CCCKC - Kansas City's Hackerspace
"Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects."
While the word "hacker" has a certain stigma attached to it, a better definition is "one who enjoys exploring the details of how systems work and how to stretch their capabilities." It does not always imply the use of a computer, for example. It rarely implies malice. Likewise, hackerspaces are about learning, sharing and collaboration.
CCCKC is Kansas City's hackerspace. I've been an active participant since shortly before the organization formed its first board of directors in 2008.
We took an interesting approach to finding a home for our collaborative environment. The first meetings were tucked away into corners of bars and coffee shops while we looked for a more permanent place to rent or purchase. Originally, part of an abandoned warehouse was to become our permanent home, but that fell through. We came to settle on a 1,400-square-foot office suite located deep within a hundred-year-old room-and-pillar style limestone mine.
The vast majority of the mine has been configured for uninhabited storage that's naturally climate-controlled, but there are a few corridors with drop ceilings, carpet, walls, full utilities and elevators to the surface.
Once inside, it doesn't look much different than a traditional office park, once you get past the huge limestone pillars that have been painted to match the walls and the lack of windows.
CCCKC's suite is, as I mentioned before, a 1,400 square foot area. It's been divided into four smaller spaces. The front room takes up about half of the footprint of the suite. It's fully finished with tile flooring and a suspended ceiling. This space is very versatile. With all of the tables and chairs moved to the walls, it provides massive amounts of open space for social events.
It may be converted to a gallery for demonstration stations. Think of it as a "science fair" layout.
Chairs can fill the room for classes and presentations.
Or all the tables can be centralized to form collaborative islands. Here, volunteers are shown teaching a Boy Scout troop about soldering.
Occasionally, we record or live-stream events. There are several video cameras and computers already configured for this purpose. The Canon XL-1 shown here was brought in by one of our members. We don't have that kind of stuff laying around, unfortunately.
The workshop room is the second largest space. One of our members found some solid wooden doors and 2x4 timbers that were going to be thrown away. These were cut up and re-assembled to build our main workbenches.
These workbenches hold several bench tools such as vises, grinders and a drill press.
Drawers and pegboard around the work shop area hold shared tools and resources, and provide storage for various collaborative projects. At any given time, people may be working on electronics, networking, software development, robotics, gaming, music composition, screen printing, paper craft, telephony, lock sport or other projects. That was a mouth full!
Also in the workshop: Our electronics station with soldering tools, oscilloscope, and other lab equipment. Our locksport station can be seen to the left.
The telecom and storage room contains our network and telephone infrastructure, and functions as a network lab environment. Some materials for larger projects are stored out of frame. We use large shelving units and bins to keep things relatively tidy in our cave.
The storage room also houses the shared library which amounts to a few tall shelves full of books, periodicals, software and manuals. Some of it is nostalgic and old, some is new and as current as print media can be.
The so-called "break room" houses a television with video game consoles and a coat rack as shown. There's also a double sink, coffee maker, two small refrigerators (one for beer :D ) and a few cabinets full of cleaning and first-aid supplies.
To me, this space embodies several tenets I hold dear: reclamation of otherwise wasted resources, collaboration and sharing of information among them.
You can keep track of the various projects and goings-on of CCCKC at our blog.
