typo(s), tendency and text

What is a hackerspace?

Since I started to use Linux and have been working on my masters thesis about Indymedia Germany from a journalists perspective in 2005/6/7, I have discovered a fantastic culture of amazing people, calling themselves hackers, makers, tinkerers, geeks and other illustrous names. Soon after my thesis I traveled as a jounalist with the Hackers on a Plane tour 2007, and witnessed the preliminaries of a becoming worldwide Hackerspace movement. After those people from the U.S. and Canada traveled through Germany and Austria to visit the existing community driven spaces, weld friendships and learn how a space like this can be made, creativity and openness can be nurtured, great projects like NYCResistor, HackDC, Noisebridge and others were founded.

Edit: It has been a while since I have had a look at the Hackerspace Design Patterns, and they actually say something about documentation, discussion and realtime conversation (wiki, mailing list, irc) in the Community Pattern. But does this really cover all kinds of communication needs?

Whatever happened to HackBergen and what can be done about it?

When I moved to Bergen, I had the profound need to get to know people and hang out at a space that is not work, is not university or school, or home - to work with other creatively. During the 24c3 I started the HackBergen website and mailing list, put it on the Hackerspaces wiki (list), and found someone currently living in Bergen, too, who also wanted to work on this. To our knowledge, HackBergen was the first hackerspace group founded by women. (And its fine, if I am wrong there.:) )

We gathered some other people interested int the same purpose, but ran into problems actually financing and finding a space. As it turns out, real estate in Norway is really expensive - and so are rents. Also, there are few to none open community projects, and creativity seems to be measured by its success, and the D.I.Y. scene is individualized to a high degree.

To solve these problems, communicating better would help. Although we had a website and a wiki from the start, both weren*t used extensively. We got a facebook group, too. What was better used, was the mailing list. But since people are getting their information in so many different ways, using one channel sometimes, and another one at other times is confusing at best, if not really annoying with people who want to get a better impression first before they can decide if they like the idea or not.

Quite soon we were allowed to gather at the Piksel Hut, the office of the organizers for the Piksel Festival. That was great for meetings and ad hoc workshops, but we still really need our own space soon. So the purpose of communication is:

• to reach people who want to tinker,
• to build a member base and
• to gather donations

Why I think communication did not work in the past:

• People in the group are very informed of communication possibilities, have strong opinions and different channels they are preferring.
• People in the group don't like blogging?!
• The blog wasn't very good interconnected, so stuff could be posted there and at the same time spread to other places like facebook, twitter, mailing list...
• We as a group did not give people guidelines or even hints where they can find the information and updates they are looking for

Now, what do I think about this?

The group, every member should ideally be equally responsible to tell about things they are doing, thoughts they are having  in order to help others see what we are about, show diversity, share ideas and let them flourish and develop.

Wiki: wiki.hackbergen.org

The wiki is the groups main documentation tool, to gather iformation about past meetings, work on the legal documents of the HackBergen foundation. Its also the place to document projects in a handbook/tutorial kind of way. The strength of wikis compared to blogs is that wikis track changes a lot better, and make collaborating on texts easier. So meeting notes, documents to collaborate on should go there.

Blog: hackbergen.org

So far a wordpress driven blog with mostly old entries. Even though more people have user accounts, only one person blogs mostly. When people concerned about things happening in the group like workshops, classes and the trek for a sustaining space find things here, there actually are comments. Its important that different voices answer and talk. This can not be the responsibility of one person, because it would be exhausting and not very longlasting as an initiative. Also, building a community means, talking. A lot. By a lot of people. Building a geeky community means talking, too. On the interwebs.

Twitter: @hackbergen

The connection between the twitter account and the wordpress account is working. What is an important question, is if this is something that should be machine generated twittering solely, or if a person should be responsible for updates as well.

Facebook

A group has been existing for some time now, and a page has been made. However, at the time, facebook seem to have problems to connect to feeds or wordpress blogs. I have tried both ways today, but nothing worked. Connecting open source self controlled software to company made commercial apis can have its perks, as f.ex. with the latest change on twitter away from OAuth, where a lot of the many clients didn't work any longer. The group and the page have to be cared for, too. People have to get answers and we should have an eye on discussions there. This has not been working fully optimal in the past, and it would be important to find out why.

Other services:

Flattr, Kickstart, Eventbrite, Google Calendar

Flattr and kickstart can be helpful to gain awareness and fundraise for obtaining and sustaining a community driven space. In the case of flattr, awareness for smaller works and projects. Kickstart is a tool to fundraise money for certain goals and projects you have, where you try to find people with solidarity of your goals and maybe set aside something to give-away for especially generous people.

Eventbrite and Google Calendar can help to make our events wider known, and to keep track of people attending. To build a membership base we want to get to know people, and we want to become a bigger group. After all, we want to share knowledge and make something new and creative out of it.

Other services and technologies we could look at come to mind, like github for social development and versioning of code, the thingiverse for object design for 3dprinting and laser cutting.

Adjustments to further development

As the group grows, as the hackerspace gets found, equipped and filled with activities, shared and individual property, better communication structures will be needed. Already now having only one person holding all the passwords to all the official accounts is a problem, but with time it will probably become a bigger problem. So we should have an eye on the changing needs we have towards our communication infrastructure, and find creative architectures and flows that w can adapt to our needs, while still keeping the group and news about it accessible and open. The challenge here is to use a codebase and connections that is both easy to overview, maintain and upgrade, as well as easy to adapt to our needs.

What will also become more important is keeping contact to other hackerspaces in the region, and internationally. It is important that we are part not only of the local community, but also of an international community. We can learn a lot of how others do what they do, and they can learn from us, too. But only if we talk about what we do.

To Do - right now

• A short questionnaire of what people feel they need to participate more actively in the conversation. Evaluation of the answers.
• Write five texts: One about how people can contribute to hackbergen with donating some of their time and hold workshops and classes, one about where hackbergen currently stands. One about the state of the international movement, and one about my next class about LaTeX. And finally: One about what communication channels can be used how by the members.
• Be more available, and make my role clearly about enabling conversation, not steering it.
• Make a direct posting method from blog to facebook page.

In 2008 I contributed to the department I work in by introducing wikis for collaboration on texts and documents, aggregating and sharing knowledge about projects. Before that, there were lots of Microsoft Word documents floating around, which was a problem when the number of people contributing to a document became too big. Keeping track of changes was difficult, and when a deadline came close, lots of emails were sent and people tried to write on the document all at once.

There was also a wish to give the collaborating libraries in four regions of Hordaland a tool to work similar with their documents, and on their projects and events.

Enter DokuWiki

I rolled out 4, eventually 6 instances of DokuWiki for library groups in the regions, our own department, a book project within the international library organization IFLA and for one local library. All of the wikis were closed for internal use and their content was visible for logged-in users only. DokuWiki is well-documented and the localization to Norwegian Bokmål (Nynorsk is required for official communication at my workplace, but this was an internal tool, and it was free) is acceptable.

DokuWiki is a Wiki software written in php, which most shared webhosting services support. The main difference to other big wiki applications is, that is doesn't  store the content in a database, but rather in plain text files on the server.  If you use the hierarchical "namespaces" in DokuWiki for sorting your content, DokuWiki puts your pages into folders named after the namespace they are in. (This makes it really easy to use those textfiles in real geeky ways over the command line.  But thats just a sidenote.)

In practice using the DokuWiki installation worked for a while, but there was a huge difference in how frequent it was used and for what purposes by certain users.

The wikis used by the collaborting libraries were used a bit or a lot in the beginning, but after a while people stopped using them. The IFLA-wiki helped to make the process of finding new examples of best practices in libraries for library guidelines editable for all contributors in an international group. But after its purpose was fulfilled, and the project done, it wasn't used anymore.

Two problems: Purpose/design of the tool & missing WYSIWYG

The wiki of the Hordaland State library was not readable or writable to the general public, but all colleagues in the department used it to update their tasks in one long document. Working with one long document was what people were used to before, but the wiki didn't help much to do that.  Certain co-workers used it more than others. Those who used it the least, said that they found it diffcult to use the WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean)- editor for the wiki pages and that it was difficult to remember the syntax, when they were not using the wiki often. Most people are used to WYSIWYG-editors for documents such as Microsoft Word provides. While this is perfectly inderstandable, many WYSIWYG-editors in web applications are known to produce horrible html-code, especially if they have a wide range of operations you can do with them. The existing WYSIWYG editors for DokuWiki match that description - and my time budget too limited to do something about it.

The purpose of what this tool was used for and the way it was used did not really match its design. The head of the section encouraged everyone to use the wiki, but required only the use and updating of the long reporting document before internal meetings. What happened was: The document grew very long. Typical deadline problem: Everybody wants to update the section about their work 30 till 5 minutes before the meeting.

DokuWiki makes it possible to edit a document sectionwise, but everybody edited the document at once. Since DokuWiki tracks changes in documents in order to show differences between the versions and to make an RSS feed of the changes, only one user at a time can edit a page. So people grew frustrated because they could not use the report page when they had to, because a co-worker was working on it.

The reason why I write this in detail is not to complain about the users, my co-workers. I take the difficulties of working with those tools seriously. Which is why after almost two years we decided to take a second look at what tools we wish and need.

Audience and organizational setting

Some difficulties to mention here are:

• The rules and regulations which public service organizations have to behave when giving buying goods or services companies
• Public service in Norway has to give access to records in general, unless certain circumstances are met under which the citizens' privacy has to be protected.
• Not everything that is being worked on is ready to be disseminated to potentially everyone on the planet at once. Personal learning or work documents should be able to be protected.
• The corporate brand and identity of the mother organization Hordaland fylkeskommune and its main communication channel on the web, hordaland.no, should not be overruled. Official communications by the library department should still be posted there.
• People working in the department: Their privacy and right to opt out of their work being cached, stored and fulltext searchable. This is a particularly complicated topic, where I am not sure yet where I stand, how to solve it or if it is sovable.

At the same time, especially in Norway, libraries have policies that make them about distributing information, knowledge and cultural narratives and technologies freely to all citizen to enrich a free democratic society. The Hordaland State library works towards enabling the libraries to continually fulfilling and developing their services and skills to meet those goals. So, opening up discussions and the dissemination of information of how we work, what we work with and which ideas we come up with would hopefully help the other library aiding organizations, librarians in the region, colleagues from other places on the cultural sector understand and learn from what we are doing.

Several other public service organizations like the City of Oslo are right now working on a social media strategy, and the Norwegian Department of administration and ICT has published Guidelines for communication in social media based on an open discussion in their blog.  The Norwegian administration discusses initiatives openly.

More specifically in the library field, there has been a library blogosphere for years now, the library lab tries to help public libraries to develop and adopt new technologies, and aids in implementing social applications to their data and media collections.  A good place to start if you want to dive in to the norwegian library blogosphere is this handy collection of library and library blog rss. Some libraries and librarians meet their patrons on facebook, twitter and other social networks.

Purpose

There is a need for collaboration on internal collection of facts, document, processes and progress of projects for official reporting purposes. But their is also the need to share knowlegde, write tutorials and discuss ideas, questions and problems within the process of developing libraries.

What I see as the most difficult task is to embed the reporting part into a communication tool, that is also open to all audiences. If you use a fine granulation of open for all/closed for member permissions system, this might be difficult to understand/remember.

Possible solutions: multiblog cms

We are still discussing options for which software (our preference is something php-based, free and open source software) to use. When we set the reporting task aside for a while, and look at the other things we want to do, we probably want a multiblog system like WordPress's BuddyPress (example install for a creative writing group at Bergen Public Library) or something like Drupal Commons/OpenAtrium, two Drupal-based distributions for collaborating in groups.

I am in favor of a tool, that we can own, as opposed to a tool that is a free service provided by a company we as a department use as long as the company lets us. Using a blog/cms software for the core discussions, and making it possible to let discussions on facebook and twitter get through to us, or let our discussions be linked to on facebook is my favorite way of doing this. That way we won't lose our data on terms of a third party. But I think this process needs some more thought, and some deeper diving into examples, and we need to include the opinion and the way people want to collaborate into realizing the way of communicating.

This semester I am taking two classes at the University of Bergen. INF100 is about programming in Java and learning concepts and practices in programming. DIKULT110 is a short and intensive class about communicating in social media, which has - of course - its own blog. Part of the assignments is to reflect on what we have learned in blog posts. So, bear with me as the next blog posts will be about social media.