served as third places (Oldenburg, 1997), or spaces for informal gathering and bonding outside of home and work. Touchstones for hacker and maker space members emerge time and again, such as German models imported to the United States via Noisebridge and Resistor NYC (Haas, Ohlig & Weiler, 2007). However their "true" origins will likely be always be subject to debate because, in addition to a lack of documentation, these spaces are both quotidian and encourage a plurality of uses.

“Co-working is about your living, your money-making life,” Smith explained. “And HackerMoms is about the rest of your life. Like all the other parts that get neglected when you’re trying to make money. And, for us, as mothers, the differentiation is not so clear anymore” (Smith and Cook, 2012).

Recent research has focused on hackerspaces as grassroots organizations for producing ad hoc, self-made tools (Toombs etal., 2014) and as homes for emerging technical entrepreneur-ship (Lindtner etal., 2014).Founder Sho Sho Smith built HackerMoms to identify with this ethos, what she called “true creativity”: making without a purpose or necessity, without people trying to elevate themselves or their career.2 Although she has admitted that she first associated hacking with criminal activity, she soon found it essential to the kind of life she desired

this case study hopefully reveals how hackerspaces might be considered as a particular genre of organization that defies traditional organizational practices.