We are a Hackerspace

A hackerspace is a physical place, run by people interested 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 everyhing 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 Order

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.

2. The Pact

This is the Code of Conduct. This is intended to be a very broad enforced guideline of how members should behave.

3. The Legacy

This is all the information we collected during the HTH meetings. This should be used as a cypher to understand the Pact itself. This is to avoid incorrect interpretations of the order and the pact

Naming things

The order

Because naming things is very hard we decided to use the names from the "Silo" series of Hugh Howey. In the series, civilization has to survive in an underground silo. In the series, the order is a book that describes how the silos should be managed. The order is clearly "bad" because all control in an infringment to the freedom of the people. Still, if you progress further in the series, you see that the order is still a good way to manage the people.