What is a Hacker Residency?

This week I'm participating in a Hackers residency in Nantes. But what exactly is a "hackers residency" or "Hackers in residence"?

It's simple: you take a place, preferably a cool one, a group of hackers (I'll come back to this term), you let it brew for a short period and you get… something, in principle a product but we could simply talk about artifacts, prototypes, applications, physical machines, etc… But not just slides. Otherwise we'd call it a McKinsey seminar.

When I talk about hackers, be careful I'm not talking about the person who hacked your credit card last month. For lack of a more appropriate term, we'd rather talk about tinkerers. People who seek to solve problems by sometimes taking a few shortcuts.

A hacker residency is, in spirit, a direct descendant of hackerspaces, shared community spaces that emerged in the 1980s/90s. In essence, there are already Hackers who move from one place to another to share, test and experiment. For Hackers residencies, the concept is strengthened with a principle: what if we invited a hacker from another country, gave him an access badge, a couch to sleep on and let him code, hack hardware or volunteer to give workshops for a month? The concept of Hacker-in-Residence was born.

And even if the lineage isn't direct, we find a historical kinship with the artist-in-residence model. The principle remains the same: invite artists, provide them with a place to express themselves, often with other artists. In short, the same fight—to create places, sometimes temporary, dedicated to creation.

Anyway, I'm in Nantes for the week with 13 other people to discuss, build things, test, and incidentally, have fun!