29 years old male (94%) who has college level or higher education.

Figure 1. Age histogram.

Figure 2. What is the highest level of education you have completed?.

2.1.2. Activity

The frequency of different kind of projects hackers participate in was asked with predefined options. The survey participants were asked to give each project type (line) a frequency value (Almost all the time, Often, Do not know, Sometimes or Hardly ever). The results (figure 3) suggest that both software(SW) and hardware(HW) development are the typical activities. Both of them are often (SW 43% and HW 39%) part of hackerspace projects. A signicant proportion (23%) of the participants have projects that are all most all the time hardware related. Nearly half (48%) of the participants hardly ever do management related projects. This might suggest that management is done well and most of the members can concentrate on other types of activities. Other explanation is that management is neglected and in poor hands or handled only by few. The answer to which the reason might be, can not be discovered with this data. 39% of the participants hardly ever do Website/Web-app related development. One third of the participants are often involved in managing events. In the future surveys, it might be a good idea to add another option or two in this question. Obvious one would have been Mobile App development, since it seems to be one of the most interesting technical area (see figure 7).

Figure 3. In general my projects in hackerspace are about

2.1.3. Motivation

People tend to participate social activities online and offine for various reasons and for various purposes. The participants were asked to tell how signicant different reasons for contributing in hackerspace are. The question included eight claims (row) and options were presented using a five-point Likert scale.

Altruism, community commitment, meeting other hackers in real world and having fun seem to be the most important factors of motivation. About 77% of the participants seem to be contributing to community without expecting something in return. Roughly same amount, 76%, feel that commitment to community is one of the most important sources of motivation. For nearly all (98%) meeting other hackers and hacker-minded people and having fun (99%) are the most important reasons to participate in hackerspace activity. In other words, the social factor of hackerspaces seems to be the key element.

Figure 4. Your motivation for taking part in hackerspace.

Figure 5. Your motivation for taking part in hackerspace.

2.1.4. Participation in hours

Participants use varying amount of time to hackerspace related activities. Two groups can be discovered. Those who spend 4-6 hours and those who spend 10-12 hours per week in hackerspace activities.

Figure 6. I spend, on average, _____ hours per week on activities related to my hackerspace/makerspace?

2.1.5. Interests

Survey included a question about the activity interests of hackers. In other words, they were asked “In general my interest with the hackerspace is MOSTLY about?” Furthermore, they were instructed to choose max 3 from 7 predefined options. Options included option “other”, where participant could write additional interest(s). Several participants chose more than 3. The figure 7 shows the occurrences of each option.

Figure 7. In general my interest with the hackerspace is mostly about?

The results suggest that the most interesting issues are related to mobile devices, building objects (hardware hacking) and software hacking (programming,databases, etc). The ‘other’ included answers which were related to FLOSS ideology, copyright politics, documentation, expanding areas of interest, AI, biohacking and being with other like minded people.

2.2. About hackerspaces

The amount of different hackerspaces among answers was 72. It must be noted that the responses represent the subjective view of the participants which might not always be consistent with the reality because of false memories or otherwise.

2.2.1. Establishing and joining

Most participants (66%) joined hackerspace when it was planned/founded and without physical space. About 30% joined after it was up and running (had physical space).

Figure 8. At what point in the creation of your hackerspace/makerspace did join?

2.2.2. Membership

Most of the survey participants were founding members (49%). Over a third (36%) of the participants pay monthly or other periodical payments. If founding members are assumed to pay similar fees and the “starving hackers” are included, then the majority (89%) of hackerspace members are paying for the membership. The “starving hacker” refers to members who are given somekind of discount in payments for various reasons. The other (6%) in the figure (9) includes those who described their membership as member of some administrative council, landlord, facilitator or supporter.

Figure 9. Memberships by types

The majority of participants were members of one hackerspace (nearly 85%). Yet nearly 14% are members of two hackerspaces.

Figure 10. I am a member of ___ hackerspaces

2.2.3.  Variety of Boards

Survey included an open question about the management of hackerspace. Participants were asked “Does your hackerspace have officers or elected officials? If so, can you list their titles.” It was interesting to notice that in several occasions members of the same hackerspace gave opposing answers; the other claimed that they have a board (and even offered the amount of officers or titles), while another one said no. Therefore it does not make sense to do any statistical charts or tables about the results of this question. Instead some qualitative results can be obtained from the results. This kind of question should be refactored in similar surveys in the future to gain more uniform and unambiguous answers. Therefore the following statements should be read with caution. They offer some information about the hackerspace boards, but are more or less assumptions.

The most common size of board was 4-6 hackers. It normally consists of President (Chairman, Secretary General), Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer(s). Commonly the boards include also varying amount of different directors such as Event coordinator, Membership secretary, Public Relations, Fundraising, Social, Education, Web, Space protection, Space development and Space organizer.

The highest amount of board members was 9 members. Several hackerspaces did not have any kind of board. The reason for not having a board became obvious in the comments given by the participants. Some hackerspaces use “consensus and autogestion” (hackers’ self-management), “collective management” and “decisions are made through the majority vote of the membership as a whole”. A few hackerspaces use dictatorship, which was expressed a bit differently as “one ‘Fearless Leader’ who got it all going on”. Some do not want to give power to one or for those who just talk and therefore apply  ”a do-ocracy: those who do, also decide”. Several hackerspaces have a board which exists purely for legal reasons. It must be noted that even if a person is elected or otherwise selected to the board, priviledges should not be assumed, or as one hacker puts it “being an officer gives no more power than regular users, only more responsibility”.

3. Discussion (and beyond)

3.1. Middle-aged members.

A signicant amount of the hackerspace members are in the late twenties. This is consistent with the previous research about FLOSS community. The age situation in hackerspaces can be described to be expected, but it raises the question where is the younger generation of hackers? Where are the 10 -15 year old hackers? They are not in the FLOSS projects nor in Hackerspaces. Are they developing and playing Flash games? Or playing and modificating console and PC games? If so, then the young hackers are now part of the game hacker generation. In that case, it might just be a phase on the road towards more ‘productive’ hacking. Part of the low amount of young hackers might be explained with puberty; they just happen to be more interested about boys and girls and parties.

Another plausible explanation is the requirements of the surrounding community. Current education in high schools and universities might take a lot of energy and time of the youngsters. Since the amount of energy and time is limited, freetime activities suffer. I find it hard to believe that it is entirely a question of laziness. Or is the reason the alarming gap in knowledge between parents and their children when it comes to technology?[9] This refers to the fact that children of this time are more familiar with the computers than their parents. Kids are introduced with technology (computers) as young as 3 or 4 years old[4]. This leads to situation where technology plays more crucial part of the every day life of the kids and youngsters. Perhaps the parents might feel that the kids have enough ‘tech-life’ already and that they should do something else on their freetime. Or is the reason in the general atmosphere of societies? At least in some western countries, individualism and self-centered values are appreciated more than community values. Mizrach’s study of ‘new’ hacker ethic revealed somewhat similar individualistic tendencies among hackers[12].

Nevertheless, various comments in IRC channels and discussion lists cry out for younger hackers. Instead of looking for reasons from outside, perhaps the hackerspaces should adjust the activities, focus of projects and atmosphere to be more attractive for the young minds, parents and families. How? I do not exactly know. One possibility would be to put emphasis on the family instead of the kids and youngster. Instead of asking “How can we lure more kids to hacking?” we could ask ourselves “How can we lure more families to hacking?”. Of course we have to bare in mind that hackerspaces are not kinder gardens.

3.2. The rule of Critical Mass is followed

Hackerspaces seem to gain most of the members during the establishment phase (66%). This might suggest that hackerspaces are not created in a hurry. Membership type supports this assumption, since 48% of the participants of this survey were founding members. It seems that the initial founder(s) are patient enough to gather critical mass before establishing a hackerspace. Only 30% join hackerspace after it has been established and has a physical space. This might suggest that the physical space is not as important as some have expected. Another reason for joining the hackerspace early in the beginning might be the ’cheap’ monthly membership fees. The low amount of “starving hackers” (4%) might suggest that the monthly fees are reasonable so that discounts are rarely needed and money (or lack of it) is not an obstacle for joining.

3.3. Community roles

Based on the results of this survey I propose the following categories for the hackerspace community roles. Again, I must emphasis that the categories offer one model which might describe the hackerspace community with a little more precision. Hackerspace members are not limited to posses only one role. Instead they can have multiple roles. Furthermore, roles can switch from time to time. This is supported by the fact that some hackers are members of two or more hackerspaces.

3.4. Motivation model

Motivation can be described to include both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. An example of this two-subclass based model can be found in the articles and writings of Ryan and Deci[19]about self-determination theory. Intrinsic motivation can be defined as “the doing of an activity for its inherent satisfactions rather than for some separable consequence” [19] or “an activity simply for the enjoyment of the activity itself” [19]. Extrinsic motivation is “an activity [...] done in order to attain some separable outcome” [19] and because it includes instrumental value, reward or (fear of ) sanction.

However, some scholars have discovered different kind of categories to be more descriptive. Mikkonen et al.[11] and Aalbers[1] divides the motivation to three categories: knowledge-enriching(KE), group-enriching(GE) and self-enriching motivation(SE). Accoring to Mikkonen et al. self-enriching motives “are motives that can be interpreted to reward the individual’s hopes and volitions. Group-enriching motives could be interpreted as volitions and hopes that keep people in groups together. These motives are also related to norms and rules that regulate the sanctions and rewards for behaviors in the group…[K]nowledge-enriching motives that could be interpreted as motives to gain knowledge and learn both collectively and individually”.[11]. In the model (figure 11) different motivational factors are seen to increase information (knowledge), social (group) or individual (self ) value. The models of Mikkonen et al. and Aalbers are not described in details. If needed, the reader should read the articles referenced before.

Figure 11. Motives by Mikkonen et al. (2007)

Figure 12. Motivation model

The model adopts the three categories of previously referenced models with slight modications. Similar to Mikkonen et al. KE, GE and SE are seen to increase information. The biggest difference is that in this model the sociability is separated as the fourth category. It is more than just information. Sociability can be defined to mean “the relative tendency or disposition to be sociable or associate with one’s fellows.” Compared to FLOSS communities where the emphasis is in software development and activities mostly occur in cyberspace, the physical world activities (as well as social factors) are more important part of the of hackerspaces. Building and maintaining the community includes both physical and virtual activities and values. Physical space is a vital element of the hackerspace communities. It is the base, which binds the members together more tightly. In the base communities hold meetings and educational events, build gadgets, hold demonstarions, spend time with other like minded and storage projects (which might not be storaged for example at home for the sake of space or family life). The space works also as a window to the surrounding community. In other words, hackerspace communities are ‘more social’ (they have both virtual and physical aspects) than for example FLOSS communities. One reason to separate ’sociability’ from GE, is that it involved close contacts with the surrounding community (including people outside hacker community). An example of this is the education that some hackerspaces organize for various topics. The model denitely needs more thought, time and development.

About this survey and results

This survey was one of the first empirical surveys about hackerspaces. It revealed some information about hackerspaces and the members of different hackerspaces around the world. Two model constructions (motivation and membership roles) were build and introduced. This survey has just scratched the surface of hackerspaces and further research is needed. Part of the results were expected such as the average member profile. Nevertheless, it was fun to do this survey. Although the analysis took significant amount of time and energy, but that is normal. Besides, no one forced me to do it. The idea for this survey came partly from the community and became reality because of personal interest.

References:

[1] M. Aalbers. Motivation for participation in an open source community. http://download. org/documentation/bc2004/Martine_Aalbers/results-summary. 2004.

[2]DIYbio. Diybio google groups, 2010. http://groups.google.com/group/diybio/.

[3]C. Doctorow. Hackerspaces around the world, 2009. http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/30/hackerspaces-around.html.

[4]J.P. Gee. Good video games+ good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning and literacy. 2007.

[5] Google. Creating forms : Forms-google docs help, 2010. http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=87809.

[6] Hackerspaces. Building an international movement:  hackerspaces.org presented at 25c3, 2008. urlhttp://ftp.ccc.de/congress/25c3/video_h264_720×576/25c3-2806-en-building_an_international_movement_hackerspacesorg.mp4.

[7]Hackerspaces. Discuss hackerspaces general discussion list, 2010. http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss.

[8]J.Lahart. Tinkering makes comeback amid crisis, 2009. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125798004542744219.html.

[9]Jennifer LeClaire. Kids and tech: How much is too much?, 2006. http://www.technewsworld.com/story/52677.html.

[10]Open Manufacturing. Open manufacturing google groups, 2010. http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing.

[11]T. Mikkonen, T. Vadén, and N. Vainio. The Protestant ethic strikes back: Open source developers and the ethic of capitalism. First Monday, 12(2):1-12, 2007.

[12]S. Mizrach. Is there a Hacker Ethic for 90s Hackers. URL: www.infowar. com Molander R, and Siang S (1998). The Legitimization of Strategic Information Warfare: Ethical Consideration, Professional Ethics Report, XI (4), 1997.

[13]Jarkko Moilanen. Hackerspaces - size issues, 2009. http://extreme.ajatukseni.net/2009/12/26/hackerspaces-size-issues/

[14]Jarkko Moilanen. Viewpoints to the development of hackerspaces, 2009. http://extreme.ajatukseni.net/2009/11/14/viewpoints-to-the-development-of-hackerspaces/

[15]Jarkko Moilanen. A survey for hackerspace members about their involvement,2010. Copy of the form.

[16]N. Neulist. Hackerspaces: The legal bases (defcon 17 on august 2, 2009.), 2009. http://www.rogueclown.net/rogueclown/defcon_slides.pdf.

[17]Farr Nick. 2009. The rights and obligations of hackerspace members, http://blog.hackerspaces.org//2009/08/19/rights-and-obligations-of-hackerspace-members/

[18]R. Quintanilla. Hackerspaces and nasa, 2009. http://www.opennasa.com/2009/08/11/hackerspaces-and-nasa/.

[19] R.M. Ryan and E.L. Deci. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations. Classic Contemporary educational psychology, Denitions and New Directions* 1. 25(1):5467, 2000.

[20]SurveyMonkey. Surveymonkey: Free online survey software & questionnaire tool, 2010. http://www.surveymonkey.com/

[21]D. Tweeney. Diy freaks flock to ’hacker spaces’ worldwide, 2009. http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/03/hackerspaces.html.

[22]J. Weiler and J. Ohlig. Building a hacker space, 2007. http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/attachments/1003_Building a Hacker Space.pdf.

Some hackerspaces do not allow anyone under 18 to enter without supervision. Reasons for this normally vary a lot, but the most common reason seems to be avoiding accidents. If an accident would happen in a hackerspace, legal consequences could occur in some countries.

“It’s all about liability or the perception thereof. If you have an insurer that is okay with it, sweet. If not, prepare to pay to allow those kids in.” (Source)

“Children are NEVER allowed [...] for safety reasons.” (Source)

The above attitude or viewpoint is easy to understand. A lot of hackerspace activities include welding, wood work, machines, acids and even flammable materials. Besides it’s not just the materials that can make a hackerspace more prone to accidents, reason can also be the facilities (stairs, stuff lying around on the floors, etc..). Therefore a risk of accident is always present. Some kid could without anyone to know about it, hurt oneself seriously. The risk is present even for the adults, but they are supposed to take care of themselves and act in responsible manner. But it is common that kids do hurt themselves often. So what’s the news? That’s part of how they learn to live in this world. Although not allowing kids to enter a hackerspace without supervision can be well justified, it isn’t the only viewpoint.

Some hackerspaces (especially US hackerspaces) use waivers that the adults sign. If the kids of those parents who signed the waiver come to a hackerspace, they are to be supervised by the parent of the child. Another option is that parents of under-aged children sign the waiver for them. This seems to be a valid practice. Although it raises a question concerning those kids whose parents are not interested about hackerspaces related activities.(Source)

Some hackerspaces, depending on their location, need to take more strict attitude towards kids in hackerspaces. To get an insurance for a hackerspace can be hard, since they might not fit into existing categories of insurance profiles (Source). Another hackerspace allows minors to enter hackerspace as long as they are guests of a member. The ‘host’ in that case will be responsible for the safety of the kids.(Source)

What kids (can) do in hackerspaces?

Most likely the young kids (around 10 years old) will keep on doing the things they would do anywhere else such as drawing, watch nice video art, breaking (cheap) things apart. Some hackerspaces have gone a bit further and offered other type of activities.

“[...]a Soldering workshop with 10-12 year olds and it was a full success. And guess what, they did burn their fingers and did not spontaneously combust![...]“(Source)

“I gave one entry-level IT Security course for Kids. And I was overwelmed by the Fact that there were 20 of them […] Then told them to draw me a Computer Virus and a Computer Worm.”(Source)

It would be reasonable to assume that the activities would be mostly for boys, but it does not have to that way. It is interesting to notice that girls are taken into account also. I guess it depends on how you teach whether girls could also be interested about technical matters or not.

“Our next bigger project (starting in 3 weeks) is an Electronics workshop for 12-15 year old girls.”(Source)

Hackerspaces could offer a different kind of place and opportunities for kids to be creative, which is not possible in some schools and day-care-centers. The activities can and should be for boys and girls. Some have gone so far as to build for-kids-only hackerspaces.

Restrictions, rules and common sense

Here are some of the restrictions which are used by various hackerspaces. Age limit for kids is applied in some hackerspaces. Most common practise seems to be not to allow kids under 18 in hackerspace without a guardian. The age limits are not always rigid, exceptions can be made if needed case-by-case. The supervisors can be the parents or the person whose guests the kids are. Either way, some adult is there to look after them. Another restriction used is that kids are not allowed to access every part of the hackerspace. Those most dangerous areas might be locked or otherwise non-accessible. Of course this facility based restriction is not possible everywhere. Some seem to place more trust on parents to teach their kids what to do and not.

Allowing kids to enter hackerspace might cause some extra work to adults but most certainly it would make us adults to think out side the box. New ideas and interesting applications for different items could be found. Hackerspaces should not rule out anyone who is interested about hacking on the ground of age. Discrimination is not part of hacker ethic. Some kind of solutions to overcome different barriers which rule out kids in hackerspaces can and should be found. This just might take some time and sharing experiences and ideas. Nevertheless, a hackerspace should not be a substitute for day-care and hackerspaces are independent to make decisions suitable for them depending on local circumstances.

“As long as your hackerspace doesn’t change into a sweatshop i don’t see any reason to close the door for kids.” (Source)

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While browsing the hackerspaces.org pages and reading the discussion in post-list I came up with the traditional question about “How much is much?” In other words I became interested about the sizes of different hackerspaces. The traditional method to answer this type of questions is comparing somewhat similar objects to each other. In particular I was interested in comparing the possible differences of sizes between European and North-American hackerspaces. Reason to choose these two continents is that most of hackerspaces are located there. Another interesting question is the possible differences of hackerspace-size inside these continents.

About data.

Again I took the data from hackerspaces.org sites by using semantic queries provided by mediawiki platform. Data was retrieved 2009.12.25. The original data included 361 hackerspaces.

Some hackerspaces prefer to use ‘+’, ‘+/-’ after the number to indicate a rough amount of members. Those additional formattings were removed from the data to exact numbers. If a number was given to indicate a range (for example 40-60) the highest value was chosen. Those hackerspaces with member amounts like 1000 were removed from the data, to avoid biased results. Those hackerspaces which did not have any kind of number to indicate member count were removed. Also some anomalies were removed. An example of a removed anomaly is a hackerspace which was in planned status and yet it had 2718 members. Also those hackerspaces which had ‘closed’ status were excluded. After cleaning the data, sample size was narrowed to 254 hackerspaces.

During this little study, it became clear that there is no shared, clear and precise understanding what is the meaning of membership. For some, it might include just the rent-paying and active people who participate the activities of hackerspace. For others, it seems that the number might include all possible people who are related to hackerspace activities either in real-life or in virtual world. Obviously a great variety of alternative views fit in between of the above opposite views. For this study, any hackerspace with member-count higher than 400 was excluded, since to me it seems odd and unbelievable. There has been some discussion about the size topic in the hackerspaces.org postlist. In that context the extreme cases of member-counts were suspected to be companies that misuse hackerspace name and hackerspaces.org services. But then again, I might be wrong and a rerun of this study might be needed. In that study one could list all the anomalies and odd listings.

Continental differences.

Concerning the active hackerspaces there does not seem to be any significant differences in (median) members-count values. The only significant difference can be seen in the case of South-America, but it can be explained by the fact that only two hackerspaces are located there.

It seems that an average active hackerspace has 20+/- members.

What about differences between statuses?

Additional questions raised while looking at the collected data. It might be interesting to see is there any differences of different statuses. It seems that people seem to follow the basic recommendations about how to start a hackerspace. Hackerspaces.org has some guidelines and recommendations about how to start a hackerspace. To start a hackerspace a The Critical Mass Pattern (http://www.scribd.com/doc/9897224/1003Building-a-Hacker-Space#page=19) is crucial.

The rule of thumb is 2 + 2. You need a partner to get the initial idea kicked off, making two of you. You need two more people in order to get real work done. Don’t start before you are at least four people. From this point it’s easy to recruit more people. Aim for ten people for a start.

( http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/The_Critical_Mass_Pattern )

This pattern seems to fit current trends of how people start new hackerspaces. This can be seen from the table below where some statistical indicators are listed about hackerspaces in different statuses. New hackerspaces seem to be listed and stay in planned status while the member-count is around 4. When a hackerspace accomplices to raise members close to 10, it apparently starts building the hackerspace (status is changed to building).

Of course it is possible that existing hackerspaces can return to building status for various reasons, but that’s beside the point here. During the building phase, member-count raises. When the member-count is about 20 (more or less) the hackerspaces changes to active status. In other words, The Critical Mass Pattern seems to be valid and applied among hackerspaces. Another interesting observation is that the most common size of a hackerspace is 20 people.

As a conclusion:

1. the most common size of a hackerspace is 20 members.
2. the critical mass pattern is applied among new hackerspaces.

In this post I will try to define hackerspaces by comparing them to traditional, larger hacker culture and community. The idea for this post came to my mind while writing the “Viewpoints to the development of Hackerspaces”. Every hacker group and other computer related groups or clubs can not be called hackerspaces. Some groups that would look like a hackerspace don’t even want to be labelled as hackerspaces. Some hackerspaces avoid using the word itself in the groups name or in the descriptions of their group. Reasons for avoiding the word hackerspace vary but the most common is related to the uncertainty of how ‘others’ will react to anything that includes or refers to ‘hacker’. This fear of the opinions of other is an example of how communities are shaped, defined and identified also by others than the members of community. Jordan and Taylor (1998) have written an article about hacker communities (“A Sociology of hackers”) and I will use that article as the main starting point.

According to Jordan and Taylor the ‘imagined community’ of hackers can be described with six internal aspects and through exploring the community’s boundary between itself and the others(Jordan & Taylor 1998, 762-775). In this post community is understood as Jordan & Taylor so neatly put it: “[...]collective identity that members of a social group construct or, in a related way, as the ‘collective imagination’ of a social group. Both a collective identity and imagination allow individuals to recognise in each other membership of the same community.”(Jordan & Taylor 1998, 762-763). Previously mentioned 6 internal factors are: technology, secrecy, anonymity, membership fluidity, male dominance and motivations. In the following I will discuss each one of those factors. I will compare the factors to hackerspaces and try to find similarities and differences. The comparison is supposed to work as a tool to define hackerspaces. One way of defining a community is to find something that is near the concept to define and has been defined previously and compare them. In this case the concepts used are hackers and hackerspaces. The resulting definition will not be a compact but rather broad. Furthermore the definition will be scattered all over in the following chapters. Reason for this is that formulating a compact definition at this point of study would be too great a task and too ambitious. Not that I would lack ambition

Technology.

Hacking community has an enthusiastic relationship to technology and especially to computer and communication technology. The enthusiasm is shared and produces new ways to see things: “Hackers share a certain appreciation of or attitude to technology in the assumption that technology can be turned to new and unexpected uses. ”(Taylor & Jordan, 1998, 763) But the enthusiasm is not limited to computer mediated communication or technology. Hackerspaces include this enthusiasm and extent it to new heights. Different hackerspaces use different names for their community: hacklab, non-profit workshop, Art Collective, maker-space, tech shop, fab lab and so on. The variety of names for hackerspace communities expresses the variety and diversity of hackerspaces. What ever they call themselves, they often have a real life place in which all sort of machines and tools can be shared, used and stored. This is might be what nations need, the next great era of innovation, and industrial revolution to spark the economy from the bottom up. With the young talent, equipment, and new materials this movement has legs. The projects of hackerspaces can be ultimately anything from building an aeroplane to simple widgets and gadgets.

Secrecy.

According to Jordan & Taylor hackers have ambivalent relationship to secrecy. A hack has to happen in secrecy to be successful, but to gain recognition demands publicity. Sharing knowledge is also a key element in hacker culture, but the nature of activities (illicit) hinders the sharing by attracting the law enforcement agencies. Hackers operate in groups, which can be physically formed or exist in cyberspace through bbs, irc and other on-line places. The group has a significant meaning and purpose to some individual hackers. The group serves as a feedback channel; to gain and give information and to get credits from other hackers.

Hacking can be rewarding in itself, because it can give you a real kick sometimes. But it can give you a lot more satisfaction and recognition if you share your experiences with others. . . . Without this group I would never have spent so much time behind the terminals digging into the operating system.(Hackers citation from Taylor & Jordan, 1998, 764)

The above paragraph describes hackers as criminals, which is not the whole truth. The above paragraph probably describes how the public in general understands hackers. One of the reasons for this is that hackers are very commonly describe as vandals and criminals in the media. Not all hackers have ‘evil’ intentions even if they act in secrecy. Some people consider the act of cracking itself to be unethical, like breaking and entering. But at the same time they believe that ‘ethical’ cracking excludes destruction or at least moderates the behavior of people who see themselves as ‘benign’ crackers(Kulmala 1999). This is where the discussion turns to ‘Robin Hood Hackers’(Mitnick & Simon 2005, 91). These ‘Robin Hoods’ break into a system, explain (via email) to the system operator exactly how it was done and how the hole can be plugged. These hackers with good intentions are also known not to hide their identity with a moniker. An example of this kind of hacker is Adrian Lamo, who hacked several organisations . It is not said when the hacker with good intentions is obligated to inform the operator about vulnerabilities. This is also slightly controversial. For example Lamo installed a backdoor after he did not get access through unprotected proxy. He found a way to run commands in system level and installed a modified commonly used administrative tool. Again he gained access to computers without anyone knowing about it. Eventually after a month of discovering around the systems, Lamo contacted to administrators of Excite@Home and described the vulnerabilities of their systems.

The computer underground can be understood as a “community that offers certain forms of identity through which memberships and social norms are negotiated” (Taylor & Jordan, 1998,763). While keeping that in mind and remembering that hackers form a ‘collective imagination’ of a social group, it is possible to understand a hacking community that use computer mediated communication to exist worldwide and in which individuals often never meet offline. Hackerspace movement is rather different at least for some parts.

The hackerspace movement functions like an umbrella under which formerly scattered hacker groups can join and identify. That is if a hacker group wants to take a public role and become visible and willing to be part of loose collective known as hackerspaces. The visibility and participation in the surrounding is what separates hackerspace movement from the former hacker community movement. Perhaps the term separates is a bit too strong word to describe the relationship, but nevertheless publicity is the difference between the two. This open attitude to others (that is non-members) is shown in several statements:

We do exist to serve our members, but we also want to reach out into the community[...] (http://lists.hackerspaces.org/pipermail/discuss/2009-October/001130.html)

“is a nonprofit orgnization, and open to the outside world on a (semi)regular basis.” (http://lists.hackerspaces.org/pipermail/discuss/2009-October/001114.html)

Hackerspaces normally have or aim to have some kind of space for activities. This space is the visible form of publicity. More or less open space – some sort of facility, storage room, garage, warehouse is used among other things for innovation and social activities.

Has shared space (or is working on a space) as a center of the community”(http://lists.hackerspaces.org/pipermail/discuss/2009-October/001114.html)

It seems that at least some of the hackerspaces welcome outsiders (i.e. non-members) to their facility, use the tools if they have necessary skills and participate and build projects. This ‘open-door’- approach serves as a way to recruit new members.

Let everybody use every tool, if the person knows how to and handles your stuff with care. If somebody does not know to do $thing, show him/her how to do it. (http://lists.hackerspaces.org/pipermail/discuss/2009-October/000994.html)

There is other type of methods to be used to gain attention and new members. One option is to have a ‘drink for donation’ scheme, where hackerspace sells drinks for visitors. Another option is to have shared meetings with other local groups with similar intrests, like unix/linux user group. Workshops work as a good PR, but they tend to have high costs. Instead of jumping directly to having workshops, hackerspace can offer high quality talks and demonstrations.

Nevertheless, the openness has different levels concerning who has the right to say how things are done, to have a vote. Some groups have oligarchy, some sort democracy and direct management. Because the the organisational approaches of hackerspaces are versatile, it deserves to be discussed in another separate blog post (If I remember to write it).

Anonymity.

Hackers and hacker groups use monikers / handles. There is nothing evil or criminal about adopting a handle. The use of moniker is a method to hide true name of the hacker and other insignificant personal identifiers like gender, nationality or ethnic origin. By using moniker, the hacker is more likely valued by his/her skills. Monikers can serve as a message to other hackers. Monikers are also used as a signature when systems are hacked. The anonymity of hackers is closely related to secrecy.(Taylor & Jordan, 1998, 765)

In hackerspace movement IRC is used a lot. People there use monikers, but as far as I understand not to hide identity but because that’s how it has always been. Besides some of the participants reveal their real name (alleged real name, because who really knows is it real or not). Hackerspaces have also collective email lists. In that list part of the participants use real name and some possibly a fake name and monikers. To participate either one of the above, one only has to join the channel or subscribe to the lists. Compared to traditional hacker IRC channel policies – often invite only – this is another example of openness of hackerspaces.

The anonymity does not seem to be such an important issue in hackerspaces movement. The hackerspaces have websites and wikis where some of them publicly list members by name. People participate email-lists with real names. Irc channels are open for everyone. Part of the openness can possible be explained also with the fact that some hackerspaces are for-profit- oriented. They need to be visible and easy to contact. Even some of the groups that are fully non-profit need to be visible to the surrounding community to gain donations from which they may partly be dependant on. Crucial feature of the hackerspace movement is to be connected to surrounding community in all possible ways. Hackerspaces do not seem to have any reason or need for anonymity, neither as individuals nor groups. Hackerspaces are not about hiding in the cyber-bush or about playing hide-and-seek games. It’s about participation, doing, innovations and creativity.

Membership fluidity.

Hackerspaces are communal workshops where hackers, gageteers, inventors, tinkerers and engineers from all walks of life come together to collaborate on projects ranging from 3D printing and rapid prototyping, amateur genetic experiments, robotics and artificial intelligence to automatic pizza-making machines. It is evident that participants of hackerspaces are diverse. That fact is not bad or unwanted, instead it describes the broadness of hacker-minded attitude towards technology and innovations.

Compared to traditional hacker communities some similarities can be found. Both have more or less high turnover in membership count. According to Jordan and Taylor (in traditional hacker community) the speed at which membership changes take place in hacking community can be explained to happen for several reasons. Firstly, is it a informal network and no clear-cut boundaries exist. Secondly, There are no formal ceremonies to pass to become a hacker. Thirdly, the obsessive nature of activities results to situations where members are ‘forced’ to keep up with others in technology related skills. A hacker called ‘Mike’ describes this situation:

If you stop, if you don’t do it for one week then things change, the network always changes. It changes very quickly and you have to keep up and you have to learn all the tricks by heart, the default passwords, the bugs you need (Taylor & Jordan, 1998, 766).

The same high-turn rates and the need to keep up with new skills is also visible in Eric Bloodaxe’s comment:

People come and go pretty often and if you lay off for a few months and then come back, almost everyone is new. There are always those who have been around for years . . . (Taylor & Jordan, 1998, 766)

Fourthly, the illicit nature of activities is bound to attract the law enforcement – some groups more sustained attraction than others.

Hackerspaces are usually more formal in membership issues. At least some of the hackerspaces require that a new member must sign some forms (accept rules, legal documents, etc.) and pay some proportion as a membership fee. It is not uncommon that a new member is first treated as a prospect before gaining full-membership. The reason for this prospect time might be that some kind of trust must be build in relations to other members and community. Another reason might be that it serves as a test for commitment towards the hackerspace. The organisational forms and decision making processes differ among hackerspaces. Some hackerspaces have decided that those who pay the bills, are the ones who say how things are done. The need for this formalism is normally tied with the need to pay rent and insurance of the physical space. In this sense traditional hacker community and hackerspace differ. In the former, skills that a member possesses are the ‘currency’ to pay membership(more or less). Hackerspace membership is more related to sharing financial costs that are inevitable. Yet in some hackerspaces the amount of activity of a member can serve as a currency, another way to ‘pay’. In hackerspaces the membership change is more moderate than in traditional hacker community. This is due the fact that some form of continuity and certainty is needed to assure for example paying the rents.

Table 1: Comparison of Memberships and Community features of hackerspaces and traditional hacker community.

As a conclusion, the hackerspaces use more formal forms of membership. The rate of changes in membership of hackerspaces is quite moderate. Hackerspaces seem to take more time (months) to be established. Members of hackerspaces are more diverse and heterogeneous.

Male dominance.

Hacking community is said to be male dominant. Some reasons why women do not seem to be willing to participate are stated by Taylor and Jordan (Taylor & Jordan, 1998, 767-768). The reasons are said to be related to : childhood socialisation, where boys are raised up more pro-technology. The biased division of gender is proven in several studies. Yet again, does it have to be that way also in hackerspaces? No.

NYC resistor is an example of mixed genders. Nearly half of the members are women.(Hsu & Colgan, 2009) From my personal experience it seems that women might need to be informed (somehow) that they are needed and wanted to participate. We at the 5w-community spread posters all around Tampere during summer 2009 and one woman came to our meeting. We had a discussion among other things about the posters and she said it caught her attention, because one sentence in it says “[...] and hopefully women as participants”. She also told that she actually was wondering if it is ok for her to come to the meeting or it is another boys-only club.

Motivations.

To be included soon.

What is a hackerspace?

A simple and compact definition is still missing even among the persons who a involved in Hackerspaces. Yet some discussion about this has occured among the participants. I participate in the discussion list of hackerspaces since I’m a founder and member of our local Hackerspace (5w) in Tampere, Finland. I began to browse the discussion archives of ‘Hackerspaces General Discussion List‘ which is publicly available here. The archives included discussion sbetween Jul 20th 2008 and Nov 16th 2009. I expected to find some hints and thoughts related to  the question  ‘What is a hackerspace?’. Very soon after looking at the archive content I noticed that there is a lot of discussion about this topic. It seems that the community is still defining the meaning of hackerspace. That seems rational since a group or community needs to describe at least in some details what they value and respect. The amount of discussion was surprising eventhough I receive the daily messages of the list. I think I needed to look outside the box to see the vast amount of discussion. A very interesting issue of the political nature and effects of hackerspaces gained a lot of attention among subscribers. It seems that some of the hackerspaces are more politically active or oriented than others. Nevertheless it is evident that the existence on hackerspaces is politically / societally an interesting phenomenon. This question ‘What is a hackerspace?’ needs to be analysed in more details and I will do so in another post. But for the purposes of this post only some observations are included here. Eventhough a widely accepted definition for hackerspace is missing, some features can be associated to it.

We do exist to serve our members, but we also want to reach out into the community to get people, young people especially, excited about technology and making things.  (http://lists.hackerspaces.org/pipermail/discuss/2009-October/001130.html)

The above citation reveals that hackerspaces are for it’s members and for the community around it. The members are most often hackers. The community around refers to surrounding area which can be understood as city or village. It is important to notice that hackerspaces want to participate and help or offer services also to other than it’s members.  They also want to raise interest to technology especially among the youngsters.

Sometimes I call it a non-profit workshop, since most landlords are familiar with that.  [...] I describe us as an Art Collective to some people.  (http://lists.hackerspaces.org/pipermail/discuss/2009-October/001133.html)

The above quote refers to the need of multiple definitions and descriptions. In different situations one needs to have different descriptions to achieve what one  is after. It seems logical to use different kind of argumentation when trying to convince a landlord compared to situation when convincing some people to make a donation. The author of these quotes seems to emphasise the multinature of hackerspaces “Your hackerspace will be different things to different people.” This sentence can be understood to have to meanings. First, it implies to different needs and desires of the existing members of a hackerspace. Secondly, it refers to different understandings of hackerspaces among the non-members such as future members, landlords and donation makers. Therefore it is important to have a precise and understandable description to offer in different situations to avoid the need to hand out a copy of The Hacker Ethic or 2-hour lecture. The sentence includes also the fundamental feature of collective identity. It is self-ascribed or ascribed by others. Hackerspaces and their members are not the only groups or people who describe and define who or what they are.

One community member collected a list of features/concepts which describe the nature of hackerspaces.

1. Owned and Run[sic] by it’s members in a spirit of equality.
2. Is a nonprofit organization, and open to the outside world on a (semi)regular basis.
3. Shares tools, equipment and ideas without discrimination.
4. A strong emphasis on technology and invention.
5. Has shared space (or is working on a space) as a center of the community.
6. A strong spirit of invention and science, based on trial, error, and freely sharing information.

Those familiar with the (old) hacker ethic (see this post) have little difficulties noticing the similarities between the two.  The above list includes features that could or should describe what hackerspaces are. In a discussion in freenode.net #hackerspaces revealed that some hackergroups that might otherwise fullfil the ‘requirements’ of a hackerspace or act like a hackerspace, do NOT want to be ‘labelled’ as hackerspace or register in hackerspaces.org services. Should the 7th point be perhaps something like “Wants to be called or labelled as hackerspace”? Another issue that the above issue raises is the need to define what hackerspaces are NOT. That list would help to separate hackerspaces as a concept from other (some of them quite similar in many ways and activities) community based hacker activity.

Statistical view to the past.

After this very brief and not all inclusive definition of hackerspaces we can take a look at the development of hackerspaces. I collected data from hackerspaces.org about listed Hackerspaces all around the world.

It must be noted that not all hackerspaces are listed in the hackerspaces service. Some do not consider ‘advertising’ their existence necessary or desired for various reasons. It came to my knowledge that for example in Brussels there is 3 hackerspaces, eventhough the count in hackerspaces.org is 1. One of those does not want to be labelled/called as a hackerspace and another one is mainly French (is there an old fashion ‘language-war’?) and does not want to be listed in  hackerspaces.org. Another example is a Romanian group does not want to gain attention, because they are uncertain of the responses of their local surrounding community.

Then I did a simple analysis about the data. The figures and charts presented here are not scientifically formulated but they bring out some interesting ideas and aspects to the development of Hackerspaces.

Data used here was retrieved 13.11.2009 from the hackerspaces.org pages. The data is somewhat incomplete because some data about some hackerspaces is missing. For example 92 hackerspaces don’t have a date of founding and 14 hackerspaces did not have any kind of status. Naturally some hackerspaces are not even listed in hackerspace.org pages. That resource collects only those hackerspaces who have created a wiki -site in that service. In Hackerspace.org service a hackerspace can have 4 different statuses: planned, building, active and closed.

When were still active Hackerspaces established?

The data shows that there is 124 active hackerspaces. During the first years from 1992 to 2006, only a few hackerspaces were established. Yet there was a spike in the amounts in 2001. During 2001 for some reason 9 new (and still active) hackerspaces were born. The real expansion of hackerspaces has occured during the last 2-3 years. Alone in 2009, the amount of new hackerspaces was 53. Some of the newly - year 2009- founded hackerspaces might follow the logic of evolution and fallback to planning or building status or even closed.

Still active Hackerspace amounts by establishment year.

As it can be seen from the above figure 1, the amount of active hackerspaces has risen drastically in the past two years. The above figure describes the (still) active hackerspaces on the basis of  the year they were founded. In other words it does not describe the cumulative amount. Furthermore, that figure does not include hackerspaces which have not provided a date of founding (92). Nor does it include hackerspaces which have not given any kind of status (4). Note that the above figure does not include hackerspaces which have other status than active. One might say that the figure is a  kind of ’survivor chart’. I will discuss other hackerspace statuses below. As it was stated before, 2001 occured a bigger wave of new active (and survived) hackerspaces. What might explain this situation? Why in the surrounding years only 1-2 new hackerspaces got founded? The turn of the Millennium?

A closer look at the 9 hackerspaces which were founded 2001, reveals that  7 of them are European and 2 North-American.

Concentration of Hackerspaces.

Hackerspaces seem to be concentrated in Europe and North-America. In the below table is shown all active hackerspaces by lands/country (13.11.2009).

* elsewhere is the known amount of hackerspaces who do not want to be listed in hackerspaces.org service. This amount includes also groups that do not want to be labelled as hackerspaces but act in similar basis. This is a bit vague but nothing is perfect. The numbers in this column is based on the notifications from the members of various hackerspaces and individual hackers. Notify the author if the numbers do not seem to be correct.

The map view of the hackerspaces in Europe got me thinking about something.

Map view of Hackerspaces (all statuses) in Europe

Inside Europe, a great amount of Hackerspaces are located in Germany. Another interesting issue can be found when looking at the map above and figures above. Where is all the hackerspaces in East-Europe? Isn’t  there any hackerspaces in Russia? This is perculiar since hacker activity brought up in the media and otherwise is normally located also to Russia or Eastern-Europe. Is there somekind of “cyberborder” inside Europe among hackers and hackerspaces in East and West? If so, then this new type of border seems to follow the old border of the cold-war. Or is the reason that Eastern-European hackerspaces are reluctant to ‘register’ under hackerspaces.org? Or is the reason more down-to-earth  explanation such as limited access to internet services? If one believes the media, the reason might be that Eastern-Europe hackers are reluctant to take visible form such as hackerspace? They might be prone to stay underground and go on as before. As it became obvious earlier, some hacker groups do not want to be called as hackerspaces or be listed in the mentioned service. The reasons for that vary a lot.

Future of hackerspaces.

The hackerspace movement (if one can call it so) is hot! It does not seem likely that the overall growth will drop in the following years.

The growth-rate of still active Hackerspaces.

When looking at the planned Hackerspaces by continents, the situation is likely to stay same. In other words hackerspaces in Europe and North-America will increase their amount. Comparing similar pie-chart about the existing active Hackerspace (below) the percentages are quite similar. Yet some possible indicators of change can be found.

Amount and percentages of hackerspaces with ‘active’ status:

Europe might  loose the position of most hackerspaces in the near future to North-America. Other continents (Asia, Australia and Africa) are actively planning more hackerspaces. Europe seems to be the only continent which will decrease in growth.

But if one looks at the percentages of hackerspaces that are in ‘building’ status, (below) the situation looks bright for Europe and North-America. This might imply that the in the near future (in 1-2 years) the amount of new hackerspaces will rise in Europe and North-America. The same can not be said about other continents, where the building of new hackerspaces has not yet kicked in. Instead Asia, Africa and Australia (including New Zealand) are in the middle of first planning phase.

Amount and percentages of hackerspaces with ‘building’ status:

Rather cautious conclusions about the growth of hackerspaces in the near future. Europe and North-America will increase the amount of active hackerspaces significantly in the following 2 years. The growth in Europe will decrease after couple of years, but in the North-America growth will possible stay steady. Other continents will need a year or two to get to the building phase really to kick in.

This topic /post needs further editing after some more analysis. Some of the questions raised here needs answers. Any ideas / suggestions to questions are welcome. Leave a comment.