What's the core principle/ethic of your Hackspace?

What’s the motivation behind it, what do you base decisions and rules upon, is it commercial, liberal, anti commercial?

What would be tolerated, what wouldn’t be tolerated? What do you do when something isn’t tolerated? Not exactly code of conduct wise.

There’s almost an unwritten ethos underlying the governance of every Hackspace, and everyone has a kind of feel for it.

An example clash would be using website tracking to identify whom visits your Hackspace website, and then using paid support marketing to advertise to those whom have or haven’t visited the website. Some would agree this is a great way to help increase membership, and yet others would have issue with passing along information to a third party about whom visits your website.

I thought it may be good for you to put it into words or to have a discussion about this to see if there are any commonalities across Hackspaces, because it can be important when writing guidance documentation or trying to help grow Hackspaces in general.

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I’m not sure this is true. Granted, my experience with other hackspaces is limited, but over here at Oxford Hackspace there isn’t such an ethos.

I know some people think there is, but if you actually ask around people want and expect vastly different things from their hackspace.

I get the impression this “core ethos” we assume exists is just the opinion of the more outspoken members and not actually representative of the group as a whole.

Meh, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s just how we are.

I’m interested to hear how other hackspaces see themselves.

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Even within our relatively new (and hence small) Hackspace there’s already slight deviations/interpretation differences between core values. There’s a LOT of overlap and that overlap largely represents this well spoken ethos but I agree with Yves, it’s not universal and it is significantly subject to individual interpretation.

Some I’ve experienced insist that they’ll always use open source software, and shun anything that’s corporate or you’d have to pay for.

I would say (and this is obviously just one person’s opinion) that Nottingham has a “get it done” ethos - we use whatever tool works best in the situation.

We still have a tendency to use open source software, but that comes from it being free more than anything else.

In the past, we have had an anti-surveillance feel, but that seems to be diminishing in recent times.

J

This does seem to be a sticking point for a number of hackspaces, so much so that when I saw a reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/hackerspaces/comments/60ooc0/setting_up_hull_hackspace/) a person linked to, and recommended forking of this github repo which appears to be a guide at starting a hack(er)space that reflects on this issue: GitHub - 0x20/hackerspace-blueprint: The Hackerspace Blueprint

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At Richmond MakerLabs our ethos is to care for the community where we live. We have the advantage of being a small space and we mainly focus on our opendays. Everybody works toguether. There are very little personal projects and most are about helping each other.