At the weekend, I organised Take Back The Web, an open spaces conference, together with Rob Purdie, Tim Street, Helen Close and Sara Hall. It got me thinking about ’spaces’: what they are, and what different kinds are useful for different purposes.

I was in Oxford around a year ago, walking around the historic city with some friends. One of them was a post-grad at the university and had access to a common room in one of the colleges. The door was locked, and the only keyholders were post-grads of a small department of the college.

There was something really appealing about having access to such a space - with its comfortable chairs and a table for working at. The day’s newspapers were laid out, and encyclopedias and dictionaries adorned the shelves. What a useful space to have!

But it was also undeniably a privilege. Not everyone in Oxford has access to such spaces - they are ‘closed spaces’. At the other end of the spectrum is the library in Brighton. It is open to everyone, and also has tables and chairs to use, as well as a great deal more books than the Oxford common room! Simply knowing about the library means that you have somewhere comfortable and warm in which to kill time while you are waiting in town between appointments.

But the library still has opening hours. If you’re looking for somewhere to hang out after dark, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Not so with a Quaker community at which a close friend sometimes visits his sister. They have a community shop that is never locked. You can go there at any time of day or night, take what you need, and leave your money on the counter.

The Cowley Club is a Brighton social centre with an anarchist ethos. During the day, it is a cafe. But because it is an anarchist, rather than capitalist, cafe, you can go in and sit down without feeling you need to buy anything. In the evening, the space changes, becoming a member’s only bar. To become a member, you must be proposed by two existing members. In this mode, a normal capitalist bar seems more open!

So what kind of space did we create at Take Back The Web? Well, for a start it was free to attend, so you didn’t have to be wealthy. We advertised that you needed to register, even though people who didn’t register would not have been turned away. So that probably closed the space off a little - especially as registering required a computer with internet access. Also, with an event like this a lot of the ‘publicity’ is actually done word-of-mouth by the organisers and the attendees. People who are more central to social and professional networks were more likely to hear about the conference. So this may have excluded the socially disenfranchised.

I think there is a lot of interesting detail to be unearthed in this area of thought. I’m interested in creating more spaces of all different kinds, and seeing how they function differently. I also think that if we organise another Take Back The Web conference, that we should think about what kind of space it is we want to create and why.