The "doing it together" instinct in HMSs may be one precipitated out around projects. Cognitive, classroom-based definitions of project-based learning tend to be formulaic (Blumenfeld et al., 1991). By comparison, the colloquial definition of project can be handily ambiguous about what is under construction. A project can be artistic, technical, or culinary (in the case of "food hacking"). It can be related to one's occupation, entirely recreational, or part of a movement from one to the other.

Quite to the contrary, members were self-regulating and saw tools and space as providing deterministic solutions (Jordan, 2008). The materialities of the space and tools allowed them to operate a democratic-meritocratic system focused on shared work with a minimum of hierarchy or rules. This spatio-materialistic perspective echoed a hacker reliance on "rough consensus and running code" that moved projects forward (Davies, Clark, & Legare, 1992, p. 543).

Individual agency is the core of do-ocracy, fostered and filtered through projects, objects, and tools in the space itself.

Hackerand maker spaces are meta-organizational assemblages. Entanglement – through the notion fo “do-ocracy” –stands in for typical organizational trappings of rules, hierarchies and roles. Hackerspaces morph and evolve to meet the desires of participants, draw on affordances of tools and materialities of the space itself.

As critics have noted, hackerspaces have only a thin veneer of democracy, made thinner still by a reliance on meritocracy. Members described the dominant ofrm of regulation in the space as “do-ocracy,”

As I will discuss shortly, hackerspaces pull people in, and it is often only through shared engagement that they understand themselves as hackers and makers. Unpacking emic terms members use to describe this entanglement — project and do-ocracy — is the focus of this chapter.