[hackerspaces] (no subject)

[Shirley Hicks]

This is turning into an interesting problem to solve. :D

Our current active employed membership are middle income to high income and are our angel members while we get this thing off the ground. The rest are a mix of students & grad students and just-starting-out techies who are doing the bulk of the grunt work. We have a mix of arts, business, engineering, tech and software dev people. Age range: 55 - 20,

On the practical front, we've in a space for the next six months that is usable as is for now. When we have all our operational processes in place, membership built, and classes underway, we'll be making a stay/go decision between this and a second arts-oriented space currently under development about a mile away. The developer of that project would like us there as we would be the hard-core tech component. The landlord we're working with now would like us to stay as a core of community development.

We don't have food facilties nearby at this time, but this is a spread-out car oriented town and most people tend to pick things up on their way in. The local co-op recording studio is right across the street and there is plenty of scope in the form of buildings in decent shape needing tenants with lots of walkable space. The arts community is active here and becoming more so - tech, less so, but being actively fostered with an incubator and active support. We formed to help push things a long by being a place where there will be shop tools and electronics and a social atmosphere.

Shirley

On Oct 11, 2013, at 8:51 AM, William Macfarlane wrote:

> It's also the case that, at least initially, the size of the set of people you hit with your outreach has more to do with the size of your initial social network/interested cadre than with the size of your city.  And has to do with what the nerd-organizing infrastructure in your city looks like (do you have a dorkbot, do you have universities, do you have users groups, etc etc.)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 4:18 PM, matt <matt at nycresistor.com> wrote:
> A fundamental problem is that different spaces have different populations regardless of geographic locale.
> 
> Some of the other vectors are, type of space... maker versus software.  Heavy Industrial versus light...
> 
> Size of space will impact overall population.
> 
> Culture of space will influence overall population.
> 
> Hours / location in the town of space.
> 
> Food areas in vicinity of space... sounds odd, but if people need to keep leaving to get food...   could be mitigated with a kitchen, but that may change the entire culture of the space.  =P
> 
> I think your best means of predicting a population is to host some pre-space acquisition events.  Maybe some coffee shop organizational meetups.  Get an idea of what your culture is going to be like based off of your core team of contributors.  And then get an idea of how much interest is guaged in a few meetups.  Who are repeats... how many new per event... see if you can find out from how far away they are coming.
> 
> Also be aware that you can't predict which hidden little communities you may end up tapping into later on.  But there's nothing wrong with growing when you need to.  It's the shrinking that will kill yah.
> 
> -Matt
> 
> 
> On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 4:05 PM, Alan Fay <emptyset at freesideatlanta.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 3:54 PM, Joshua Pritt <ramgarden at gmail.com> wrote:
> You would be able to do this with GIS if you had some sort of "nerds per capita" data.
> Perhaps there's some info to be found in the ESRI census data?
> 
> census.gov is actually a great resource for this.  Oh it's shutdown right now and I have a sad.  :(
> 
> Of the couple of hackerspace surveys I've seen, I think I recall 40-60% of members identify themselves as people 25-40 years of age with high income (>$75K/year).  So, locating in an area with those characteristics is helpful - but I don't think strictly necessary to ensure good membership numbers.
> 
> My personal experience is that the offerings of a hackerspace and its community are what trump price, location, and square footage.
> 
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> -- 
> -Will
> www.partsandcrafts.org
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