F0 · Library Essay
F0 · Essay

Politika

A working theory of what F0 is, what it might want, and why money, membership and power keep arriving together.

Draft·Sept 2026·15 min
I

Intro & summary

If you read one section, read this one.

I will use a working definition of community that sits close to the one set out by McMillan and Chavis in 1986.

A community is a group of people pursuing group goals. Ideally those goals align with the goals of individual members and with the community’s values. Politics, and more narrowly governance, is one of the ways a community pursues them. A community uses resources to achieve its goals.

The definition is simple, but every word counts.

First, goals and values are discovered, not invented. They describe what is, rather than prescribe what should be.

This is easy to see in individuals. I can discover that my stepdaughter’s goal is to watch YouTube all day. I can also invent one for her: graduate with honours. And the second thing is a task, not a goal.

Group goals are harder. Groups want different things from the people in them. Many people from business assume group goals are set by leaders. But what leaders set are KPIs.

Take a typical online community. Its goal might be the exchange of information. But in a typical one, roughly a fifth of members want only to share, and four fifths want only to consume. No individual’s goal matches the community’s. They still align.

Second, most goals are not pursued through politics at all. They are pursued socially — through motivation, peer pressure and custom. Shaming and reputational sanction are politics, but they are not governance.

Third, governance is not mostly rules. Most of it is gathering information, establishing the outcomes the group wants, and building and running the procedures that deliver them. Rules are perhaps 5 per cent of governance. They are the part that typically gets written down as a legal code.

The short version

I do not believe F0 knows what it wants yet. It has not been discovered. Some members know what other members want. Nobody knows what the group wants.

II

On the independence of resources

The latest meeting mentioned two resources: foldable chairs and money. The chairs were referred to throughout as “the fucking chairs”.

It is worth remembering that resources are not people, not goals and not activities. Sometimes tying a resource to headcount is correct — sales revenue is tied to salespeople. Often it is a blunder.

There are many ways to get resources. F0 has its own resource-acquisition strategy — its business model. That strategy is not a separate thing from its membership structure or its politics. All three are the same mechanism.

The fee is the mechanism. Paying the higher resident fee makes you a resident, and being a resident is what gives you a vote. Money, belonging and power arrive together in a single act. That has a consequence: the only reliable way to raise more money from members is to create more voters, and the only way to restrict the vote is to cap the number of people who can pay the most.

The budget cannot be changed without changing the electorate, and the electorate cannot be changed without changing the budget.

This is a design choice, not a law of nature. It has real advantages — chiefly that those who decide are those who pay. But it is worth a brainstorm on whether money, membership and governance need to stay welded together, or whether some of them can be uncoupled.

Here is a stupid, top-of-my-head list of what communities like F0 typically do. Open a category to see the options.

Money from outside 5 options
  • Sponsorship. Cash or in kind. A tool vendor supplies a machine; a local firm covers rent. Creates an outside stakeholder with informal influence but no formal vote — its own political problem.
  • Equipment sponsorship. A company funds one named machine rather than the space. Narrower obligation, easier to end.
  • Grants. Municipal culture funds, innovation programmes, EU money, university partnerships. Brings reporting duties and forces the space to state goals in writing — which, given the earlier argument, may mean inventing KPIs it does not actually have.
  • Recurring small donations. Open Collective, Patreon, a crowdfunder for a specific tool. Donors expect visibility, not control.
  • Salvage and donation streams. Corporate hardware refresh cycles, e-waste, surplus furniture. This is how you get chairs without buying chairs.
Selling to the surrounding context 4 options
  • Paid tours, talks and events.
  • Courses and workshops. Soldering for beginners, CNC safety, a school-holiday programme.
  • Corporate team-building and away days. Reliably the highest margin per hour, and reliably the most resented by residents.
  • Mobile makerspace. Take equipment to schools, festivals or fairs for a fee.
Selling services from the space 4 options
  • On-demand fabrication. 3D printing, laser cutting, PCB assembly, small-batch runs for local businesses.
  • Repair services. A paid repair desk alongside a free repair café.
  • Prototyping and consulting. The space bids for contract work as an entity rather than as individuals.
  • Certification and training. Recognised safety or machine certificates that people outside the community will pay for.
Selling goods 4 options
  • Kits and physical products. Sold on Tindie, at markets, or direct.
  • Digital goods. Designs, models, plans, courses.
  • Merchandise.
  • Group buys. Bulk orders of filament, components or materials, with a small margin retained.
III

On community goals & alignment

As I said, politics is mostly information gathering, and the single most important piece of information is this: what does the community want to achieve?

I do not know. I do not have the information. I doubt many people do. It needs to be researched.

A community may hold several goals at once, and they may conflict.

A longer list of possible goals not research — just examples
  • Teach its own members.
  • Teach the surrounding city.
  • Be taught — by visitors, by outside experts, by each other.
  • Give members access to tools and machines they could never justify owning alone.
  • Provide a place to learn things that have no professional payoff.
  • Start shared technical projects for the fun of it.
  • Support individual projects that would stall at home.
  • Make things the surrounding context needs but nobody will pay for.
  • Repair things and keep them out of the bin.
  • Produce work good enough to show in public.
  • Start shared social activities so members meet people they otherwise would not.
  • Be somewhere to go when you have nowhere to be.
  • Build a professional network sideways, through work rather than through networking.
  • Give a specific group a place of its own — expats, teenagers, women in tech, or anyone else.
  • Be a route into the field for people without the usual credentials.
  • Be a landmark that the local technical scene organises itself around.
  • Be a neutral venue other groups can use.
  • Host outside events and give them a home.
  • Change how the city thinks about making, repairing and owning technology.
  • Defend a particular way of working — open source, free software, the right to repair.
  • Preserve knowledge and machines that would otherwise disappear.
  • Keep access cheap enough that money is not the filter.
  • Stay independent of any employer, university or state body.

Self-preservation is almost always a goal, so of these I am fairly confident:

A discovered goal becomes a lens. Once you have one, every decision that used to take an hour of argument takes a minute, because there is now a question that settles it.

Suppose research showed that F0’s goal is:

Make things the surrounding context needs but nobody will pay for.

Watch what happens to everything else.

Admissions. The question stops being “can this person pay and vibe” and becomes “will this person finish things for other people”. A brilliant engineer who only builds for themselves is a weaker fit than a mediocre one who keeps showing up for someone else’s project.

Onboarding. New members are introduced to the current queue of unfunded work, not to the machines. The first question asked of them is what the city keeps failing at — not what they want to build.

Resources. The chairs stop being a nuisance and become a capacity question: how many people can sit down and work at once. Money is judged by whether it buys throughput for unpaid work. A second cheap 3D printer beats one expensive one, because the goal favours quantity and availability over precision.

Business model. Paid work is now instrumental, not embarrassing. Corporate away days are fine, because they fund the unfunded work. But the space will not take on paid contracts that consume the same evenings the real goal needs. The test for any revenue stream is simple: does it buy time for the unpaid work, or does it eat it?

House rules. These write themselves, and they are unusual ones.

Requests from outside. The space needs a way to receive them — a public channel and someone answering it. Under a teaching goal, that would be overhead. Under this goal it is the intake pipeline, and neglecting it is the most serious failure available.

What gets refused. A member who wants to run a paid prototyping business from the space is now a clear no, even if they are popular and pay on time. A request to host a commercial product launch is a no. Under a different goal both would be easy yeses. The lens does not only tell you what to do; it tells you what you are allowed to turn down without a fight.

The point is not that this particular goal is the right one. It is that any discovered goal produces this cascade, and no goal produces none of it. If F0 adopts a goal and nothing downstream changes, the goal was invented rather than discovered — it is a KPI wearing a costume.

IV

On values

Values are orthogonal to goals. Any goal can be pursued under any value set. A humanist space and a technocratic space can both aim to make things nobody will pay for, and both can succeed.

Goals answer what we are trying to achieve. Values answer how we treat each other while doing it. Neither determines the other.

Values are also not governance. Governance is procedures and authority: who decides, by what process, with what limits. Values are the manner in which all of that is conducted. You can have identical rules under different values and arrive at different places.

Some examples.

Humanist

Nobody is ever demeaned. Not members, not applicants, not guests, not the person asking an obvious question on day one. Dignity is non-negotiable, and it costs what it costs. A rejected applicant leaves having been treated decently. A bad idea is dismantled without its author being dismantled with it.

Efficacy-cratic

What matters is whether the thing works. People are expected to absorb some damage in the process — blunt criticism, being told their approach is wrong, having their work picked apart in front of others. Not cruelty for its own sake, but no particular effort spent cushioning. The assumption is that adults can take it, and that softening feedback wastes everyone’s time.

Technocratic

Competence weights the conversation. The person who knows the most about the subject has the most say in it — not more votes, which would be governance, but more standing. Expertise is deferred to, and the newcomer with a strong opinion and no track record is expected to earn the right to it.

None of these is the correct one. They produce different places and they attract different people — which is the actual mechanism by which values shape a community: not through rules, but through who stays.

Two things worth saying plainly.

First, values conflict. Humanist and efficacy-cratic collide the moment someone’s project is bad and they have worked on it for six months. Technocratic and humanist collide when the expert is right and unpleasant about it. A space that claims all three has not resolved anything — it has just deferred the argument to the first hard case, where it will be settled by whoever is loudest.

Second, values are discovered, not declared, exactly like goals. A space that says it is humanist and lets one member sneer at beginners is not humanist. It is efficacy-cratic with a nicer mission statement.

V

On politics & governance

Currently F0 is, technically, a prescriptory negativist plutocratic oligarchy. Every word in that sounds bad. None of it is. Most companies are the same.

In technical terms:

  1. Oligarchy. Only the ruling class decides who joins the ruling class.
  2. Plutocratic. Money gets you residency. No money, no residency.
  3. Negativist. The rules say what is forbidden, not what is allowed.
  4. Prescriptory. They are rules.

The system can be changed. It does not have to be. But if it does change, it changes through the same lens.

Take the same example goal as before:

Make things the surrounding context needs but nobody will pay for.

Here are the potential changes through the lens of that goal.

Plutocratic → track record

Residency is earned by delivery. Complete two or three pieces of unfunded work that someone outside asked for, and you are a resident. The fee stays as a membership fee, because the space still has rent — but it stops buying the vote. This is not charity towards the poor; it is the only filter that measures the thing the goal cares about. A wealthy member who never finishes anything is, under this goal, a worse resident than a broke one who does. The current system has that backwards.

Oligarchy → vouching by beneficiaries and collaborators

Whoever worked alongside a candidate vouches for them. So can the outside party who received the work. That second source is unusual and worth the trouble, because the failure mode this goal fears is invisible from inside the space. A member can be delightful in the workshop and unreliable to the person waiting on the delivery. Only the beneficiary knows.

Negativist stays — but only for members

Improvisation is the engine here. Unfunded work is unfunded precisely because nobody knows how to do it, so a list of permitted methods would be fatal. Keep the rules for members negativist. Invert it for power: officers may do only what they are explicitly authorised to do, including explicit types of new rules.

Prescriptory → precedent

Most of the hard cases under this goal are judgement calls that no rule list survives. Which requests to take. When to refuse. What to do when a member goes quiet mid-project and a school is waiting for a delivery. So record decisions and the reasoning behind them. After a year you have a body of practice that handles new requests without new rules, and a new resident can read how the space thinks rather than what it forbids.

VI

Social engineering

That all said, a hackerspace should be governed as lightly as it can stand. Every rule is a cost: someone has to remember it, someone has to enforce it, and enforcement is where small communities break.

So most of the work is not governance at all. It is custom, habit, ritual, visibility and peer pressure.

Some examples.

Make behaviour visible. Almost all of this works by putting something where people can see it. Anonymity kills the mechanism; visibility makes it run on its own.

Make the good thing the easy thing. Most failures of custom are failures of friction. If the tidy option takes three minutes longer than the messy one, you will get mess, and no rule will fix it.

Ritualise. A thing that happens at a fixed time needs no reminder. A thing that happens when someone remembers to organise it will stop happening the month that person is busy.

Let newcomers learn by copying. The strongest norm transmission is watching what regulars do in the first week — which is why the behaviour of the oldest members matters far more than any onboarding document.

Use status deliberately. Communities distribute recognition whether or not they mean to. Deciding what earns it is the single most powerful lever available, and it is usually left to accident.

All of this is only meaningful once you know what you are optimising for. The same mechanism, pointed at different goals, produces different customs. Take the example again:

Make things the surrounding context needs but nobody will pay for.

Here is what the mechanisms become.

A visible request board. Incoming asks from outside, on a wall, with names and dates against the ones people have taken. Nothing enforces it. But an empty board is embarrassing in a way no rule can make it, and a name sitting next to a six-month-old request is a quiet pressure that no officer has to apply.

Show and tell. Fixed slot, same day every month, anyone can show anything — including failures. Under this goal it does something specific: it makes finishing socially rewarding and drifting socially costly, without anyone being told off. People start timing their work to have something to show.

Beneficiaries come to the space. Invite the school, the repair charity, the neighbour who asked. Someone standing in the room saying the thing was useful does more for commitment than any deadline policy. It converts an abstract obligation into a face — which is what actually makes people finish.

Documentation as a social act, not a duty. Nobody documents because a rule says so. They document if documentation is what gets shown, linked and praised. Under this goal the space wants reproducible work, so make the write-up the thing that earns status, not the build.

Pairing as the default. Not mandated, just habitual. Regulars ask newcomers to join whatever they are doing. This solves onboarding, safety training and handover of abandoned projects at once — and it means a dropped commitment has a second person who already knows the work.

The adoption ritual. A fixed date when stalled projects are offered to whoever wants them. Framed as rescue rather than shaming. It handles the goal’s worst failure mode — silent abandonment — without anyone ever having to accuse anyone of anything.

Credit the unglamorous. Under this goal, the person who answered the emails from outside requesters is more valuable than the person who built the impressive machine. Whoever the space celebrates is what the space will get more of. If the machine-builders get the applause, the request inbox will go unanswered, whatever the stated goal says.

None of these is a rule and none needs an officer. They are arrangements of visibility, timing and praise. A different goal would produce a different set. Under a teaching goal, the same mechanisms would yield a beginner-question channel where asking is visibly welcomed, regulars who drop what they are doing when someone is stuck, and status attached to teaching rather than to delivery.