| Episodes | 74 |
| Mentions | 130 |
| Cited here | 26 |
| First — last | #4 — #697 |
| Top guests | Jeff Keyzer, Dave Vandenbout, Jørgen Jakobsen |
| Related | kickstarter · professional networking |
A hackerspace is a shared physical facility whose purpose is pooling tools and workshop space so that members can build physical things: “a place to meet and share physical resources to build something”.[27] The model matters because it makes classes of equipment and floor area available to individuals who could not justify owning them alone, and because it provides the social structure that solitary technical work removes.[41][409] Purely software work is generally better resourced by online communities, which are not limited to whoever happens to be local; the defining value of a hackerspace is therefore physical rather than digital.[27]
History
The American hackerspace model is traced to the 2007 Chaos Communication Camp in Germany, where visiting US participants encountered the existing European scene.[38] Although hackerspace activity in the United States became widely discussed around 2009–2011, the model itself was imported from an older German and wider European movement rather than originating domestically.[284]
Public institutions subsequently engaged with the model. DARPA’s Cyber Fast Track programme was established to pay hackerspaces for quick-turn government-related projects without the usual procurement process.[60] US federal agencies including NASA and the NSF later convened makerspace representatives and signalled that grant funding was available, making public grants a live funding avenue alongside dues and donations.[313]
Premises and founding costs
Securing affordable premises, rather than equipment, is usually the binding constraint on founding a space; one Melbourne group spent two years searching for a location.[64] Donated or vacant commercial floor space is not free space: heating, cooling, power, maintenance and liability all attach to it and are borne by the group.[64] A group that cannot cover utility costs loses effective use of its space even while holding the lease, since an unheated space in winter is not usable for sustained work.[64]
Renting premises requires capital before any dues arrive: alongside monthly rent, landlords typically demand a bond up front, reported in one UK case as roughly two thousand dollars against rent of about a thousand.[40] Spaces are commonly bootstrapped by founders personally fronting a long block of rent — in one case twelve months in advance by two founders — and by accepting a remote or semi-derelict location to bring the rent down.[96]
Because spaces rent rather than own, loss of the lease can put a group out of operation; after being evicted, Nottinghack solicited donations to fund a replacement space.[40] Eviction recurs as an interruption rather than a one-off event: the London Hackspace lost its building and was out of action until it reopened elsewhere, and members who had depended on it for metalworking fell back on negotiating access to individually owned workshops.[697]
Equipment and the cost-pooling mechanism
The core economic mechanism is cost pooling: a machine priced beyond a single home workshop becomes minor when split across members. Noisebridge bought a three-thousand-dollar laser cutter this way, with roughly twenty people contributing.[41] Much of a hackerspace’s equipment arrives as donated spare gear from members rather than being purchased; in the United States such donations can be written off against tax while the donor retains access to the tool.[40]
Equipment must match the membership’s actual work to be useful. Many spaces do little electronics and are oriented toward woodwork, mechanical work, 3D printers and laser cutters, so an expensive oscilloscope in such a space would sit idle.[291] Members are also frequently unwilling to lend their own instruments into shared use because they cannot control how the equipment is handled once it leaves their possession, which limits how far a space can be stocked by loan rather than purchase.[473]
Maintenance of shared machines is a chronic weak point: spaces have difficulty keeping even basic equipment such as band saws in working order, which is the practical objection to extending sharing to stocked component libraries.[425]
Location, density and participation
Viability tracks residential density. The model works in dense urban centres where members have no space of their own at home, and works poorly where a city’s population is spread over tens of kilometres of detached housing.[40] Travel time governs whether membership is worth paying for; practitioners at roughly forty miles or a forty-five-minute drive report that they cannot attend often enough to justify joining.[232]
Scheduled open nights are the standard entry path: one large Chicago space held open meetings on Tuesdays and some Saturdays, letting prospective members visit and meet people before committing to join.[313] University-hosted spaces have structurally better attendance than independent ones because the membership already lives or spends its days on site, removing the travel cost that limits participation elsewhere.[368] A hackerspace inside a university is also proposed as a way to absorb the hands-on, applied side of teaching that would otherwise fall entirely on faculty.[232]
Because a shared space is a physical location, the skills and help available in it are bounded by the local membership rather than by the whole field; this is the structural difference from an online community.[27]
Relationship to the home lab
A home electronics bench typically runs out of floor space before it runs out of bench space, and mechanical equipment such as vices and drill presses is the first thing that will not fit; shared workshop membership is one way to reach that class of tool without owning the floor area.[21] Access to equipment, rather than community, is the driving factor in joining: a member with a functioning home lab has little incentive to travel to a shared one, however much the social side is valued.[75] A shared space stays relevant to members who already own good tools only by holding at least one machine they cannot justify at home; on one account, the acquisition of a laser cutter turned Jeff Keyzer from a non-attendee into a daily presence at his local space.[66]
Shared workshops substitute poorly for a personal electronics bench, because development requires instruments at hand for immediate troubleshooting, unlike fabrication work that can be batched into a visit to a shared facility.[312] For electronics specifically, a serious home lab is often better equipped than the shared space’s bench area; Greg Davill works from his home lab for this reason, reducing the space’s role to social contact rather than tool access.[473]
Falling equipment prices erode the tool rationale over time: once a personal lab can hold a pick-and-place machine for a couple of thousand dollars along with a laser cutter and a 3D printer, the social function becomes the remaining reason to join.[245]
Social and economic functions
Tools alone do not produce an active space: well-equipped fab labs in Tokyo have been observed to be largely inactive, while interesting projects attract interesting people who bring further projects — the feedback loop that sustains a space.[245]
For a home-based one-person hardware business, joining a local space functions as imposed structure that forces time away from work and supplies the social contact that working alone removes; Piotr Esden-Tempski adopted this practice for his consulting business.[409] Spaces and recurring technical meetups also act as referral networks for independent consultants, who keep each other in rotation on client work; arriving with a project in hand makes the contact easier for people who are not naturally outgoing.[409]
People who acquire hardware skills in a hackerspace and then start a product business commonly have no exposure to formal testing, industry standards or regulatory compliance, which is the substantive gap between that route and an industry background.[281]
Related models
TechShop
TechShop operated a paid-membership model at roughly one hundred to one hundred and twenty dollars a month for access to new, top-of-the-line equipment, in contrast to hackerspaces running on donated and second-hand gear.[53] Its Bay Area membership later ran around one hundred and fifty to one hundred and sixty dollars a month, above the typical cost of a volunteer-run makerspace.[368] The limit on the paid-membership workshop model is assessed as market size rather than accessibility: too few people need regular access to that equipment for a commercial space to sustain itself, even where cost and location are addressed.[368]
Fab labs
Fab labs are a distinct, standardised model: every lab is equipped from the same specified kit of machines, and curriculum is developed against that fixed equipment set for use in schools.[78] The standard kit — typically a ShopBot, a Modela and an Epilog-class laser cutter — is deployed identically worldwide and originates from the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms.[200]
Hardware accelerators
Hardware accelerators are a well-funded variant that differs from hackerspaces by staffing rather than tooling: a fixed residency of about six months with a mechanical engineer, industrial designer and electrical engineer on staff to fill skill gaps in two-person startups.[162] The category fragmented over time from hackerspaces into makerspaces and then into commercial makerspaces run effectively as accelerators, with different funding and membership economics at each step.[245]