Travelling the continent’s hackerspaces over the years, I have visited quite a few spaces located in university towns. They share a depressingly common theme, of a community hackerspace full of former students who are now technology professionals, sharing a city with a university anxious to own all the things in the technology space and actively sabotaging the things they don’t own. I’ve seen spaces made homeless by university expansion, I’ve seen universities purposefully align their own events to clash with a hackerspace open night and discourage students from joining, and in one particularly egregious instance, I’ve even seen a university take legal action against a space because they used the name of the city, also that of the university, in the name of their hackerspace. I will not mince my words here; while the former are sharp practices, the latter is truly disgusting behaviour.
The above is probably a natural extension of the relationship many universities have with their cities, which seems depressingly often to be one of othering and exclusion. Yet in the case of hackerspaces I can’t escape the conclusion that a huge opportunity is being missed for universities to connect engineering and other tech-inclined students with their alumni, enhance their real-world skills, and provide them with valuable connections to tech careers.
Yesterday I was at an event organised by my alma mater, part of a group of alumni talking to them about our careers. At the event I was speaking alongside an array of people with varying careers probably more glittering than mine, but one thing that came through was that this was something of a rare opportunity for many of the students, to talk to someone outside the university bubble. Yet here were a group of engineers, ..
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