The Hacker Dojo: Community-Centric Working Space

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2009-08-14 11:56:00 UTC
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Coders gather at a BarCamp in Orlando, FL (credit: hyku)

Imagine a working space that's optimized for your working habits, in the perfect location, full of people like you who can challenge you, learn from you, and teach you things. And imagine this space is community-centric. Run by the people who love it. That's the new Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California.

The Hacker Dojo is, well, pretty much how it sounds. It's a 24-hour space opened by software engineers, web application designers, and other hackers that's meant to fill a very unique manifestation of the universal need for space and company.

The project came out of SuperHappyDevHouse, a series of events for coders up and down the Bay Area. The idea of having a physical space is to provide a central locale for all those sort of events and community happenings. According to an article on VentureBeat, part of the goal with the physical space is to make it easier for new members of the hacker community to run into their peers.

This is one more example of the intersection of online and offline communities. The thing I love about this one is that it's totally owned and operated by the community. The "work for" page is all about asking how people can volunteer to keep the space thriving, and what they can contribute.

This is a slightly different approach than other incubators and coworking spaces. This is certainly a more purely social experiment than a business model. But I think it shares a growing impulse towards connection and community that is more about what it means to be a social being than what it means to belong to an online network.

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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