[hackerspaces] Roaming Membership USA Was: Inter-Hackerspace Cooperation and Membership

[Deech]

This has generated a lot of discussion. That's great! :)

I understand that there is pretty much a blanket guest policy, and
that no space on the list is actually denying visitor status to
anybody from any other space.

What I want to see, and I think the wiki page is a great start, is to
establish more in-depth collaborations and sharing between spaces. We
already have at least one local member who is actually a member of
CCC, but is going to school in St. Louis for a while, so he comes to
our meetings.

There are going to be more and more spaces popping up, I mean, not
long ago, it was only Cowtown Computer Congress, then Arch Reactor,
and now I can see  Columbia Gadget Works, FactorEFarm, Hack Rolla and
Uptown Labs are all well on their way to joining the Missouri family
of Hackerspaces. (Though, aside, I don't see why Columbia Gadget Works
and Uptown Labs aren't working together, but I don't know anything
about them). Therefore, some sort of structure for sharing access
seems to be in order, not a monolithic hard and fast list of rules,
but a general structure to work in and keep communication open.

The Wiki page, I think, is a great start, but I think that separating
them into all or just guest categories is not granular enough. What if
in one of the tables, we just add a "Services offered to visiting
Hackers" column, so we can detail what we are willing to offer to
other group's members. For instance, I think at AR, we're willing to
offer more access to a fellow Hackerspace member then the average Joe
off the street, but handing out keys like candy isn't much in the
cards. (However, we may be able to do so in the future when we get our
electronic key project underway, to be able to easily extend key
rights to folks and remove them based on USB stick serials).