If you have missed it so far, Jarkko Moilanen is a PhD student in Tampere, Finland, who is writing a detailed history of the hacker movement and its different manifestations.

His blog is here and contains many interesting entries, supplement by summarizing graphs and visualizations, that are well worth reading.

I have excerpted some of the material on the P2P Foundation wiki entries on hackers, hacktivism, and hackerspaces.

Since the latter is the most current manifestation of the movement, here is an excerpt on the history of hackerspaces:

Jarkko Moilanen:

“Hackerspaces began to form during the late 90s, but the grounds for hackerspaces were constructed around the turn of the millennium in Germany by CCC. (Farr 2009) During that time, hackerspaces began to organize as associations or alike, became known to the public and identified hacker ethic as one of the key elements to guide activities. The year 2001 was a turning point for hackerspaces. during that time several still existing spaces were established. (Moilanen 2009) One possible reason for the growth might be the recession around the millenium, which was in general one of the ‘best’ recessions in history. The overall economical effects of the recession were relatively small.(Nordhaus 2002, 200-204) Yet it affected the IT sector and the technology bubble had just bursted in Silicon Valley. Therefore several companies were forced to reduce resources in IT expenditures and a lot of ‘hackers’ were laid off in Europe and in US. The hackers still needed a community to attach and different forms of ‘fabbing’ communities offered a new ‘place’ for them. For the above reasons I have located hackerspaces generation to begin at 2001.

Hackerspaces are hacker versions of ‘third places’ defined by Oldenburg. According to Oldenburg ‘third places’ refer to separate social settings or surroundings from the ‘first place’ (home and other similar settings) and ’second place’ (workplace). (Oldenburg, 1999) The third places are ‘anchors’ of community life, facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction. These places serve as focal points of community life, which has eroded due to commercial chains and unifunctional zoning policy.(Oldenburg, 2001, 3) In other words, we have abandoned public parks, playgrounds, schools, cafees and little local stores as places for community life. We have been growing apart from one anothers since the second World War. Third places are needed to reconnect to each other and strengthen community ties. To become a succesful third place, they must be locally owned, independent and small-scale and be based on steady-state business.(Oldenburg, 2001, 4) Furthermore, the places should be highly accessible, within walking distance, free or cheap and involve regularity. When these criterias are compared to hackerspaces, the similarities become obvious.

Even though a compact definition of hackerspaces is missing, some features can be associated with it. Firstly, a hackerspace is owned and run by it’s members in a spirit of equality. Secondly, it is a nonprofit organization, and open to the outside world on a (semi)regular basis. Thirdly, members of hackerspace share tools, equipment and ideas without discrimination even to outsiders. Fourthly, is has a strong emphasis on technology and invention. Fifthly, it has a shared space (or is working on a space) as a center of the community. Finally, it has a strong spirit of invention and science, based on trial, error, and freely sharing information. Hackerspaces are specialiced third places for technically oriented people. Hackerspaces function to serve hackers’ “need to construct the infrastructures of human relationships”(Oldenburg, 2001, 2)

Hackerspaces want to be part of surrounding community to enhance technological knowledge and bring people together including the ones who are not so technology prone. Hackerspaces offer knowledge and skills to surrounding community and arrange classes, courses and demonstrations about various topics. They seem to rely on attraction rather than agitation. They also want to create a positive attitude towards technology and the possibilities it can offer to everyone. In this sense hackerspaces promote the hacker ethic, where one key aspect is: “You can create art and beauty on a computer.” (Levy, 1984, 43) and another one: “Computers can change your life for the better”.