<div dir="ltr"><div>This is a topic that's of great importance to me, and I think that there's a little bit of inaccurate information in this thread. </div><div><br></div><div>Who am I, and where am I coming from? I co-run a kids' hackerspace called Parts and Crafts in Somerville, MA. When Gui says "another space almost got shut down because an organization was running a summer camp there," he's talking about us. He's also mischaracterizing both the type and scale of the problem, but which isn't actually much relevant to this particular discussion.</div>
<div><br></div><div>A few things I want to correct, though: there are not generally particular building code requirements for having children in your space -- public spaces are generally required to be pretty safe, with or without kids. That said, there are particular building requirements for certain kinds of uses involving children -- mostly these requirements are triggered by kids getting dropped off by parents who then leave them alone in your care, like for classes or whathaveyou.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Building codes and requirements vary by municipality and they're hard to get your hands on because the publishing of them is frequently controlled by a totally insane monopoly that is somehow allowed to charge people to have access to knowledge about the letter of the law.</div>
<div><br></div><div>These codes tend not to vary all that much, though, since they all derive from an international standard. Some cities are more "business friendly" (read: lax in enforcement) than others, but there's not a huge amount of variability here.</div>
<div><br></div><div>What does vary a lot more than the actual building code (which says, for instance, that if you are running a "school" you need to have 2 routes of egress from every part of the building), is the part that defines what a "school" is. And in fact, practically, the only thing that actually defines what your use-case is is the inspector who fills out the form when you apply for your certificate of occupancy.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The truth is, though, that building code stuff isn't a big deal. Even running an actual-legit-honest-to-god school doesn't actually trigger a whole lot of requirements in this domain. Two routes of egress, no lead paint or asbestos, maybe needing a sprinkler system, maybe needing to have your fire alarm system monitored. Having lots of people in your space is likely to trigger more regulation than having a couple of kids.</div>
<div><br></div><div>These things aren't huge, but if you're running a tiny little hackerspace in an old warehouse, you probably can't afford to do lead paint abatement, asbestos removal, install a new fire alarm, etc. And you certainly can't afford to install sprinklers. So unless you're saying "we want to run a hackerspace for kids" you probably want to avoid these eventualities.</div>
<div><br></div><div>But all of this stuff is relevant if what you're talking about is "running a space for kids." Again, probably defined by a set of things around kids being dropped off by their parents (how old are the kids? how often do they come? how long do they stay? what do they do? same kids each week or different kids?)</div>
<div><br></div><div>Generally this isn't what people are talking about when the issue of kids at hackerspaces comes up. Generally people are talking about "can we run a kids class every once in a while?" or "can high schoolers be members?" or "can members who are parents bring their kids sometimes?" All of which are much much more nebulous, and are mostly unlikely to trigger specific _legal_ requirements.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Which leaves us with the less-straightforward liability/insurance questions. The only thing I will say with 100% confidence and certainty about insurance is that, if you are going to bother having insurance, you need to tell the insurance company all about the things that you are doing. They are insuring you for some specific set of things, and if they perceive that you are doing something that is not what they're insuring you for, you're going to have a hell of a time collecting on it if you need to. Even if they should -- even if the accident _is_ the kind of thing that your policy covers, if there's anything at all they can do to say that you were in violation and so they don't have to pay out,they will. So if you have an insurance company, be honest with them and tell them all of the things that might matter.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The other really obvious point: with or without insurance, you should be an LLC (it's easy!) or a 5013c (people sometimes will randomly give you money!) so that there is a collective entity to have the liability and go bankrupt in case of emergency so individual members don't have to. </div>
<div><br></div><div>I said "if you're going to bother having insurance" because I actually don't think that the answer to this question is obviously "yes" for a lot of spaces. If your lease doesn't have an insurance requirement, then it's up to you to make a </div>
<div><br></div><div>decision. And this decision starts with deciding how much risk you want to put the organization through, how much risk you want to put your members through, and how much risk you want to subject other stakeholders (like your landlord) to. </div>
<div><br></div><div>I think the argument that I see made by people involved with large, high profile spaces make that says "if you don't have insurance and run your space totally professionally and cleanly and above the board and entirely respectable in all ways you are doing a disservice to the 'movement'" is incredibly offensive to the wide world of hackerspaces that have existed in the past and continue to exist that are small, scrappy, risky, illegal, uninsured, squatted, etc etc. It's fine for you to want to protect your space/self, especially when you are associated with a large space with a lot to lose, and be consequently risk-averse, but I think it's entirely unacceptable to suggest that the above-the-board, professional model is the only correct one for hackerspaces. There are many spaces with, for instance, no insurance, no rent, and no money. Maybe something will happen to them eventually and they'll stop existing because of liability problems, but maybe that's okay because institutions don't need to last forever to be awesome and good.</div>
<div><br></div><div>That said, to my mind, the compelling reason to have insurance (apart from needing it to get a real, grown-up, commercial lease) is so that money from medical bills can come from somewhere in the event that someone in your space suffers a serious injury. Insurance isn't likely to keep you in business after this happens -- either way you're probably going bankrupt -- but at least the insurance company will help pay the medical bills. If someone hurts themself in an environment in which I'm supposed to be teaching them, or helping them, I consider it at least partially my responsibility.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Having kids in your space certainly increases the likelihood that you'll need to go bankrupt and cease existing. It's not clear how much it increases this likelihood. People are traditionally terrible at making rational decisions about unlikely-but-catastrophic possibilities. My advice is "don't try to make the decision rationally." If you're psyched about working with kids, and you've told your insurancecritters and they're okay with you running the occasional class or whatever, then do it. And if you have a space that doesn't have insurance (like maybe your garage) and you're still psyched about doing stuff with kids, then, great! Do it! Be careful and safe and sane and reasonable. And be clear with families that you're working with that you aren't a child care institution, don't have liability insurance, don't do background checks, that you're just a few nerds who are really psyched about teaching kids awesome skills. </div>
<div><br></div><div>If you're not comfortable telling people that you don't have liability insurance then you should probably have liability insurance. </div><div><br></div><div>Ask yourself what your risking. If you're big, or established, or want to be big and established, maybe you want to be risk averse. If you're small and scrappy and radical, maybe you don't want to bother insuring your squatted hackerspace since you figure you'll be shut down in due time anyway</div>
<div><br></div><div>Artisan's Asylum, for instance, absolutely cannot and shouldn't be cavalier about, well, anything -- it's too big, has too many members that love it and use it, too much going on, and too many deadly things sitting around. It is also, by design, very high-profile. It both has a lot to lose and ,lots of serious tools and objects that need to be taken seriously.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Parts and Crafts also, at this point, cannot and shouldn't be cavalier about these things. We're reasonably well-established, very public-facing, are a number of grownup's full-time-jobs, and a number of kids full-time-educational-institution. There's a lot here that we want to protect.</div>
<div><br></div><div>On the other hand, if your space is new, if it's small, if you trust yourselves to be responsible and safe, and are willing to let the thing poof out of existence in the event of a lawsuit, then maybe you should just do what you want to do.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I want to back up a little bit, because I've been talking about lawsuits and poofing out of existence. I think that if you're working with kids or strangers, safety is hugely important and you need to be conscious of it. You need to do your very best to keep people safe and lower the likelihood of really bad stuff happening. And if you're excited about working with kids you're going to do that, and you're going to do it well, because you're not monstrous, and you know that being in any way vaguely sort of responsible for a kid losing an eye or a finger would feel really really awful and you don't want to feel that way.</div>
<div><br></div><div>So I'm not too worried about major catastrophic injuries -- not because they can't happen (they can, and do!) but because I think you (whoever you are) can figure out how to stop them from happening. What I'm worried about, from your perspective, is the kid who burns himself on the soldering iron, the kid who cuts herself with a hacksaw and needs stitches. But I'm not actually worried about those kids, because as an educator I will go on record saying that it's really important for kids to burn and cut themselves. </div>
<div><br></div><div>I'm worried about when it turns out that one of those kids has a crazy parent who sues you or tries to get you shut down because you let their kid use a hot or sharp thing. And maybe you weren't even worried about that because the kids mom is awesome and you know her, but then it turns out the dad is a nutcase.</div>
<div><br></div><div>(For reference, because this happens, I've had interactions that felt like they might end up with lawsuits around things as banal as not checking a dad's ID when he came to pick his son up, and not letting a kid go canoeing because I didn't trust him to be safe and responsible on the water)</div>
<div><br></div><div>These are things that can happen. They aren't things that always happen, or that happen a lot. I've been corunning a kids' hackerspace for 8 years. We don't have a laser or a bridgeport or a table saw, but we have power tools and soldering irons and x-acto knives and other fast-moving, sharp and/or hot things that you can hurt yourself with. We're pretty safety conscious, but we let kids use the tools. We're still here. We haven't had any major injuries involving tools (our worst injury was someone shooting himself in the eye with a cork from a soda bottle with dry ice inside -- he should have been wearing safety goggles, but he wasn't, he shouldn't have been pointing it at his face, but he was trying to figure out if there was a leak and forgot himself temporarily. these things are both his fault and ours, and I continue to be grateful for the fact that he didn't permanently damage his eyeball.) This is a digression. Have lots of pairs of safety goggles and put them everywhere and make people wear them all the time. Eyes are soft and squishy and incredibly useful.</div>
<div><br></div><div>So bad stuff can happen. That doesn't mean you shouldn't work with kids. To a certain extent, the fact that there is so much anxiety and tension and worry around kids using tools is a very compelling reason why it's incredibly important to get kids into hackerspaces. If we get enough kids into spaces, maybe a generation from now we won't have quite so much of it. It's worth noting that the idea of kids using tools and building stuff was, pretty recently, a very normal thing. A lot of folks I know who are my parent's generation spent a lot of their youth hanging out in auto-shops scrounging parts and trying to learn something.</div>
<div><br></div><div>So it's really awesome and rewarding and good for the world to have kids in hackerspaces. This doesn't mean you should work with kids, either. If you want to work with kids you should know what you're getting into, and you should approach it with open-eyes and a sense for what kinds of risks you are and aren't willing to take.</div>
<div><br></div><div>And take heart! One of your grownup members might miscalibrate the laser and burn the building down! Kids aren't the only possible source of liability in your space..</div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra">
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 8:08 PM, Mark Janssen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dreamingforward@gmail.com" target="_blank">dreamingforward@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="im">On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 3:00 PM, Christie Dudley <<a href="mailto:longobord@gmail.com">longobord@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
</div><div class="im">> Interesting thoughts on the subject. I know a bit about law, although I am<br>
> not a lawyer, no am I able to give legal advice.<br>
<br>
</div>Thanks Christie for your thoughts...<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> Second of all, someone needs to tell that landlord that he leased out the<br>
> building and has relinquished control of it.<br>
<br>
</div>This is not necessarily true. While there may be case history to this<br>
effect, this does not mean that it couldn't be overturned at any<br>
moment. There is good argument why a property owner has ultimate<br>
responsibility for what happens in her/his space countermanded only by<br>
explicit agreement. If I lease out a building to music band and that<br>
band makes noises all hours of the night, then my property neighbors<br>
are effected. The owner has to take responsibility for who s/he<br>
offers space to.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> Unusually dangerous activity: When an activity is not the normal sort (such<br>
> as Matt's metal shavings problem) it falls into this category. Law students<br>
> love these because it's strict liability, fast track to liability. They<br>
> don't have to show that a duty was breached because it's inherently<br>
> dangerous.<br>
<br>
</div>While lawyers like to jump on this bandwagon, it doesn't make it<br>
"sound". Going up and down stairs is inherently dangerous. The issue<br>
is: is it either obvious that there is danger involved (to an adult),<br>
or has that danger been completely communicated? After that, it's up<br>
to the individual, who also is an adult.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> Assuming the risk: When kids play baseball, or whatever extreme sports kids<br>
> are into these days, they know that there's a danger and accept that there<br>
> is risk involved, but do it anyway. That's why you'll see "assume the risk"<br>
> crop up on waivers. It's how all the crazy shit that goes on in the bay area<br>
> (fire arts festival anyone?) could possibly happen. (And why Burning Man has<br>
> not been sued out of existence.) Oh, and kids (under 18) can't legally sign<br>
> waivers, although they can assume the risk.<br>
<br>
</div>I don't think minors can "assume the risk". Any contract engaged with<br>
a minor must have a guardian.<br>
<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
--<br>
MarkJ<br>
Tacoma, Washington<br>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br>-Will<br><a href="http://www.partsandcrafts.org">www.partsandcrafts.org</a>
</div>