A hackerspace is a physical place, run by people interested in various aspects of constructive & creative hacking. From finding ways to make your beer cold in a matter of seconds to building a do-it-yourself sms-voting-system with an old android phone.
We are a breeding ground for awesome ideas. We provide a nest where those ideas can become reality. We operate by collaboration and openness. We allow people to fail, and to try again.
We created our very own Ghent hackerspace. We had two rules: be excellent to each other and decide everything by consensus. We thought normal human interaction and common sense would solve all problems. Sadly, this was not true. When our hackerspace almost died, we decided to "Hack the Hackerspace". We found that the problems could all be traced to the following root causes:
- We cannot rely on common sense because people have different realities.
- People have different, conflicting goals. Because of that, consensus will never be reached on certain things. Problems will arise and they will not be solved. In most cases, no solution is worse than a bad solution.
We knew that, in order to fix this, we needed a system that gets the best out of everyone and enables us to be awesome! After long late-night discussions, we came up with "Hack the Hackerspace" (HTH), a document that describes how to run a hackerspace in a way that brings out the best in people. To get the latest PDF version of this document, go here and download the file hack-the-hackerspace.pdf.
We have been refining this system for a few years now, tweaking the system when we encounter issues and explaining important parts in more details. This document specifically describes how Hackerspace Gent runs, but it is generic enough so that it can be easily adapted to other hackerspaces and similar organizations. Feel free to use and remix this for your own benefit, learn from our mistakes and let us know what you think of it!
The goal of this system is to empower people to get the best out of themselves. It stimulates collaboration and enables people to think and solve problems creatively. We know that this system will be flawed from the start. We know that control of people is evil. But a flawed system is better than no system, and we continuously update this system to make it better. That is why this is on GitHub, in order to make it easy to build Hack the Hackerspace as a community.
The main system running the Hackerspace is the do-ocracy, explained further in Section 2. In short: If you want something done in the hackerspace, either do it yourself or convince someone else to do it for you. The goal of the do-ocracy is to lower the barrier to contributing as much as possible.
However, when you want to do something that affect a lot of people in the space, or when you want to make sure that people will support what you want to do, discuss it with the other members on a meeting as explained in Section 3.
Every organization has a number of unspoken guidelines of how you should behave, we have written down some of ours in Section 6 in order to make it easier for people to get a sense of what to do in certain situations. These guidelines are not meant to be strict rules, but they give an overview of what is good and bad behavior in the space.
Because every good idea that was once written down has been misinterpreted, we included information that led us to the system and the guidelines. We call it the legacy. It is a collection of information that we used to create Hack the Hackerspace, it gives more context to why the system is the way it is. The legacy should by used as a "cipher" to interpret the system and the guidelines correctly and to explain a bit of the rationale behind them.