Reviewer: Anonymous

1) Is the subject matter relevant?

Yes, hacklabs and hackerspaces play an important role in the peer production ecosystem, both at the local and global level.

2) Is the treatment of the subject matter intellectually interesting? Are there citations or bodies of literature you think are essential to which the author has not referred?

I am not an expert in this field, but I feel that there is a large body of related work that is not considered. I guess that the previous JoPP issue is a good starting point for discovering additional related work: http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-12-makerspaces-and-institutions/

3) Are there any noticeable problems with the author’s means of validating assumptions or making judgments?

There seems to be a big gap between the complex concept of a “space of transformation” introduced in this paper and the analysis carried out to validate the assumption that hackerspaces could be considered “spaces of transformation”.

More specifically, I find the treatment of the concept too theoretical and difficult to understand, and at the same time the mapping of the hackerspaces through crawling very trivial.

Without any qualitative analysis of a few examples of hackerspaces, I think that this paper sheds very little light on the hackerspace ecosystem, or at least not enough to defend the ambitious theoretical argument.

4) Is the article well written?

The theoretical part of the paper was difficult for me to understand and I am not sure if it is a matter of my lack of expertise or the unnecessary complexity of the text itself. There are also many typos and sentences that seem to be wrong grammatically, and this causes additional difficulties.

5) Are there portions of the article that you recommend be shortened, excised or expanded?

The whole mapping exercise is of little intellectual interest in my opinion, given that the results are “as expected”. I would reduce this part and complement it exactly as the authors propose at the last section: “a further analysis of these spaces must focus in its offline relations, the ‘close reading’ or ethnographic exploration of the network of relations …”. I think that without such an analysis the two parts of the article appear as disconnected and if this gap is not bridged somehow I would recommend against its publication.

Reviewer: Anonymous

1) Is the subject matter relevant?

Yes, there is value in understanding how new technological assemblages may (or may not) empower humans in the digital environment. It’s a little unclear what actual argument the paper is making though – the conclusion does not link the theory with the hackerspace analysis in any clear way.

2) Is the treatment of the subject matter intellectually interesting? Are there citations or bodies of literature you think are essential to which the author has not referred?

Yes, again, the paper proposes a theoretical framework, and then presents a mapping and analysis but fails to present a convincing argument around the subject matter. See comments below.

Castells’ “The Rise of the Network Society” and Latour’s Actor Network Theory might provide useful further context

3) Are there any noticeable problems with the author’s means of validating assumptions or making judgments?

The paper attempts to situate a mapping of hackerspaces as ‘spaces of transformation’ in a theoretical framework that draws on a particular (post) digital reading. Setting aside my reservations around the reality of our post digital existence (it’s ongoing development and contestation suggests to me we are not yet “post”), there are two issues with the analysis as presented.

Firstly, the relevance of the introductory theoretical explanations to the mapping is not particularly well drawn. The notion of quasi-objects (and indeed spaces of transformation) could be more strongly tied to hackerspaces.org – which superficially appears to exist as little more than a list of links to quite disparate web presences. We need deeper understanding of those presences, and how they relate to the theoretical constructs.

Secondly, the analysis from the mapping is overly descriptive. It mostly draws attention to geography and typologies and does little to answer any significant research questions. For example, what is important about the various types of linkages and activities, what is at stake in this network – and building on the first issue, how does the theoretical approach inform this analysis.

Overall, the paper fails to make a convincing argument.

4) Is the article well written?

Mostly. There are some grammatical issues and the writing can be overly dense at times

5) Are there portions of the article that you recommend be shortened, excised or expanded?

A better balance between the theoretical exposition (probably too long) and the analysis (too short and insufficient in scope) would help.