Good morning Amersfoort! I just arrived at the Digital Society Conference and look forward to presenting my ongoing and planned research on informal learning in hackerspaces today. My project “Hacking your way to IT expertise” is one of the showcases at the information market. For those who will/have come by to take a look at (and hopefully a chat about) my project at the conference, I have put together some additional material:

• Earlier this year (2018), I published an article on ethical considerations for researching hacker communities. In this piece, I focus particularly on how to discuss controversial content that has been shared online – for example via publicly archived mailing lists. The paper Tracing controversies in hacker communities: ethical considerations for internet research has been published in the Information, Communication & Society journal.
• I wrote an article on hackathons, i.e. hacking-marathons, which was published in the Convergence journal in 2017. If you are interested in how individuals and groups may develop their IT skills during such events, take a look at the article: Hacking events: Project development practices and technology use at hackathons
• Together with my UM colleague Karin Wenz, I edited a Digital Culture & Society journal issue on Making and Hacking (2017). Just like the articles above, our introduction and all other contributions are available as open access.

Pressed for time/tldr?

• This short piece, based on an interview with Jolin Linssen, gives an overview of my research: The ins and outs of hacking (2016).

Less talk, more action?

• If you want to see and experience a hacker- or makerspace, rather than hearing more about it, consider a visit. Some communities have regular, sometimes even weekly, open evenings and many participate in the yearly International Open Hackerspace Day. You can find more inforation on Dutch hackerspaces here and an international overview, provided by the community network hackerspaces.org, here.

Picture credits and thanks: The image featured above is the logo of hackerspaces.org, a network of hackerspaces. It has been retrieved from http://hackerspaces.org.