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> Guest are fine, but don’t let anyone live there. Kick them out if necessary. My friends spent years bootstrapping and maintaining a local hackerspace. Most
by PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Guest are fine, but don’t let anyone live there. Kick them out if
necessary.
My friends spent years bootstrapping and maintaining a local hackerspace.
Most of their problems could be traced back to people trying to live at the hackerspace. 95% of people were trying to use it as a hackerspace, but 5% saw it as an opportunity to do some combination of sleep, shower, eat, and relax among interesting people for significantly less than it would cost to rent somewhere. It gets even harder when the person in question is friends with so-and-so, who will try to defend having them live at the space while they're down on their luck.
I was never heavily involved with the space, but having watched their struggles I would agree: Nobody lives there, nobody stays overnight, no exceptions. Maintain a hard line against this and enforce it early.
- stryan 5y agoI've been intrigued by the concept of a co-living space combined with a hacker-space/co-working space (something similar to a boarding house with attached hacker/maker space) but it does sound like you would definitely have to have a hard separation between the "living" space and the "working" space. I wonder if its something that could feasibly be organized or if hackerspaces should just stay hackerspaces.
- ja27 5y agoWe had one van-dweller (who was otherwise homeless) that tried to live at our space. We tried to let it work for a while and added rules to deal with issues he created but he'd find a new way to antagonize other members every couple of days. Finally crossed some line and he took us up on an offer to refund his membership dues and go away. Bonus: he was working on a perpetual motion machine the whole time.