Membership Philosophy
We welcome everyone — regardless of background, identity, belief, or lifestyle. The hackerspace is a shared environment built around curiosity, collaboration, and making things. To keep it that way for everyone, we ask all members to understand the difference between existing here and imposing here.
Who we're looking for
Membership here isn't a contract with loopholes. We're not interested in building an exhaustive list of forbidden behaviours, and we're not interested in members who treat the absence of a specific rule as permission.
What we're looking for is simple: people who are here in good faith. People who want to build things, share knowledge, and contribute to a space that's worth coming back to. People who, when they encounter a situation the rules don't explicitly cover, ask themselves "is this good for the space?" rather than "can I get away with this?"
The rules that follow describe the spirit we expect members to operate in. They are illustrations, not an exhaustive list. If you find yourself arguing that what you did was technically allowed, you are probably already the wrong fit for this community.
You are welcome as you are
Your identity, beliefs, relationships, and values are yours to bring through the door. A member who is trans, religious, queer, atheist, polyamorous, or anything else is welcome here without question. Personal expression — stickers, pronouns, religious dress, whatever reflects who you are — is entirely fine.
What is not fine is using the space, its channels, or its community as a platform to recruit, preach, campaign, or advocate. This includes:
- Pushing political or ideological causes on other members
- Attempting to convert others to your religion or worldview
- Rallying members around personal disputes or relationship conflicts
- Pestering others with views they haven't asked to engage with
If you want to do any of those things, there are better venues for them. This isn't one.
Your existence shouldn't limit someone else's
The line we ask everyone to respect is simple: exist freely, but don't use your existence as a tool against others.
A few examples of where that line sits:
Identity — You're a gay trans furry and you want to join. Great, you're welcome. Displaying who you are is not a problem. What is a problem is invoking your identity as a rhetorical device in every conversation, or using it to pressure or provoke other members. The same applies in reverse: a member whose religion leads them to disagree with your identity may hold that belief privately, but the moment they start directing it at you or attempting to influence others, they've crossed the line and will be asked to leave.
Relationships — Members date each other sometimes. If things go south, we ask both parties to handle it outside the space. Recruiting people to your side of a breakup, or badmouthing an ex to other members, is not something we'll host. Unless someone has committed a crime against you, their membership is not affected by the relationship ending.
Beliefs — Holding a worldview — religious, political, philosophical — is not grounds for exclusion. Acting on it in ways that make other members feel unwelcome is.
The missing stair
A "missing stair" is a term for someone in a community who is a known problem — but instead of being addressed, people quietly learn to work around them. New members aren't warned. Regulars adjust their behaviour. The stair stays broken, and the cost is distributed silently across everyone else.
We don't do that here.
If members are privately warning each other about you, if people are avoiding the space on days you're around, if your presence consistently requires others to manage their behaviour around yours — that is a membership issue, and we will treat it as one.
This applies even when nothing you've done is dramatic enough to point at directly. A pattern of low-level behaviour that degrades the experience of the space — making people uncomfortable, monopolising shared resources, creating social friction that others absorb — is grounds for termination. It doesn't require a single incident serious enough to justify it on its own.
We'd rather have a hard conversation and lose a member than let the space slowly become somewhere people don't want to be.
The hard limit
There is one exception to the general principle of tolerating all viewpoints. If your ideology is defined by the exclusion or oppression of others, and you make that visible in the space — through materials, language, or behaviour directed at other members — you will be asked to leave. We are not in the business of ideological gatekeeping, but we are in the business of keeping the space functional and safe for everyone who walks in.
The short version: come as you are, let others do the same.
if you are reading this because another member causing you problems or making you uncomfortable, message @pan and she will handle it for you