Upon founding, 10BitWorks was primarily referred to as a "hackerspace" or "hackspace" - a place where a community forms around "hacking".
Note that the true meaning of hacking is exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful
cleverness. The most common examples involve circumventing limitations, especially arbitrary and unnecessary ones, of physical or digital things. This term and the hacking community originated at MIT and some other universities in
the 1960s and 1970s.
Today, it's common that you may have only heard the term hacking in a negative, or even criminal, context. What happened?
Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated
on one narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some
hackers occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and
took the term to mean breaking security, no more and no less. The
media have since spread that definition, disregarding the community's attempts to
correct them. As a result, most people have a mistaken idea of what
we hackers actually do and what we think.
The label "hackerspace" still applies to 10BitWorks and we are proud to be the home of much playful cleverness. However, we have since moved to the more general term "makerspace", not to distance ourselves from hacking but to emphasize the most common use of our space - making things. While circumventing limitations is still a regular practice in our community, most member activity is better described as "making". We hack or repair existing things, but also create functional or artistic things from scratch, like furniture, machines, decorations, and pottery.