As part of this year’s EMF Camp I organised a workshop to share information on how to build inclusive makerspaces. In the first part of the workshop I presented some of the results from my research on diversity and inclusivity issues in makerspaces, then I opened the floor up to a roundtable discussion with other
Along with Noisebridge, NYC Resistor was one of the very first hackerspaces to start up in the US. It formed on Halloween 2007 after New York hackers Bre Pettis and George Shammas got back from the Hackers on a Plane tour around European hackerspaces and gathered a group together to start their own hackerspace in
This year was my second visit to Electromagnetic Field, the UK’s hacker camping festival, and by a weird twist of fate this year’s camp was held at the former site of a music festival I used to work at around 10 years ago. The new site was a lot bigger than its former location in
Build Brighton has a special place in my heart as my home hackerspace (and full disclosure, I was also one of their trustees for a few years). Fittingly for a hackerspace in the UK’s “Silicon Beach” tech capital, Build Brighton was also one of the first hackerspaces to start up in the UK way back
I’ve written a practitioner reflection piece for the Journal of Peer Production Issue 12, where I talk about the efforts that maker communities around the world are making to be more inclusive and accessible. It’s a special journal issue on the institutionalisation of makerspaces, so check it out for a bunch of other interesting papers too!
The Raspberry Pi Foundation have launched a new monthly magazine called HackSpace. The problem? The Foundation doesn’t actually have anything to do with hackspaces. Hackspaces are volunteer-run makerspaces which usually operate on a not-for-profit basis. Running costs are covered by membership subscription fees which are kept as low as possible, often operating on a ‘pay-what-you-can’
Seattle Attic is a feminist makerspace in the suburban Fremont neighbourhood of Seattle. Since opening in 2013 they’ve inspired various other feminist hackerspaces to open around the US, including Double Union in San Francisco (which I wrote about in an earlier blog post). The Attic aims to be a welcoming place for women to work
Double Union is a feminist hackerspace in San Francisco, located on an industrial estate in the Potrero Hill neighbourhood next door to the building that used to house the offices of the Mythbusters TV show! DU was originally inspired by another feminist hackerspace, Seattle Attic, which aimed to be a welcoming place for women to
Noisebridge was one of the first hackerspaces to open in the USA. It’s part of the wave of spaces founded after a group of American hackers including Noisebridge’s co-founder, Mitch Altman, visited existing European hackerspaces including c-base and Metalab after the 2007 Chaos Communication Camp in Germany and decided to set up their own hackerspaces
Metalab is one of the oldest hackerspaces in Europe. Its workshop in the center of Vienna – in between the Austrian Parliament and Vienna’s Rathaus (city hall) – has been open since 2006. It got started when a few friends wanted somewhere to meet and exchange ideas, and to get access to machines that they