However, this assumption of an essentially “outsider” researcher, though true in many cases, deserves a degree of scrutiny and problematizing. In some cases, researchers come from the communities that they research (even if they are now part of an academic or other similar institution), in some cases researchers are not formally affiliated to a larger institution and may be performing work for local benefit at a local level (on behalf of a community group, for instance) and in some instances a researcher may be “between cultures” (for example, being originally from a Global South nation but having lived in a Global North one for a long period of time).

decolonization of knowledge and research methodology point to critical areas of reflection for researchers, regardless of the context of their work.

‘modelo’ del sistema que genera el problema de preocupación comunal.

un sistema de investigación o aprendizaje sobre sí misma

El énfasis en la construcción de lugar y en la práctica colaborativa, así como en el arraigo inequívoco del diseño para la transición a una visión ecológica, constituye, sin duda, una intervención ontológica —una ontología política del diseño

Un proceso ininterrumpido de reconstrucción convivencial es posible a condición de que el cuerpo social proteja el poder de las personas y de las colectividades para modificar y renovar sus estilos de vida, sus herramientas, su ambiente; dicho de otra forma, su poder para dar a la realidad un rostro nuevo [...] Estamos hablando de una sociedad que diversifica los modos de producción. Poner límites a la producción industrial tiene, para nosotros, el objetivo de liberar el futuro [...] Una sociedad congelada sería tan insoportable para el hombre como la sociedad de la aceleración: entre las dos se sitúa la sociedad de la innovación convivencial

More and more people make use of and relate their daily activities to media in one way or another. At the same time legislators, politicians, judges and other actors with decisive power related to policy-making and the law are in need of advice, con-sulting and grounded recommendations

. First, as has been underlined above, one needs to take into account both actors’ inward oriented and outward oriented communicative practices. In addition, it is understood that media representation today goes far beyond coverage by mainstream media as it relies on actors’ multi-layered media ensemble. Second, instead of arguing for a straightforward causal correlation between ‘media attention’ and social standing, this research reveals a more eclectic process: a spiral of legitimation that is based on the relation between the organization’s internal communicative figuration and the communicative figuration related to the public discourse around the political qualities of contemporary media technologies and infrastructures

The Club’s media ensemble and interactions with rel-evant actors perpetuate each other and co-determine the Club’s abil-ity to politicize media technologies and infrastructures. The dynamic at hand that best describes this process will be referred to as a spiral of legitimation.According to Mark Suchman, legitimacy is practically the basis of poli-tics as it addresses the forces ‘that constrain, construct, and empower organizational actors

the CCC’s internal communicative figuration not only enables the Club to execute direct digital action in the form of hacking, but also allows the hacker organization to communicate with a diversity of relevant actors (including the larger public) in coherent ways. In the case of the CCC, the relations between hacking and the communicative figuration within the Club are best understood as interlocking arrangements (Kubitschko 2015). These, as will be argued below, have wider consequences for the Chaos Computer Club’s standing as a political actor

Similarly, the Club is not aiming for visibility at any price; which can be seen in the fact that it does not make use of Facebook or many other capital oriented and data hungry infrastructures.

Richard Ericson and his colleagues (1989) make a useful distinc-tion between media access and media coverage. By access, they mean the news space, time and context to reasonably represent one’s own perspec-tive, whereas coverage entails news space and time but not necessarily the context for favourable representations (Ericson etal. 1989: 5). This distinction is vital because it demonstrates that media access—as with access to all kinds of resources at institutional levels—remains a politi-cal question (Freedman 2014). While media coverage simply denotes the amount and prominence of attention and visibility a group receives, media access indicates that an actor has a particular standing and is treated as an actor with a serious voice in the media

t from day one the Club complemented its hacks with outward-oriented com-munication aimed to make the hackers’ findings comprehensible and its political demands visible to the largest possible public. The Btx hack itself, for example, would not have been overly effectual if news media had not picked up the story. As news media reported widely on the hack and were largely in support of the hackers’ criticism, the hack gained an event character. Following the Btx hack, the CCC was recognized as a collective actor that had something relevant to say about the communi-cation and information landscape in Germany. The CCC was invited to speak on the main television news magazine of public broadcaster ZDF, the advice of Club members was frequently sought by national newspa-pers, they were asked by corporations to speak on data security and were requested by the newly established Green Party to write a report on the Party’s potential use of networked computing. one of the important details here is that instead of only being the subject of media coverage, the CCC had the opportunity to communicate its point of view to differ-ent audiences

During that time, the CCC was publicly affiliated with illegal hacks that, amongst other things, involved the Soviet Union’s KGB (the Committee for State Security) and hacking into NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) computer systems. As internal communication soured, accusations got out of hand and dis-putes amongst core members led to controversies that almost saw the Club’s dissolution. After reorganizing and re-establishing its own iden-tity over the coming year

day is a digital rights and civil society organization whose members have advised all major political parties in Germany over the past years, have written expert reports for the German constitutional court on six occasions and have been invited to be part of governmental committees. organization, in the context of this framework, is not understood as a static phenom-enon, but as a ‘discursive construction’ (Fairhurst and Putnam 2004) produced through an ongoing process of ‘organized sense makin

Third, the space acted as a recruitment tool for participants and served as a source of solidarity as members rallied around the space. This emphasis on actively inviting new members drew attention to the group's latent desire for open-access, a radical shift from the often insular nature of hacker culture.

Hacker and maker spaces are nearly universally defined within relatively affluent western cultures, raising obvious questions of economic privilege as well as more difficult ones of how spaces are defined by various cultural imaginaries. Mirroring previous work on collective organizations, HMS members' desire for an idealized space appears driven both by their exposure to a participatory democracy (Turner, 2013) and shortcomings they see in that model. Participatory culture, as an ideal, may be a utopian goal (Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013, p. 2; Turner, 2008), imagined here through material engagement.

For example, in the old space, visitors needed to obtain two signatures from two members to be approved for membership. This was seen by the directorship as a small barrier to entry and by female visitors as an unnerving time to be "judged" by uncertain criteria and leadership. In other words, what the two founders saw as a "weak" culture was interpreted as a "strong" one by women visitors. Querying the power dynamics of interactions takes us further towards unpacking when a cultural style can be inhibiting of participation, particularly geeks among who may embrace alternative masculinities (Kendall, 2002; McRobbie & Garber, 1976; Wilkins, 2008).

ad-hoc groups that form and just disband. They form again and disband. Then the individual ties between units in the group become stronger as part of this experience."

The "doing it together" instinct in HMSs may be one precipitated out around projects. Cognitive, classroom-based definitions of project-based learning tend to be formulaic (Blumenfeld et al., 1991). By comparison, the colloquial definition of project can be handily ambiguous about what is under construction. A project can be artistic, technical, or culinary (in the case of "food hacking"). It can be related to one's occupation, entirely recreational, or part of a movement from one to the other.

A physical workshop, then, helped reconcile often highly individualistic and introverted personalities to pursue collaborative learning together. The community nature of the space meant that it was easy to drop by, and relationships often developed between members. However, GeekSpace was initially populated by members often in technical professions and used as a "social club" to blow off steam, play foosball, and drink. The learning that occurred there was mainly self-education and listening to the occasional guest speaker. In retrospect, members, particularly those not coming from technical backgrounds, saw the failure of this space as the lack of collaborative work in the form of projects.

Quite to the contrary, members were self-regulating and saw tools and space as providing deterministic solutions (Jordan, 2008). The materialities of the space and tools allowed them to operate a democratic-meritocratic system focused on shared work with a minimum of hierarchy or rules. This spatio-materialistic perspective echoed a hacker reliance on "rough consensus and running code" that moved projects forward (Davies, Clark, & Legare, 1992, p. 543).

The most important shift in learning during this period was members' relationship to knowledge. GeekSpace attempted to democratize hacking and move towards a more inclusive model. This stands in contrast to Jean Burgess' observation that hacking "as an ideal, permits rational mastery ... but in reality, it is only the technical avant-garde (like computer scientists or hacker subcultures) who achieve this mastery" (Burgess, 2012, p. 30). Individualized encounters with software gave way to making and hardware tinkering where users learned by doing (Rosenberg, 1982). Collaborative work in the space took place in small groups clustered around a project, or the projects were passed from person to person to solve specific problems. The frustrations members had with the first phase of the space organically shifted to a set of practices based in materials, routines, and projects. "Collaboration on ideas and [their] physical manifestations," in the words of a GeekSpace director, is "how you tell somebody's part of the community."

Somewhat paradoxically, the group took advantage of their backgrounds in software even as they were careful to denote they weren't ''those kinds" of hackers. In correcting misunderstandings they both negotiated the stigma around hacking while retaining the term as central to their operations, albeit less so than before. Wayne, a director, would use the term in public because he knew people might question it. He saw this as a chance for redefinition, to get people to "realize that we're not just guys who read 2600 and try and make free long distance calls." Nancy similarly described it as a "word we 're trying to take back" from the media. Even as outwardly the organization shifted to being a maker space the word hacker continued to be a potent way they could mark the difference of their space as compared with other types of shared workshops.

Mike, the most involved director, described a conscious move towards maker culture and away from "being like a closed little nerd group that requires a prerequisite of being able to program in C." Software production was frequently used as a point of contrast to the current space. Making captured a notion of productivity and openness that the previous iteration lacked. Mark described the current version of GeekSpace as "more of a makerspace ... there's a lot of physical fabrication happening." The original members, by comparison, were "more software [oriented]... specifically, hardcore infosec [information security]," harkening back to the group's roots in local 2600 meetings and professional occupations.

By framing the work of women-operated hackerspace members as vital forms of hacking, they embraced the counterculture, but not the one most prevalent on the playa at Burning Man, home of the San Francisco Bay Area digerati. They instead embraced a personal counterculture, one based on their own family narratives—resurrecting a phrase widely celebrated within the 1970s Feminist movement: “the personal is political.”

By embracing the kinds of failure performed at FC, emotional support and entre-prenuerial work became one and the same. When Renz was getting ready to open her store, HackerMoms members helped her paint the space, hang lamps, and make her first chalk mural. In exchange, she gave members the walls of the store as a gallery, offering them a 100% of their sales. Later that year, Renz held a “table building workshop” at her space to replace the newly purchased CB2 hackerspace furniture that members found “poorly made.” Renz built a prototype, coordinated the low-cost purchase of supplies, and showed members how to do the rest.

These were the kinds of projects Smith wanted members to realize—projects that have an emotional component and seemed to need social support. If it’s something members could do on their own, “don’t bother coming,” Smith declared.

Participants in these groups celebrate technical exper-tise over skills that resonate with mainstream practices and ideals (like advocacy). Drawing out similar relations, Ellen Ullman (2012) uses her personal account of writing assembly language to argue that work closer to the machine helps (often male) programmers main-tain a higher status in computing cultures. In her examination of the largely male free/libre open-source software (FLOSS) community, Dawn Nafus (2012) extends this argument to hacking discourse in what she terms a “pushyocracy.” FLOSS members’ open scrutiny and “highly masculinized, aggressive online talking” shaped the perceived worth of individual contributions to expose “both the material aspects of computing and the social identities that people create for themselves through engaging with programming [...as] cultures made by and for men” (p. 671).

She knew she wasn’t going to join Noisebridge, finding it both messy (“completely offensive to all my design sensibilities,” she once remarked) and unapproachable (“I was into all the soft stuff and [Noisebridge] was into the hard stuff,” she explained).

Coleman suggested scholars consider the diverse range of ways individuals organize, mobilize, and act politically. This move toward how political notions evolve within specific collectives can also be seen in Nathanael Bassett’s (2013) writing on activist hackathons and Molly Sauter’s (2014) work with online civil disobedience. Their mode of inquiry, and the one I follow here, focuses on a specific collective with a specific and traceable history with attendant tools, practices, and tactics.

Members can be added to the TC at any time. Any committer can nominate another committer to the TC and the TC uses its standard consensus seeking process to evaluate whether or not to add this new member. Members who do not participate consistently at the level of a majority of the other members are expected to resign.The TC just uses the same consensus seeking process for adding new members as it uses for everything else.It’s a good idea to encourage committers to nominate people to the TC and not just wait around for TC members to notice the impact some people are having. Listening to the broader committers about who they see as having a big impact keeps the TC’s perspective inline with the rest of the project.As a project grows it’s important to add people from a variety of skill sets. If people are doing a lot of docs work, or test work, treat the investment they are making as equally valuable as the hard technical stuff.