[hackerspaces] Trenton NJ

[Arclight]

If you had 6 people willing to be on a lease and a community, even one
that churns over, you were already on the right path. I think my
caution is more about the "top down" approach where a "big thing" is
constructed with outside grants and nobody in the community hears
about it until it's complete.

Arclight

On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 12:19 PM, Simon Clark <simon at zebraspot.com> wrote:
>
>> On May 2, 2016, at 2:50 PM, Arclight <arclight at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> My experience is that getting one-time funding is not the problem you
>> need to solve. "Build it and they will come" doesn't really work with
>> hackerspaces.  What you need to do is "Get everyone to come and then
>> build it."  Without a core community, there would just be a big, empty
>> building that only sort-of serves the needs of those who show up.
>
> This is somewhat contrary to our experience.  We tried waiting until we had enough members to keep the place afloat before signing a lease, but people would drift away as they lost interest, and we got not closer.  Finally we signed a lease with only 6 core members (we needed 26 to pay the bills). Now we have 118 active members, and a bigger space.  I agree, it’s madness to try and start out with only one person, but had we waited until we had critical mass, we’d still be waiting.
>
> Simon
>
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