What is the Hackspace Owners Manual?

This manual aims to be a basic and factual set of introductory documents on all apsects of running a hackspace.

The aim is to discuss technologies, tools and techniques to describe choices and give enough information for an informed decision to be made regarding an area. An emphasis is placed on keeping the main documentation free from personal opinion so that this can be expressed within case studies.

In each area you will hopefully find case studies which are examples of how different organisations have used the given technology or technique, what they learned along the way, what worked well, what did not work well, what they would do differently if you were doing the whole thing again from scratch. The idea is again to inform decision making based on the experiences of others.

We will always try to maintain the accuracy of the information found here however the documentation is community content. Please use the information as a starting point for your own research and reading.

Curated content

This document is community driven curated content, which means that we invite and encourage people to make contributions via our contributions process.

The reason that we curate the content is to encourage peer review, discussion and agreement prior to publishing something that will influence current and future organisations and decisions.

That's why we're chosing to host this content on github rather than a wiki.

Structure

. ├── CHANGELOG.md ├── HOM │   ├── contributing.md │   └── README.md ├── Infrastructure │   ├── IT │   │   └── README.md │   ├── Organisational │   │   ├── FundingSources.md │   │   ├── HealthAndSafety.md │   │   └── README.md │   └── Physical │   ├── Access Control │   │   ├── images │   │   │   ├── mifare-manufacturer-block.png │   │   │   └── mifare-memory-organisation.png │   │   └── README.md │   ├── Furniture │   └── README.md ├── README.md └── Workshop ├── CNC │   └── README.md ├── Craft ├── Electronics ├── Glass ├── Metalworking └── Woodworking

Case studies

What should a case study contain?

The point of the case studies is to examine how an organisation implemented a solution so that another organisation can learn lessons from what they did and how they did it. Opinions are very much welcome and encouraged in case studies but please remember to keep a focus on the technology and not on the individuals involved :)

Suggested questions to consider:

• What did you do?
• What worked well?
• What did not work well?
• What did you learn along the way?
• What would you do differently if you were doing the whole thing again from scratch?
• Are there any cultural considerations that you needed to make?
• How was it received by the organisation?
• Would you implement this again or not? Why?

The idea is again to inform decision making based on the experiences of others. Think about the things you wish you'd known when you started working with your project. This is an opportunity to provide gems of wisdom for those that follow in your footsteps.

Your case study should not be lots of technical implementation detail, there's a place for that and that's on your own organisation blog! Feel free to link to the details in your case study.