[hackerspaces] membres hogging space and a lot of tables

[Petr Baudis]

  Hi!

On Thu, Nov 06, 2014 at 06:15:51PM -0300, Florencia Edwards wrote:
> I'm with you dosman that the best way would be asking them. But we've been
> asking forever, and they hog more space now. They put all of their stuff
> there like really messy and complicated so you can't just grab it or order
> it. And every day of the month they sit in the same table, so they sort of
> reserve the spot putting things on there

  Okay, so the standard advice "make a rule to put everything in boxes"
etc. might apply, but based on your last sentence, this might also be
a manifestation of the live-in anti-pattern - maybe those members just
took it as renting out their personal workshop space?

  First, figure out if you want to actually work them on their projects
in your hackerspace.  Do these people add significant value to the
community?  Are the projects collaborative in some way?  Maybe everyone
would be better off if they just rented out a personal workshop.

  If you think having them is great, then the issue is that they are
using a large share of your resources and you have too little resources.
You don't want them to go away and them using less resources doesn't
sound practical, so the only solution is increase the resources - grow,
move to a larger space (or look into renting nearby rooms, that's how
we grew at brmlab).

  One thing to support that would be to ask them to pay more than
others - offer having a dedicated table in exchange to contributing
more towards the rent.

				Petr Baudis