I think it's really cool when people build anything, there's a small odd change in reality forever. Anyone else find themselves scanning the PDF looking through just the photos?
"This server could not prove that it is events.ccc.de; its security certificate expired 42 days ago. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection. Your computer's clock is currently set to Monday, December 25, 2017. Does that look right? If not, you should correct your system's clock and then refresh this page"
We've been building Tampa Hackerspace for the past four years and much of this is similar to advice I give.
The "ten people" to start is close. I tell people you need at least 100 in your broader community and at least 10 committed to the point that they'd put money into it. More is better though.
We probably would have started a year later if we hadn't had a firm "just do it" person on the board.
We got lucky with our initial landlord and very lucky with our current landlord. Everyone we talked to would tell us how easy it would be to find space but it was a huge hassle finding someone that would rent to an unproven organization without much cash on hand.
Using recurring billing via Paypal (now considering Stripe) was a huge help.
Of course we meet on Tuesdays. It's been painful but we meet every single Tuesday. There's never any confusion about whether we meet this week or next week. Every Tuesday.
The "Sine Curve" pattern worries me and I can definitely see some of our shops / areas becoming cyclical.
Don't be everything to everyone, it's unsustainable. Have a clear mission and stick to it. Know what a hacker space is: it's not a startup incubator, even though it's easy to confuse the two.
I dropped out of a hacker space when they took on too many financial commitments. They thought they needed to expand because they were operating as a pseudo startup incubator for 1/4th the price. The problem was once they started to grow, they needed to meet ADA requirements. Dues that were fine for a hacker space just didn't pay the bills when suddenly the new crop of members were showing up everyday and had high impact needs.
It would have been fine to run a real incubator in the same building with a different membership fee structure so that things like ADA and conference rooms would be there for those who needed them.
The problem was ultimately that the organization ran itself in an everything for everybody mode. No one really put on the brakes when an expansion didn't make sense for what the organization did.
I would add a recommendation for Peter Hook's book, "How Not To Run A Club" as a cautionary tale. In it, he's talking about how to run a dance club, but the things he mentioned impacting his club were the same as those that I saw impacting my local hacker space. The biggest one is the cash-flow. People open a club because they want to be with their friends, and friends get friend-prices. Before you know it, everybody's your friend and nobody's paying for anything.
My club had fees for things like project storage and certain consumables, but they were terrible at collecting these fees. ja27's recommendation to outsource that billing to Paypal or Stripe is a very good idea, in my opinion. Certainly the "totalitarian treasurer" in the presentation seems like a hard requirement in my mind.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 30.4 ms ] threadThanks for sharing this.
"This server could not prove that it is events.ccc.de; its security certificate expired 42 days ago. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection. Your computer's clock is currently set to Monday, December 25, 2017. Does that look right? If not, you should correct your system's clock and then refresh this page"
https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/images/8/8e/Hacker-Space-Desig...
The actual presentation from 24C3 is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lywXCZogsg
The "ten people" to start is close. I tell people you need at least 100 in your broader community and at least 10 committed to the point that they'd put money into it. More is better though.
We probably would have started a year later if we hadn't had a firm "just do it" person on the board.
We got lucky with our initial landlord and very lucky with our current landlord. Everyone we talked to would tell us how easy it would be to find space but it was a huge hassle finding someone that would rent to an unproven organization without much cash on hand.
Using recurring billing via Paypal (now considering Stripe) was a huge help.
Of course we meet on Tuesdays. It's been painful but we meet every single Tuesday. There's never any confusion about whether we meet this week or next week. Every Tuesday.
The "Sine Curve" pattern worries me and I can definitely see some of our shops / areas becoming cyclical.
I dropped out of a hacker space when they took on too many financial commitments. They thought they needed to expand because they were operating as a pseudo startup incubator for 1/4th the price. The problem was once they started to grow, they needed to meet ADA requirements. Dues that were fine for a hacker space just didn't pay the bills when suddenly the new crop of members were showing up everyday and had high impact needs.
It would have been fine to run a real incubator in the same building with a different membership fee structure so that things like ADA and conference rooms would be there for those who needed them.
The problem was ultimately that the organization ran itself in an everything for everybody mode. No one really put on the brakes when an expansion didn't make sense for what the organization did.
My club had fees for things like project storage and certain consumables, but they were terrible at collecting these fees. ja27's recommendation to outsource that billing to Paypal or Stripe is a very good idea, in my opinion. Certainly the "totalitarian treasurer" in the presentation seems like a hard requirement in my mind.
https://www.amazon.com/Hacienda-How-Not-Run-Club/dp/00623079...