Hacker Dojo: Community Trading Zone

I recently came out of a Hacker Dojo board meeting, as I do every month, but this time with a renewed sense of excitement for Hacker Dojo. We began with the usual board meeting stuff — finances, staff benefits, etc — but there was one final item to discuss that’s more in tune with the reason I’m even on the board. There has been an increasingly pressing issue around what Hacker Dojo is. We used to know what it was and had a reasonable idea of what we always wanted it to be, but we’ve grown, we’ve learned, and our model has to adapt. This discussion led to a rethinking of the conceptual structure of Hacker Dojo.

One of the reasons this came up is growth. We’ve had consistent membership growth with only a couple expected downturns, due to various setbacks. For example, when we were temporarily limited to a maximum occupancy of 49 people, membership dropped because people couldn’t throw the same events as before. Despite setbacks, we’ve had impressive long-term growth. If you describe us as a “hackerspace,” we are the largest in the United Sates, and I believe one of the largest in the world. It’s clear that overall we’re doing quite well, but we want to take it further. We want to keep pushing because Hacker Dojo means a lot to all of us and we want to see it, and the culture and ideals that go with it, reach new people and new places.

We’ve always talked about franchising and starting new locations, but we’ve learned that a single, 24/7 location with 400 members and around 2,000 people coming through every month is quite difficult to run, especially as a bootstrapped non-profit with minimal staff. We’ve had sponsorships, but we work hard for those sponsorships and provide services to receive them. Most of our income comes from membership fees. Despite all this we’re trying our best to continue to take Hacker Dojo to the next level, and it should be noted we have been quite successful so far, for many reasons that could go into another long blog post.

Scaling any organization is hard. Scaling an organization like this one can be extra difficult, especially when we’re trying to maintain the grassroots, bottom-up, culture that started it. We’ve always tried to support the concept of a democratic organization. For the first few years we were 100% volunteer run, with no paid employees. The growth of Hacker Dojo has generated lot of extra work to get done that nobody really wants to do. Raising money, working with the city, organizing contractors, dealing with financial issues, having to move to a new location and rent the previous one … all this requires a LOT of leg work and consistent attention that just wasn’t happening with volunteers.

Eventually, you need to start hiring full or part-time people. We now have a small staff of paid employees who tackle these more time-intensive tasks. While this has helped us manage the growth, it has created a kind of interesting tension between the forces of the democratic, bottom-up nature of our organization and the forces of more traditional, more centralized modes of operation necessary for efficient execution of a vision. The vision being in the short-term to improve the quality of the experience at Hacker Dojo, and in the long-term to bring Hacker Dojo and all that it stands for — what some have called the epitome of true Silicon Valley culture — to more people.

This tension has been healthy and has helped Hacker Dojo often reap the benefits of both worlds. However, as we grow, so does the tension and discussion around it. This was the catalyst for our discussion at the board meeting. Now the realization I’m excited about is somewhat of an aside from this issue of tension, but the issue was the catalyst for revisiting what Hacker Dojo is. I quite enjoy the occasional existential crisis as it often results in refreshed sense of purpose and meaning.

We revisited many ideas, for example that Hacker Dojo is a platform, and like many platforms it can be hard to describe. We serve purposes in the worlds of education, business, social, and many others. We’d talked about how Hacker Dojo has played a part in not just projects and startups, but relationships — partnerships, friendships, and even marriages. We considered different organizations for analogy: universities, incubators, fraternities, and anything else that comes close to an existing framework for all the amazingness that Hacker Dojo produces.

Then it hit us. Communities. Plural.

What we realized is that we’ve effectively been treating Hacker Dojo as one community. We’ve sort of acknowledged that there are sub-groups within Hacker Dojo, but we’ve more or less operated under the assumption that we serve two types of citizens: members and the general public. As we’ve gotten larger, it’s become much more difficult to effectively treat either of those as one group. The reality is that they are all actually part of many communities.

The idea was right under our nose the whole time, just under a different guise. Events have always been a core part of Hacker Dojo because Hacker Dojo started with the idea that it could be a place where people could meet and host events like the event that inspired Hacker Dojo itself, SuperHappyDevHouse. When an event happens on a regular basis it turns into a community. A group of people with a common interest and/or set of values come together, turn into a community, and these communities grow, develop, and spawn really interesting things, just as SuperHappyDevHouse spawned Hacker Dojo.

Hacker Dojo now serves many communities both inside and outside of Hacker Dojo; not only internal communities but external ones as well. External communities can also leverage the infrastructure that Hacker Dojo provides. These communities might already have a member of Hacker Dojo, or someone in the community chooses to become a member of Hacker Dojo, usually to throw an event. Once that community gets into Hacker Dojo, they not only see Hacker Dojo, but all the other communities that come together under our roof. Sometimes this inspires even more people to sign up as members, not just to be a part of Hacker Dojo, but to participate in and see what other communities Hacker Dojo offers.

We’re now thinking of Hacker Dojo not just as a community hub, but as a hub of communities. A community trading zone, if you will. While we will always support and listen to individual members, we should begin to think of communities, in the plural, as first-class citizens of Hacker Dojo. This may seem like a subtle change but it is a big difference. It means acknowledging and supporting the communities that operate in and around Hacker Dojo. It means going to those communities and asking how we can better serve them as a community, not just individual members.

By connecting with communities we can provide infrastructure to foster their growth and development. Imagine going to the Hacker Dojo website and seeing a page devoted to the many communities of Hacker Dojo. When a new member signs up they could indicate their interests and we could provide them with a list of communities they might be interested in. Hacker Dojo would in a sense then be improving the communities’ “deal flow.”

Rethinking Hacker Dojo as infrastructure for communities has led to lots of exciting new ideas. By focusing on empowering them with infrastructure that allows them to flourish, we are then supporting our members in a more meaningful way.

I’m hoping this simple change in the way the board and members invested in Hacker Dojo think about Hacker Dojo will hopefully lead to lots of positive change. We don’t have these conversations very often on the board but we need to have them to maintain the vision of Hacker Dojo and we need to have them in public. Clearly this is a collaborative effort, so we want to know how the general community feels about this idea. So I’m putting this out there, and hopefully it will lead to more exciting discussions.