[hackerspaces] Establishing hackerspace and getting people actively involved

Nick Farr (hackerspaces.org) nick at hackerspaces.org
Tue May 11 19:48:57 CEST 2010


On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 01:52, Jens Christian Hillerup
<jens at hillerup.net> wrote:
>
> In Labitat we had a general assembly with nine participants last year.
> Before that we had one or two meetings with slightly more people. At the
> general assembly we decided we wanted to make a hackerspace, so we set down
> a board and *all* worked towards raising money for workshops before we had a
> space.

This seems to fit in with the pattern.  However, as I've noticed it,
while 4-12 people sit on the "board" or are the core organizing group,
it ends up being 1-4 people who do the leg work of collecting the
money, filling out the papers, searching for a space, etc.  How did
Labitat end up dividing the work equally?

> Sometime in October last year we held an Arduino workshop paid for
> from some money ($3000) that we won in a "project battle" against ~20 other
> youth-related projects in Copenhagen.

This is definitely cool!  Do you have links or more info on this?
(Perhaps I'm running into language problems GTFAing my question...)

> In December we had sixty members that actually paid a monthly fee (>= $30)
> so we decided to sign the lease.

This is another good data point to have:  How many members did other
spaces have before signing a lease?  (HacDC had 6)

> January through March 2010 we were renovating ev-e-ry-thing and only last
> month we held our public opening with journalists and media people.

I think this is definitely unusual...while each space I know of does
some renovation, going from trashed-to-space seems a bit odd.  HacDC
renovated a new room that opened up in our building, but that process
continues to this day.  (We just got better power down there.)

Nick Farr


More information about the Discuss mailing list