What is it?

The Hackerspace Blueprint is a living document which explains how our community works. This document is the result of more than five years of testing and improving our do-ocracy to get the best out of people. It’s a system with minimal overhead and minimal control, designed to give power to the people who do stuff.

We’ve been using this system for more than five years, tweaking and improving it when we encounter issues. Interested? Download the PDF or epub version to read it.

Who are we?

We are Hackerspace.Gent a cozy hackerspace in the beautiful city of Ghent, Belgium.

Why did we make this?

We were on the brink of collapse because of internal conflict. Instead of giving up, we decided to hack the hackerspace itself; find a system where internal conflict actually gets solved. We did an number of workshops to figure out how to do this, we wrote everything down, and got to work. Five years later, the disorganized workshop notes turned into an actual booklet. We hope you can use this to solve issues in your organization.

For more information and a quick overview of some lessons learned, you can watch this lightning talk.

Can everyone use this?

Yes! The blueprint is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, so feel free to use it, learn from it and remix it. Let us know what you did with it! You can find the source of the blueprint on Github.

More formats?

More information?

How to solve conflict in a community of equals - RC3 (2020)

Merlijn did a presentation at RC3 about how to solve conflict in a Do-ocracy and other leaderless communities.

Hackerspace Design podcast - 36C3 (2019)

The Hackerspace Design podcast gives some more context around the Hackerspace Blueprint and Do-ocracy in hackerspaces in general.