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We are a Hackerspace
A hackerspace is a physical place, run by people interested in various aspects of constructive & creative hacking. From finding ways to make your beer cold in a matter of seconds to building a do-it-yourself sms-voting-system with an old android phone.
We are a breeding ground for awesome ideas. We provide a nest where those ideas can become reality. We operate by collaboration and openness. We allow people to fail, and to try again.
We failed, but we try again
We created our very own Ghent hackerspace. We had two rules: be excellent to each other and decide everything by consensus. We thought normal human interaction and common sense would solve all problems. Sadly, this was not true. When our hackerspace almost died, we decided to "Hack the Hackerspace". We found that the problems could all be traced to the following root causes:
- We cannot rely on common sense because people have different realities.
- People have different, conflicting goals. Because of that, consensus will never be reached on certain things. Problems will arise and they will not be solved. In most cases, no solution is worse than a bad solution.
We knew that, in order to fix this, we needed a system that gets the best out of everyone and enables us to be awesome! After long late-night discussions, we came up with HTH. This git repository contains the organizational structure of our hackerspace. This is intended to be place-agnostic information so it can be used by other hackerspaces around the world.
This is divided into 3 parts.
1. The System
This is a description of the system that will run our hackerspace. You will find the different decision processes and the different entities of the organization.
The system should empower people to get the best out of themselves. It should stimulate collaboration, and enable people to think creatively and to solve problems creatively. We know that this system will be flawed from the start. We know that control of people is evil. But a flawed system is better than no system, and we will continuously patch this system to make it better. That is why this is on GitHub. So we can learn from our past mistakes and other people can stand on our shoulders to see further than anyone else.
2. The Guidelines
This is the Code of Conduct. This is intended to be a very broad guideline of how members should behave.
3. The Legacy
Because every good idea that was once written down has been misinterpreted, we included information that led us to the system and the guidelines in this repository as The Legacy. This should by used as a "cipher" to interpret the system and the guidelines correctly and to explain a bit of the rationale behind them.