This is a CTP of initiative: Hackspace 4 (South-Central England, UK)
This CTP describes the process by which the hackspace acquired its first workshop space, and the subsequent effects on the organisation’s membership, purpose, and wider influence in the UK hackspace community.
Hackspace members had been meeting in person very shortly after the organisation had been initiated, at a point when there were no permanent premises in use and (as described in previous CTPs) voluntary membership fees had been introduced to raise money for a deposit. To create community, free fortnightly hack events took place at a local co-working space; and the co-founders did not expect to find the type of space that they wanted particularly soon, putting the idea on the back-burner.
However, in early July 2009, 7 months after the organisation was founded, and when the organisation comprised of around 35 members, the co-founders unexpectedly stumbled across their first space. One of the members had been taking archery lessons and discovered that the building which the archery range was in also had space to rent, extremely cheaply. The co-founders made the decision to move in quickly as they wanted to create the more permanent community and environment that the hackspace needed to grow and develop.
This event constitutes a CTP because it allowed the organisation to firstly realise one of its core aims, to inhabit physical premises; but also because as a result of obtaining the space, the hackspace gained unexpected visibility. With space to work in and house machines, the organisation tapped into a new range of members from diverse backgrounds, extending far beyond the programmer- and engineering centred communities who constituted their initial membership.
This CTP was shaped by the availability of space in the organisation housing the archery range. The archery building was based in North-Central London, near to several Underground train station stops, and extremely accessible to the organisation’s members (comprising around 35 people at this time). The building comprised a long archery range on the ground floor, with targets and sufficient distance for members to shoot across. In the upper floor, under a sloping roof, was a long empty room which was going unused. As the rent was exceptionally cheap by local standards – around £400 per month for the entire space – the founders decided to take it immediately. The space was not finished, but required small fixes around utilities.
The co-founders also requested donations to kit out the space, particularly with regard to furniture (at that time, members were keen to donate spare technologies but, as one co-founder noted “We had around 50 old servers – we really didn’t need any more than that”). When moving in, the co-founders also drew on the voluntary help of their existing member base to assist with heavy lifting and fitting the space out.
The CTP was also shaped the wider issue of rental prices in London. London rental prices for businesses are the most costly in the UK, comprising rent itself, business rates (charged on most non-domestic properties by the local council), and service charges (fees leaseholders pay to cover a degree of maintenence of the building, such as repairs to the roof or drains). By mid-2009, there had been a marked increase in actors looking for office property in London, after a small slump following the 2008 financial collapse. The issues of costs were exacerbated for the hackspace who not only needed a space large enough to store their equipment and provide safe workspaces, but also a landlord who would be happy with the activities which took place there.
This CTP was shaped by the presence of available space at the archery range; and the wider issue of rising property prices in London.
There was little conflict or tension reported in interviews around this decision. The stakes were comparatively low as the hackspace had not anticipated finding workshop space for some time. As detailed in other CTPs, conflicts arose through the unexpected side-effects of having a permanent, loosely-managed space around usage, behaviour, and abuse, raising new challenges for the organisation which have been detailed elsewhere.
Finding the first premises was entirely unexpected because of the costs of rent in the city: “That point of getting a space had been thrown away for a long time. We knew it was unrealistic because of how much space cost in London”. Even when members became aware that there was space available, they were initially offered a single desk to work from; instead, the hackspace took over the entire upper floor. The low costs were also unexpected, as the co-founders had expected to pay considerably more for premises; as a result, the group moved into the space more rapidly than they might have otherwise done because of how unusual the situation was.
As detailed above, one side effect of the move into new premises was the expansion in membership, including newcomers from across different fields which came through their wider networks:
“We got the first connections to the art colleges through Dorkbot [a tech meet-up group]. People started turning up who either needed things fixed or had projects they wanted to work on. We got people doing photography in. We got people doing biology in. We didn’t know where to put them, but we had space and it made us realise that what we could do was so much bigger than what we thought we had”.
Over the longer term, these groups expanded and formalised into new offshoots within the hackspace, including a Biohackspace who were equipped and qualified to carry out molecular biology experiments in a Containment Level 1 Lab.
The effects of the workshop on hackspace visibility were also unexpected. As detailed in earlier CTPs, the co-founders were aware of the impact that being a registered company would be on their legibility to outside stakeholders. However, this impact was accelerated by the acquisition of a space, which gave the group a greater sense of being serious about what they were doing. At the time (as detailed in previous CTPs) technology meet-ups were common in large UK cities, offering a space where technologists could socialise, netwok, and learn from each other; and particularly offering a form of community not always easily accessibly to freelancers or those who were the sole technologist in their workplace. The prevalence and importance of these meet-ups was documented in a Wired UK article in early 2011.
However, the low barriers to entry to running these events meant that few were ever instantiated in physical premises for long-term tangible ‘making’ activities; instead serving as sites for discussion. By taking up premises, the hackspace demonstrated that it was possible to translate from a loose meet-up based group, into a formal, located, organisation; and inspired other UK hackspaces to follow in its wake:
“Having the space gave us so much visibility. We’ve been told by other spaces outright that they wouldn’t exist if we didn’t exist and done it all first.”
This CTP fundamentally allowed the organisation to meet their transformational aims in terms of permitting to the hackspace to instantiate physically, making investments in material infrastructure (shelves, sofas, boxes) as well as the In addition to the unexpected effects of visibility and wider community described above, moving into premises had a number of other structural impacts on the organisation. Firstly, the co-founders decided to formalise membership and raise the recommended donation fee (as described in other CTPs):
“We had to say, membership is now a requirement if you want to use the space. No more just turning up every two weeks at the pub for bit of a hack, we had to lay it down. And we raised up the recommended donation up to £20 per month because now we had to have money coming in to pay the bills, and it had to be there all the time. And because we had the space we could start saving up to buy the tools that we wanted because we had somewhere to put them. £20 was still a recommended donation, we had people on lower but we needed to put out the message that this was serious now”.
Over the longer term, this shift in accruing resources and defining the nature of membership allowed the organisers to transfer these processes across to later spaces. A year after the first move, the co-founders sourced a second space which was double the size of the first, allowing them to plan further expansion; and also more central and accessible. Whilst rates were still comparatively cheap for London (and the directors were able to cover the first three months of rent through savings and projected cash flow), the rents for the second space were four times those of the first.As a result, the directors again raised the recommended subscription rate to £40 per month (again, allowing for voluntary lower fees to be paid); went on a hard membership recruitment campaign to bring in a wider range of members to both populate the space and increase income; and began running more public workshops to bring in revenue.
Stay informed. Subscribe for project updates by e-mail.
