[hackerspaces] Inter-Hackerspace Cooperation and Membership

[Yves Quemener]

Koen Martens wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 12:45:10PM +0100, quemener.yves at free.fr wrote:
>> I think that this works well when the number of visitors is lower than the number of members. In a situation like the aforementioned C-base during a Chaos Congress, having more visitors than members can cause problem and require a policy of some kind. I think the current discussion is useful if we want to avoid the "members only" policy from becoming more and more common.
> 
> FWIW, although i might not have been happy with it at the time, i totally understand the policy at c-base at the time of big parties. You simply don't want all those intoxicated party-people in your members area, messing around with projects and equipment when they're not in their most clear and careful state. Apart from the fact that they might break stuff, that might actually turn out to be dangerous.
> 
> And in my experience, when the place is not crowded things are not as strict and you can get a tour or sit and hang out if you know someone there (getting to know people is easy these days :).

Well, right now hackers usually feel that they are not enough and welcome
any curious person but imagine that the next hollywood movie is a "hackers
are cool and have super powers" movie. You'll quickly get surrounded by a
crowd of incompetent self-proclaimed hackers and sorting between reputed
people and complete tourists can be hard. It would be nice to have a kind
of social network in place to know who is who. Maybe a layer on top of a
FOAF ? But I know that social networks are frown upon by many...