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.
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.