There are two ways in which the bookstore differed from the current implementation of hacker spaces; ad-hoc local usage (book browsing), and commercial activity (book buying).<p>The hacker spaces I&#x27;ve been too have all shared a common &quot;mode&quot; which is &quot;bring your stuff and we&#x27;ll work in the same room.&quot; The allure being the social aspects and the interactions with other people interested in your space. But that has two problems, generally &quot;moving&quot; your space from where you work to the hacker space (for small embedded projects that is really hard), and for software projects they aren&#x27;t necessarily &quot;shared&quot; any better in a social context other than IRC.<p>Hence the idea of the &#x27;hack wall&#x27; which would be some common infrastructure that everyone would be able to see and work with (from a distance on their computers) and a common understanding of the opportunity and constraints. My thesis is that this is what the jigsaw puzzle does as a party, anyone can share in working on it, skilled or unskilled. At a conference I attended there was a similar sort of idea with &quot;craft sticks&quot; (aka popsicle sticks) and hot glue guns, but I think the need to be &quot;artsy&quot; was intimidating some people.<p>In my imagination the wall would be constructed somewhat like sections in a garden railroad might be, where each square would have some standard requirements, like power on the corners, 3.3v data busses, RS-423 connections, and maybe a serial port. And you could put squares together using something like 80&#x2F;20 extrusions, then jumper across to the &quot;standard&quot; connectors, and each square would have a page in a local gitlab server which described its makeup. So to talk to an inner square you would have to create interfaces from the outer squares (which might all have a RasPi on them) to get to the inner squares.