[hackerspaces] Looking for some insight from other S.O.O.H.

[Nate Bezanson]

> Hehe, a hard discussion to be sure. Our space (the Phoenix Asylum in
...
> - Regular discussions about what is going on at the space - even menial
> things like "I put a new keg in the kegerator today" can spark discussions
> and create meetups.

Oooh, huge point! We've done a few things that make that sort of feedback
easy/automatic.

First, is the twitterbot. Since we don't have good street frontage for an
"open" sign, we wanted a way to tell people they can drop in. Out of
concern for the safety of our single female members, and the privacy of
everyone, we avoided the automatic presence-detection concept in use at
some other spaces, and went with a voluntary switch that anyone can throw.
It takes your picture and throws it on Twitpic, which was originally just
a quick way to know who's there, but turned into a running zany-photo
contest. A rewrite to include statusnet is "coming someday". (It's down
right now while our DSL gets repaired.) Take a gander at
twitter.com/i3detroit to follow the carnage...

Second, is the wiki RecentChanges scraper. The members mailing list gets a
daily digest of wiki activity, with the goal of triggering slow-motion
edit storms as people update pages that each other care about. Sometimes
this even works.

Third, is the not-entirely-successful "what I did today" email. I try to
send these whenever I do anything, but usually only feel motivated when
I've been really productive or pissed off, a habit I'm trying to quash. I
could go off-list with the little "hey, I left that thing on your bin"
notes, but if there's other stuff to post about anyway, including those
notes reminds everyone that their projects can move forward. Others
occasionally send these emails, and I haven't yet figured out how to make
it a custom.

-Nate-