This is a CTP of initiative: Hackspace 4 (South-Central England, UK)
CTP1 occurred in the extremely early days of the formation of the organisation, as the co-founders began to tap into new communities as a way of first publicising, and then strengthening the community that would form the cornerstone of this hackspace. The co-founders worked together at the same company, and had been discussing for some months about the absence in the UK of an organisation similar to the NYC Resistor hackspace in New York. In early 2009, on the spur of the moment, co-founder 1 decided on a Sunday night to create a mailing list and IRC channel for a new hackspace in the city they lived in. He emailed details of the list around to other technology-related groups in the city and wider UK, and received interested replied immediately. Through these initial connections, the co-founders were invited to meet with people in a nearby city to support their own efforts in setting up a similar space: “They emailed saying ‘We think this is a great idea! Can you help us do the same thing?’ even though we’d only been running for a few weeks.”
In the same time period co-founder 1 was also invited to give a talk to about the hackspace to a local Linux user groups; expecting a couple of people in attendance, he arrived to find the talk hosted in a lecture hall with around 300 people in it. Through these events, and through the first in-person meet-up of the organisation, 2 weeks after the founding of the mailing list, the co-founders realised the importance of looking beyond their own social networks and doing outreach with other communities and organisations who might be interested, including universities, companies, and local activist groups. The co-founders also decided to extend their outreach into the group itself, bringing in guest speakers from other local communities to showcase projects, and talk about their work:
“As soon as we started talking to other people, they brought their friends and they brought their friends. It started out as a group of purely software people, maybe electronics, occasionally woodwork. It just got out of control on its own.”
His networking acted as a CTP for HS4 because it radically changed the focus, scope, and make-up of the organisation. The co-founders - both software developers - had initially imagined HS4 to be a more personal space where they - and people like them - would be able to make things themselves. “We weren’t about outreach, we weren’t about being open - that came later”. Through the early and unintentional networking, the co-founders realised that reaching out to a wider network of people allowed them to keep the organisation interesting, “even to us”; and also to bring in enough people to enable the organisation to afford to stay afloat and be sustainable in the extremely expensive city where it was located.
This CTP was co-produced by the presence of several well-established technology mailing groups in London (themselves reflecting the presence of a well established technology community working in the city’s finance, creative, service, and public sector economies); and an article in Wired magazine in early 2009, detailing the hackspace phenomena.
At the time of this CTP, several well-established technology-related mailing lists were already in operation in London, including Dorkbot and the Open Rights Group, and the co-founders were able to directly tap into these networks when they founded the organisation. The co-founders themselves were already well-known and liked within various activist and enthusiast technology circles, through their presence at the above groups; and through their own work at a popular media start-up. This social capital allowed them to more easily reach out into other networks, generating interest and inviting guest speakers to give talks, than otherwise might have been possible. The media start-up itself also had a strong creative team - “a really diverse set of people there who were massively multidisciplinary” - which helped the co-founders to broaden their horizons.
The CTP was further shaped by an article in Wired magazine was released in February 2009, describing the hackspace phenomenon, with a particular focus on NYC Resistor. This brought attention to a wider audience about the phenomenon of hackspaces, which had until that point been relatively sparse across Germany, the Netherlands, and the US. The co-founders estimated that after the article was published, thousands of hackspaces were set up globally in the following six months; and that, having founded HS4 the month previously, they were in the right place at the right time. In the same time period, the first UK Makerfaire was hosted in March 2009 in Newcastle. The co-founders attended, and were introduced there to some of the co-founders of established US hackspaces. In addition, the US co-founders had also brought with them some artists who worked at their organisations who, the co-founders of HS4 recall, brought in “a different perspective, a different purpose to what we’d been doing up until then”. In addition to the mailing lists, Twitter had come into popular use with the UK technology community by early 2009, and the co-founders were able to use it as a platform for initial outreach.
This CTP was co-produced by the presence of several well-established technology mailing groups in London (themselves reflecting the presence of a well established technology community working in the city’s finance, creative, service, and public sector economies); and an article in Wired magazine in early 2009, detailing the hackspace phenomena.
The co-founders reportedvno real contestation, tension, or conflict in this CTP. Rather the levels of interest, enthusiasm and networking from their surrounding networks to be highly unexpected, and had to constantly adjust their expectations and strategies about just what type of organisation the hackspace would turn out to be, and their own role in the process - “There was so much interest, it just kept rolling in”. The co-founders also needed to take stock of their own knowledge about the process, even at such an early stage, in order to share it with other groups.
This CTP was unseen and unanticipated. As described above, the presence of the hackspace movement in the UK was minimal at this time, despite the presence of well-established digital technology communities who had been building horizontal, community-led structures around open source activities and knowledge sharing for a decade previously in the city. This CTP thus built on the already-considerable experience of both co-founders around founding and building technology communities. Both founders rapidly realised that if they wanted the organisation to be large and sustainable, they would have to adapt the nature of their behaviour and expectations.
The full impact of this very-early-stage intervention on the nature and development of the hackspace was unexpected and difficult to assess until much later on. The surge of interest in the nascent hackspace, in addition to the co-founders own social capital, gave the organisation unexpected first-mover advantages. This included a much higher profile than might have been afforded otherwise, and the borrowing (and sometimes outright theft) of the hackspace’s own materials, such as their structures and internal codes. In the absence of either social networking platforms or incumbent technology communities, the co-founders would have found it difficult to either build critical mass in their own hackspace so quickly, or to have created such a wide influence on the wider emergent UK hackspace community.
Fro From this CTP, the co-founders learnt the importance of reaching out to build the relationships necessary to sustain a small, early stage, social enterprise. As one of the co-founders described:
“You see this [what we did] in all the spaces that are successful. You have people who are capable of going out and building the relationships that are necessary, and doing outreach. The ones that fail are the ones that are locked into their existing communities”.
It was also recognised that doing this form of engagement was not an easy process for all organisations. One co-founder described how “People are terrible at outreach, I just don’t get it”, before detailing how whilst he himself was happy to go out and have those conversations, other founding members - whose skills lay elsewhere - would have found it more difficult. This complementarity of skills also allowed each co-founder to focus on their strengths – whilst the more outgoing of the founders did public talks, the quieter one focused on developing the accounts and business models for the organistion.
As described above, the transformational aims of this hackspace were to create a place where the founders could do hardware hacking and “make things”. Outreach, openness, and inclusivity were not an initial part of these goals. Instead, this CTP had transformational effects on the aims and purpose of the organisation itself, as the co-founders learnt through their networking how popular the space was, and the wider interest in it. As one of the co-founders described: “As soon as we started talking to other people, they brought their friends who brought their friends. What had started out as a group of purely software people wanting to do some soldering, maybe electronics, maybe woodwork, just got out of control on its own”.
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