
Building a Hacker Space (2007) [pdf] - Tomte
https://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/attachments/1003_Building%20a%20Hacker%20Space.pdf
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ja27
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.

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gwbas1c
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.

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YaxelPerez
I think I found a link that works:

[https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/images/8/8e/Hacker-Space-
Desig...](https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/images/8/8e/Hacker-Space-Design-
Patterns.pdf)

~~~
Kerrz
The OP's link is from Dec 27, 2007, while this link is from Aug 2007.

The actual presentation from 24C3 is available at
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lywXCZogsg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lywXCZogsg)

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dwyerm
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.

[https://www.amazon.com/Hacienda-How-Not-Run-
Club/dp/00623079...](https://www.amazon.com/Hacienda-How-Not-Run-
Club/dp/0062307959/)

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nhooyr
Getting an expired certificate error.

~~~
Pseudothink
Ditto.

"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"

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RobertRoberts
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?

Thanks for sharing this.

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Tomte
I like the Tuesday Pattern a lot!

~~~
myself248
All the spaces I'm familiar with follow the Tuesday pattern. It's sort of
funny.

