Building a Hacker Space (2007) [pdf]

I like the Tuesday Pattern a lot!

All the spaces I'm familiar with follow the Tuesday pattern. It's sort of funny.

Ditto.

"This server could not prove that it is events.ccc.de; its security certificate expired 42 days ago. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection. Your computer's clock is currently set to Monday, December 25, 2017. Does that look right? If not, you should correct your system's clock and then refresh this page"

We've been building Tampa Hackerspace for the past four years and much of this is similar to advice I give.

The "ten people" to start is close. I tell people you need at least 100 in your broader community and at least 10 committed to the point that they'd put money into it. More is better though.

We probably would have started a year later if we hadn't had a firm "just do it" person on the board.

We got lucky with our initial landlord and very lucky with our current landlord. Everyone we talked to would tell us how easy it would be to find space but it was a huge hassle finding someone that would rent to an unproven organization without much cash on hand.

Using recurring billing via Paypal (now considering Stripe) was a huge help.

Of course we meet on Tuesdays. It's been painful but we meet every single Tuesday. There's never any confusion about whether we meet this week or next week. Every Tuesday.

The "Sine Curve" pattern worries me and I can definitely see some of our shops / areas becoming cyclical.

Don't be everything to everyone, it's unsustainable. Have a clear mission and stick to it. Know what a hacker space is: it's not a startup incubator, even though it's easy to confuse the two.

I dropped out of a hacker space when they took on too many financial commitments. They thought they needed to expand because they were operating as a pseudo startup incubator for 1/4th the price. The problem was once they started to grow, they needed to meet ADA requirements. Dues that were fine for a hacker space just didn't pay the bills when suddenly the new crop of members were showing up everyday and had high impact needs.

It would have been fine to run a real incubator in the same building with a different membership fee structure so that things like ADA and conference rooms would be there for those who needed them.

The problem was ultimately that the organization ran itself in an everything for everybody mode. No one really put on the brakes when an expansion didn't make sense for what the organization did.