31–40 of 126 posts
Now that things have reopened they simply never brought it back.
It's not all bad. In my city it seems the hacker spaces organized by individuals were replaced by maker spaces funded and organized by the city. At least two that I know of, that are now basically free co-working spaces with 3D printers, meeting rooms, free wifi and such.
One is run by the agency that ran the ccTLD back in the early 2000s, called Goto10 in Malmö and Stockholm. Very nice space to work at.
The other is run by the city of Malmö called Stapeln and is in a basement.
Besides those I know of at least two hacker spaces run by individuals that were still going last I checked.
The pandemic hit them pretty hard of course.
Hackerspaces require ongoing work and support. They aren't great businesses, but are great community spaces. To that end, you need an ongoing commitment of people to provide their time, resources, and effort.
We are extremely lucky in Ballarat that we have such a group of committed members, as well as very generous sponsorship. We've paid that back through ongoing community involvement and releasing many free resources, but we are lucky to be in that position.
I think the finances of hackerspaces were always very brittle and Covid killed a lot of them. https://hackerdojo.org/ https://makernexus.org/ https://sudoroom.org/ https://noisebridge.net/
Hackerdojo isn't a Hackerspace in the early 2010's meaning of the word anymore. They converted to a more startup incubator kind of place (and so I stopped going). From their website, looks like they're doing quite well! (for those who remember a previous incarnation of the space, with my partner and some friends we painted the 2 Dinos mural)
Same question for LUGs.
The LUGs I have been to are mostly social groups running off the inertia of old members which were around back when LUGs were relevant, an inertia which is slowing down with the age of the members.
I served on the board for a local LUG and there is still some interest from the community but not like back in the day when they could pull 100s of people in a meeting and IBM or Redhat would buy free pizza for everyone in the early 2000s.
The two big reasons I and my friends don't run them anymore: rent costs and COVID.
Same question for LUGs.