[hackerspaces] Bucketworks needs help

[Petr Baudis]

  Hi!

On Sat, Jun 01, 2013 at 12:56:11AM -0400, Gui Cavalcanti wrote:
> Our secret for getting the income we need to survive has been simple - we tell our members exactly how much it costs to run the space professionally. It's about $80,000 a month. One member might pay for .1 to .5% of our expenses in any given month. Everyone who uses the space has to pay their dues. 

  I appreciate that there are spaces like yours, but a hackerspace can
cost much less than $80,000 a month, obviously. :-)

  Here in brmlab, Prague, we are also in black numbers from the very
beginning. Our income is solely from membership dues which we have
determined at the beginning, then searched for a space with suitable
rent for us to be able to cover.

  But aside of rent, accounting, a yearly batch of Tshirts and an
occassional spare HDD for our main server, our legal entity has no other
expenses; we receive very little financial donations aside of membership
dues, but received basically all our furniture, EE equipment etc. as
donations (or some of our members just keep it there as free for use).
I think this may be a cultural difference of US vs. Europe (here we have
not so much money to spare, or just are a bit more greedy about the
money we do have, but we have a lot of junk we think would be a shame to
throw off).

  Of course we accumulated some extra money on our account; we keep
three monthly rents as an emergency backup, it's difficult if that's the
appropriate amount, and we are now at a point where we want to give away
the rest (about another three monthly rents) by running a grant contest
between a few projects (will it be USRP, pipettes, a projector for some
art projects...?).

  So I don't understand why would anyone think it wrong to collect more
money than the rent costs - you can give the extra back to your space's
projects, *if* there is anything extra, or simply adjust the membership
dues after a while.

				Petr "Pasky" Baudis