[hackerspaces] Hackaday series on hackerspaces

[Steven Sutton]

Meetup was great for us too. We get some visitors from HaD, but most of
ours come from people searching Google for "Atlanta makerspace" or Atlanta
hackerspace." Our blog stats are a pretty good indicator of how our
visitors find us, so that is something to watch.

However, I think we benefit from the recent focus on hackerspaces in that
it is really beneficial for them to collect up and curate some data about
how our spaces are run, what works and what doesn't,and so forth. Even
recently, more than half (and actually probably close to two-thirds) of the
people that come into our space either have no idea of what we do or
misunderstand it enough to have seriously unrealistic expectations.

We have between 3 and 15 new people for each weekly Open House, but the
signal-to-noise ratio isn't very great. Of course, I guess there will
always be perpetual motion fanatics that are bent on creating breakaway
libertarian paradises in international waters and people that want to host
children's theater / puppet shows in our space.

TL;DR: Atlanta is a pretty weird city.

Steven Sutton
President, Freeside Atlanta
www.freesideatlanta.org
http://www.meetup.com/Freeside-Atlanta/


On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 3:35 PM, charlie wallace
<charlie at finitemonkeys.com>wrote:

> We get some people that have seen hackaday articles, and a few more
> that send emails or commented on blog posts about it, or people
> building similar projects based on the articles. I generally see
> around 3000-4000 unique hits after the article goes up.  a couple of
> times commercial companies looking to turn projects into part of their
> line up.
>
> As for media, specifically film makers, we're in LA so pretty much get
> that all the time anyway so didn't see a difference.
>
> hackaday is a great site, they've always been really good to us, i
> haven't interacted as much with the since the last ownership change,
> but the guy seems nice enough.
>
>
> Setting up a meetup.com has gotten us quite a few people too.
>
> cheers,
> charlie
>
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Nathaniel Bezanson
> <myself at telcodata.us> wrote:
> > Question for the spaces featured in Hackaday's recent push to focus on
> > hackerspaces:
> >
> > What sort of attention resulted from it? Was there a noticeable influx in
> > visitors? Member applicants? Donations? Jerks? Other media?
> >
> > -Nate B-
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org
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> >
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