[hackerspaces] Discussing/Alleviating the Decline (was: Children in hackerspaces.)

[Matt Joyce]

Well, nycr is pretty good at forward thinking, but a lot of our members are
chasing projects outside of resistor these days.  Though there are a number
of in house projects steadily progressing.

But in august we actually went out of our way to try and reinvigorate the
space.  We called it awesome august and tried to have everyone who was a
member submit a project for the blog.  Then we hosted an interactive party
at the end of the month.

It was a terrific success.

I think we just oscillate between too much nycr and too little.  But, with
our up and coming expansion hopefully we can draw in some fresh blood and
get everyone excited again.

I expect the move will have us all amped up for at least a little while.

On Jan 29, 2010 3:09 PM, "David Powell" <davepow16 at gmail.com> wrote:

I feel Harford Hackerspace differs a lot from our neighbors (HacDC,
Baltimore Node) and because of that we have been successful for over a year
now. When we initially started I was able to gather up 6 members and we
still have those original 6 members today. We started collecting dues as
soon as we started working on projects. We a using a free space provided by
a member so our overhead is very little. Our 6 members pay their dues every
month and we are a very happy small group. We want to expand our membership
and we have had several people come part time who are not include in the
original 6. For some unknown reason we can't seem to recruit more dues
paying members.

We focus more on just doing stuff than we do on holding classes. Mostly
because non of our members really want to teach a class. They just want to
build stuff and learn as they build it. We have actually learned a lot this
way. The problem is that we come up with ideas on the fly and we are not
actively advertising Events. We use meetup.com and mailing list to announce
our weekly gatherings and as I said we do get people who show up randomly to
those but they don't come too often and we are not charging them dues.

Our goal this year is to restructure a little bit by adding fund raising
events. We just got word last week that our 501(C)(3) status has been
recommended for approval so we are just waiting for the official letter.

I would like to see an organization setup for the purpose of marketing
hackerspaces. It would be nice if we all contributed to a fund that allowed
us to put Hackerspace.org in all the major related magazines and on related
websites. It seems that whenever there is a major publications about
hackerspaces our website traffic goes through the roof.

David



On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 2:47 PM, Nick Farr (hackerspaces.org) <
nick at hackerspaces.org> wrote:
>
> I...

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