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Just some thoughts on the Tarrant Maker experience so far...
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We looked at how various organizations (and sometimes individuals) approached spinning up a physical space before we embarked down that road. Plenty of successes, sure, but plenty of failures. Here are my observations from our still-in-process experience:
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- don't commit to a space until you have a business plan covering all expenses. At a minimum that's rent, utilities and liability insurance.
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- people that tried "holding out a hat" in order to entice locals into seeding a space have failed. That's not a plan.
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- NETWORK. Odds are good you have entities in your community with helpful resources, whether that's cash, facilities, equipment or what-have-you.
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- partner Partner PARTNER. One of our members attended a local library symposium on 3D printing. He made good contacts with two municipal library directors. One of them has several thousand square feet of space at their brand new library that they are offering to us completely FREE of charge. We just supply equipment and human capital for classes, demos, shows, etc. The available hours are not ideal and we have some equipment restrictions but it's a win-win scenario overall. Another partner, a civic group chartered by the City of Fort Worth to develop their 10-year-outlook, found us another free space downtown but we currently lack funding for the utilities and insurance. So they brought in a local university who will pick up that tab. Again, we just need to supply warm bodies. Easy enough!
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- make sure volunteerism is quantified. We built our site on Wordpress, and found point systems (like myCRED) that plug right in. You can award points for various contributions, and in turn those points become currency for your services. Points can be purchased via Paypal, so that you can run your entire access system on points-- even coding apps that take advantage of NFC or RFID to enable building and equipment access (hey, we're makers, sooo...)
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- put on shows for the public, and make sure you have a prominent donation jar. That's helped us quite a bit.
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- if people are using your space without contributing, call a halt to it. As Alan said, people should be pitching in.
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Bottom line, get creative. Look at quid pro quo opportunities to eliminate or lower cost where ever you can. That minimizes the burden on your members and makes donation easier.
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Randy
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founder, Tarrant Makers
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On December 19, 2013 at 2:31 PM Florencia Edwards <floev22@gmail.com> wrote:
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Thanks dave for your answer . Alan, I agree on the community, but i'm thinking this hour rates for a virtual community we have but don't have the money to spend on a whole month in the makerspace, but for sure would do it if it was for hours (less money and time). to use some tools. So the community exists, we have a forum and we are friends, but they just don't have the money. I don't know what to do to include them
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2013/12/19 Alan Fay
<span><<a target="_blank" href="mailto:emptyset@freesideatlanta.org">emptyset@freesideatlanta.org</a>></span>
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There seem to be a lot of problems, if you're considering charging hourly rates.
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First, having paid staff is really difficult for a hackerspace to maintain. I have heard of only a handful of spaces that have staff (only Boston's Artisan's Asylum comes to mind). Do you really need staff? Can you convert some or all positions to volunteer? At Freeside, about 10% of our membership is in some volunteer staff capacity, and we also encourage all members to play their part in keeping the space clean and organized.
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Second, is your space more geared towards providing services, or building a community? If you build a strong community, then your members will support your space. If you provide services, then folks that use the space will feel like consumers, and not take responsibility for the tools, and not feel the need to contribute. Community needs to be first and foremost - sometimes I feel it's all the hackerspace has, really.
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Third, you should only be spending money on rent and utilities - if you've just started. Members should provide or donate time, money, equipment, materials, consumables, etc. - it's much easier if a strong community is built first. Most hackerspaces I've read about spend at least several months meeting together in bars or public spaces before going in on a hackerspace.
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Fourth, I think charging an hourly rate is a huge mistake. You will solve the problem of people not wanting to stop by just to tinker on something...but you'll destroy any hope to build a community. How do you enforce this, too? It sounds expensive to figure out a good system to track that.
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Fifth, are you open to the public more than once a week? If you're continuously open to the public, not only is that expensive in terms of staff and utilities, but it also calls for very different strategies of managing a shared space like this. At Freeside's open house, we occasionally do get a "taker" or two that will show up, but they don't tend to stick around - even if they did, they're only allowed at the weekly open house (no member keeps folks like that around, either).
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Sixth, you should investigate if the monthly rate is priced appropriately. There could be other reasons why people don't want to pay, other than just price alone. If your space is open to the public most nights, why pay for access? If you don't have sufficient square footage for projects, or sufficient equipment, the value might not justify the cost. One other thing to keep in mind is that you can't expect all visitors to seek membership or pay anything. Freeside, on its best months, retains about 1-2% of visitors as new members, on average. I don't know how that compares to other spaces, but we feel great about this. It might also go back to community - if there's no community, why would I support something I don't feel like I'm a part of?
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I wish you the best of luck - it would be terrible to have to close down a space! I hope these questions offer you a good starting point, or least facilitates discussion with your leadership!
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On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 2:23 PM, Florencia Edwards
<span><<a target="_blank" href="mailto:floev22@gmail.com">floev22@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:
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So we want or makerspace to have more people daily, knowing the feel of being here . Also we are losing money every day so if we don't do something about it we'll have to close eventually. Some times people are't willing to take from their pockets once a moth reasonable amount, that all together seems a lot and hurts. It hurts more than giving two dollars a day, something we don't even notice. Also a lot of people come here to sit in and don't collaborate, don't give anything back to the space, don't pay the membership. And staff wages are awful.
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This is why I thought of the hourly rate, for people that can't pay for the month and want to do small fixes or tweaks to their projects, so we can have more people at the space, and people that sit in can contribute hourly. Do you think it could work or could it be even worse for the hacker space and it's sustainability
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Please help!
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thanks
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Randall (Randy) Arnold
<br />Developer and Enthusiast Advocate
<br />http://texrat.net
<br />+18177396806
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