probably all those people running coworking facilities. There are people who pay, and there are those who just show up and mooch. But somehow they're able to stay alive. In SF, there's the Hat factory & Citizen Space. I've only been to Citizen Space as a non-paying resident, but it amazes me how those places manage to survive in general.
So, if I understand correctly, there's basically no difference between "hackerspaces" and "coworking facilities". Except maybe that coworking facilities already exist and work.
Both hackerspaces and coworking facilities are kind of operating on the "gym membership" model, where a lot of membership fees are pooled to get something that is shared but no one could afford to buy for just their own use.
However the people there don't totally overlap, any more than they totally overlap with Gold's Gym, TechShop, a Country Club, Hunting Lodges, organic co-ops, or any of the other things that people do in the same pattern.
Co-workers are there to make money, mostly either by freelancing or by doing a startup. They have in common that they have rejected (or been rejected by) the large corporate organization, and that their work consists mainly of typing on a keyboard and looking at a screen (instead of shaping metal or cooking food or something), so they have similar facilities requirements.
Hackers might like to make money, but the primary goals of the endeavor are expansion of ability and knowledge. Thus, hackerspaces can succeed, and then completely disappear as people wander off; they tend to have more counter-culture type themes; people often live there; since the part of hacking that is typing on keyboards and looking at screens is easy to do from home, the stuff in the hackerspace tends to be the stuff that needed money and physical space, so there is more hardware crap all over; and a portion of the people are generally interested in hacking human society in various ways, leading to the political interests and "hacktivism" and etc.
Both hackerspaces and coworking facilities are not new. HQ and BusinessSuites and many hotels are essentially more expensive co-working facilities with less emphasis on community, and the insurers who agreed to do all their business at Loyld's coffee house in 1600s London or the lawyers who all worked from the Inner Temple Inn even before that must have been doing something similar. I am pretty sure that CoD had a loft hackerspace in Boston in the early 1990s, and I know of a few other shared apartments and houses that were hackerspaces for a few years.
The basic idea is, if you want to do something, and you can't drop the cash to do it yourself, see if you can find some like-minded friends. "Co-founders" is what they are called in the startup context.
I was a member of the first coworking space in San Francisco for a few weeks toward the end --- the one at Spiral Muse. I've also been to the (now defunct) hacklab here in Buenos Aires, to SuperHappyDevHouse (which is sort of an intermittent hacker space), to TechShop, to some classes at the Crucible, and gone to Wiki Wednesday at Citizen Space, and I'm considering signing up as a client of CoworkCentral here. So, given this broad but shallow experience, I think coworking spaces don't have much in common with hacker spaces; coworking spaces (IME) are a place where people go primarily to work (and aren't necessarily hackers, nor are they necessarily going to be happy with you interrupting their work to ask for help with your own), while hacker spaces are where they go to spend time with other hackers and work on fun stuff that you aren't getting paid for, in a fun collaborative setting. You might meet cofounders of a company at a hacker space and then go start your company in a coworking facility.
I recognize that my experience on both sides is pretty shallow, though.
noahlt writes: "Except maybe that coworking facilities already exist and work."
I'm pretty sure hacker spaces have been around a few more years than coworking spaces.
Here's what Jake Appelbaum, one of the Noisebridge founders, said about this discussion:
There are huge differences. Noisebridge, a 501c3 in San Francisco, is tangentially related to the so-called "hackerspaces" movement. Coworking is a gym, Noisebridge is a community. Coworking spaces are quiet places to do your day job. Noisebridge is a place to learn why your kernel module isn't working by talking to the person to your left. The person to your left just happens to be a kernel hacker and she is totally happy to talk to you; she's there for both social and technical reasons.
It's a safe space for asking questions and it's a safe space to find the answers together.
It's the kind of place where you drag a safe in off of the street and learn how to crack it. Because you're spending your spare time with ten other people interested in understanding mechanical locks, it will open.
