As someone who's still trying to keep a local hackerspace alive, it seems like much of the organisational and grunt work, as well as financial support, has to be done by a few core people.
Many people aren't willing to financially support community spaces, especially if they haven't had the chance to develop memories from it. Many people can't seem to fathom that rent is an ongoing concern, and we'd rather someone commit to paying $32 a month than give us a one-time $100 donation.
I find it difficult to trust that people will contribute their share of work necessary to upkeep a space. Many users are slobs, and are happy to leave the space worse than it already is.
Funny I was looking at a hackerspace near me and it was $100/mo was like what... but I get it, machines cost money but yeah. I have my own workshop so don't really need it. At least your price is more manageable.
You need to have a price that is actually a barrier to consider. Low monthly fees attract terrible members that will cost you money and time and stress to deal with.
So many problems at my local makerspace went away when they bumped up the prices.
I think that's the point, these spaces greatly prefer recurring donations because a) the aggregate value is usually more than a one-off and b) they're much easier to reason about, as they're more "evened out".
'a' isn't very interesting though. Preferring more money because its more is very very uninteresting.
'b' is probably the point the person was trying to make - if they'd said "I would prefer $32/month rather than $1000 one-off" it would be a much more interesting comment, talking about the relationship between value and the commitment to the space.
> Many users are slobs, and are happy to leave the space worse than it already is.
Slobs will drive up costs and demoralize your volunteers. If you try to factor too much toxic behavior into your price, your rates will drive away your target market.
Instead, avoid toxic slobs by requiring newcomers to pay not just with money, but also with time before they get access to resources that could harm your property. In the trades, this is called apprenticeship: newcomers pay up front, but aren't allow unsupervised access to tools until they've completed several years of work under the watch of a senior practitioner. Your programs don't need to be as long, but you do need to train people about real dangers: anything from a soldering iron to a drill press can cause permanent physical injury, never-mind CNC mills and welding equipment. No one should be able to use a hot glue gun or X-Acto in your facility without first paying you and consistently physically showing up to hear you tell them how, when, why, and for how long they're allowed to use it. As part of the training, have them maintain tools -- replace 3D printer drive belts, calibrate stop switches, hit the E-STOP on your CNC, lubricate joints with the correct grease, change the blade in your jigsaw.
Once you have a trained user base, waive fees for masters who spend time mentoring apprentices.
Also, document and promote achievements in your makerspace. Did a group of three multi-skill certified masters build a working cellphone from scratch? Did your recent repair-a-thon save 100 broken appliances from the landfill with custom repairs? Did a junior apprentice fabricate a novel tool that made the news? This stuff should be on your walls! Incentivize members to make your facility and culture famous.
Gamify the credentials by celebrating member accomplishments, and advertising them on a leader board. Talk about your elite members with reverence. Talk to your new members with respect. And compliment new members who do well on things like keeping benches clean when they're finished.
Align your certifications with local trade programs. The industrial tech instructors will love it when their students come in with experience in your maker space. They will recommend your organization to students and prospective students.
Structure your org into a non profit that owns a for-profit. Solicit contributions from wealthy elites. I've heard Jeff Bezos will personally send you six figures if he thinks what you're doing is worthwhile, but 1000 other businesses will do the same if you put their name somewhere on the wall. This will provide rent-security, budget for high-end equipment. Why can't your makerspace have the world's only 12-nozzle 3D printer? Or a 10um lithography machine for making 555 timers from scratch?
With money, you can also host internships, paying undergrads to build meta functions, like setting up and hardening your IT, industrial automation, filming for your youtube channel, fundraising campaigns. With a good challenge and classy tools, your interns will make their fellow classmen jealous with incredible accomplishments to add to their resume.
Expand into a regional movement; mentor and support other makerspaces who are doing good things.
At each step you'll have to train people to carry on what you started. But you won't be worrying about slobs any more.
> No one should be able to use a hot glue gun or X-Acto in your facility without first paying you and consistently physically showing up to hear you tell them how, when, why, and for how long they're allowed to use it.
This is why I end up just buying my own tools. By the time I factor in a couple months of membership just so I can get trained up to use the machines, plus the gas & time sinks of driving to the place, I've blown the time and the money to get my own gear instead. A 3d printer, a variable power supply, a soldering iron, and all the X-Acto blades I can break cost me less than 4 months at Hacker Dojo, and they're here in my garage, and if they get ruined and set me back on my project it's my own fault.
Governance: basically anarchic, but with one person ultimately calling the shots.
That's the classic problem with pseudo-anarchies. They're really dictatorships.
The larger scale form of this is the non-profit with the self-perpetuating board, where the board of directors appoints its successors.
It's the standard form for big non-profits, such as hospitals or national organizations.
Non-profit organizations with real elected officials, where the incumbents get kicked out now and then, are rare. They take too much attention by the members.
Nobody knows how to run a meeting under Robert's Rules of Order any more. The whole point of such meetings is that the group is in charge and the outcome is a binding decision. Most organizational leaders don't want that.
I think there's a pretty critical difference between a "dictatorship" and what this is, which is rule-by-the-least-apathetic; maybe let's call this "pathocracy" (from pathos). The minimum number of pathocrats needed to sustain such an organization is one, and the pathocracy either successfully grows until it warrants a more formal organizational structure or it dies when the sole remaining pathocrat bows out. For plenty of community events--maybe even nearly all of them--this is sufficient; the bi-monthly knitting circle at your local library probably does not greatly benefit from imposing a bureaucracy upon itself. And I say this as someone who's sitting within thirty feet of a copy of Robert's Rules of Order.
Many small organizations don't need much governance. Those are usually the ones with no real assets. At the community space level, you have assets and constraints. At that point you need some degree of governance.
This article would have been more interesting if it wasn't just one guy and his space, but an article by someone who had visited a few community spaces to see how they were organized.
I've watched Bay Area maker spaces come and go. TechShop is gone. TheShop is gone.
The gym model didn't work.
HumanMade has some government funding for its job training function, and is quite expensive.
Noisebridge, the most anarchic space, is still running. They've had to shut down for months for cleanup, or move, twice. Some spaces were taken over by arts and crafts people, and now are more into paper-folding and glue guns than CNC milling. Some spaces ended up in the teen college resume building niche.
It may have something to do with the audience though. I would say it is closer to Pratchett's idea of monarchy in Ramptops than anarchy. It is not that people there were not interested. They may even cheer the king on principle. After all, kings are supposed to be kings.
It is rather that when kings did something stupid enough, pitchforks were there to remind them. In this case, the audience can simply stop being part of the group.
thanks for sharing this. not sure if you are the author, but it's really useful reading this right now.
I am working, quite literally as I write this, on starting a community space like yours for 'digital makers' in Portland.
I wake up every morning feeling charged and ready; I go to sleep every night full of anxiety and doubts -- "who am I to start this thing? does anyone want this? I don't know what I'm doing!". ultimately, I feel, failure is better than not trying.
and it helps to know it's not about me. every person I talk to in my community feels the need for this thing. and that's why we want help from other people like us. we're just getting started!
if you live here and this sounds interesting to you, you can find us here: https://rcdc.space
This looks awesome, the owner of this substack is a good resource and writes lots of case studies.
I am not based in Portland myself but I run the ticketing and membership program for Synth Library Portland which is a really cool spot. The biggest thing with all these spaces is how to make it work financially over the long term.
hello!! I have been planning to reach out to Synth Library Portland; it's awesome to hear from someone connected to it. I know they recently got kicked out of their Lloyd Center location and were looking for a home. I was hoping to talk to them about this. I will email you
Shoot me email, I might not be the best for the details on that but I could intro someone on their who might be better on their team. I run their memberships as part of a platform called Pools https://pools.events/o/synth_library_portland/
hey man, live on the other side of the country from you but just want to share that the collective desire for a third space is so strong that i think no matter what you do you are doing the right thing (so long as it isn't like actively harmful or exclusive, etc.).
like, i live in a big city with a tech scene and i still yearn for a space to just go and hang out to hack in that isn't a college. you are doing a service!
FWIW, not sure how you're funding it and i have no experience just offering a take: I've always felt like I would definitely be fine with spending like $15/mo on having access to a barebones space. Maybe $20-30/mo if there was more that came with it (e.g. coffee machine, occasional events). I know rent is a PITA but I get turned off by coworking spaces that charge upwards of $200+/mo, it's just not feasible obviously for a community space.
Take with that what you will, just offering one person's pov prob in your primary demographic. i'm also kinda cheap lol so maybe i'm the low end, lol
Awesome. Good luck. Unfortunately I'm no longer in PDX or I'd be there. I always wanted a "hacking dojo" -- a sacred place to think and create with other in flow, together. Shower before entering, robes and laptops only :)
> Tons of people helped out – more than I ever expected – but none of them had the bandwidth to take it on as a full-time job with me, which was what I really needed.
Even in the best case, that wouldn't have ended well:
Author: I found a retired domain expert willing to devote full-time energy! The two of us combined will be unstoppable!
Retired domain expert: Author's funding is 1/10 of what this place needs to thrive. Looks like I'm going to need to find at least ten donors at that same level.
> just start. Find a space that’ll work well enough, start inviting people to it, and be the best host you can be. In the end, spending time with other people is the most important thing. Everything else comes from that.
It doesn’t go over costs. Starting a “community space” in Brooklyn cannot be cheap. There seems to be an ever growing divide in art as those who can even afford to open a community space. “Just start”? I work 5 days a week and my parents would not give me the rent money to open a Brooklyn art space. This reads like someone had no money problems to worry about even when profitability was a question.
It's interesting that people will label someone as "well off" pejoratively even after the article in question described how it started and how it was financed.
I wasn’t being perjorative about their financial standing. I was merely pointing out the lack of information relative to just starting a community center. “With what money” is a valid question. And for the record it appears this author is a highly paid software engineer at Amazon. The average person isn’t going to be able to afford to live in and rent out a warehouse in Brooklyn to “just start” a community center. Let a lone the social connections to do so without money.
i threw some good parties in the 90s at warehouse spaces I lived in, and this is distinct from a community space, but closely related. with hindsight, there is a specific talent for doing that.
Alex Danco's writing on "Scenes" [1] codifies a lot of the details, but nobody so far has been able to scale it.
The main factor when I did a hacker/artist space, it was the effect of relationships with musicians and scene people, not the affect of a vision to make something cool.
The defining factor of the spaces I've seen succeed vs. fail was something physical, and explicitly not software, and to a lesser extent, politics. You can have software and politics flavored things, but unless you are doing something physical like robotics, motorcycles, puppeteering, bookselling, pyrotechnics, music production, mma, it's not going to survive. Sure, there are spaces that don't do anything physical, but if you scratch the surface there is always a mysterious source of funding by the usual suspects who want to direct the scene to some other end.
The physical activity creates the competence hierarchy that is a stable and self regulating social dynamic.
I'd say the point is that community spaces should "scale" in the sense they inspire imitators to create their own spaces. We know this kind of scale works because this was how art and culture endured through human history for thousands of years. If anything, the urge to scale up, centralize, and delegate everything to for-profit corporations is what destroyed these sorts of community spaces.
"Artists are the storm troopers of gentrification," was some famous Toronto graffiti and I've been a part of the gentrifying class in a few cycles and neighborhoods in my life. It's never organic. Everything cool is a real estate play.
By this point there should be a 3-5 year formula where someone can finance buying a crappy strip mall or corner building and turn it around as the hip new thing and exit for 5x anywhere in the world. Invest in loss making restaurants and music venues operated by the people who care about them.
As someone who's still trying to keep a local hackerspace alive, it seems like much of the organisational and grunt work, as well as financial support, has to be done by a few core people.
Many people aren't willing to financially support community spaces, especially if they haven't had the chance to develop memories from it. Many people can't seem to fathom that rent is an ongoing concern, and we'd rather someone commit to paying $32 a month than give us a one-time $100 donation.
I find it difficult to trust that people will contribute their share of work necessary to upkeep a space. Many users are slobs, and are happy to leave the space worse than it already is.
Funny I was looking at a hackerspace near me and it was $100/mo was like what... but I get it, machines cost money but yeah. I have my own workshop so don't really need it. At least your price is more manageable.
You need to have a price that is actually a barrier to consider. Low monthly fees attract terrible members that will cost you money and time and stress to deal with.
So many problems at my local makerspace went away when they bumped up the prices.
Well sure; $32/mo is a lot more than $100 inside just 1 year
I think that's the point, these spaces greatly prefer recurring donations because a) the aggregate value is usually more than a one-off and b) they're much easier to reason about, as they're more "evened out".
'a' isn't very interesting though. Preferring more money because its more is very very uninteresting.
'b' is probably the point the person was trying to make - if they'd said "I would prefer $32/month rather than $1000 one-off" it would be a much more interesting comment, talking about the relationship between value and the commitment to the space.
Well, interesting or not, they need to pay rent.
> Many users are slobs, and are happy to leave the space worse than it already is.
Slobs will drive up costs and demoralize your volunteers. If you try to factor too much toxic behavior into your price, your rates will drive away your target market.
Instead, avoid toxic slobs by requiring newcomers to pay not just with money, but also with time before they get access to resources that could harm your property. In the trades, this is called apprenticeship: newcomers pay up front, but aren't allow unsupervised access to tools until they've completed several years of work under the watch of a senior practitioner. Your programs don't need to be as long, but you do need to train people about real dangers: anything from a soldering iron to a drill press can cause permanent physical injury, never-mind CNC mills and welding equipment. No one should be able to use a hot glue gun or X-Acto in your facility without first paying you and consistently physically showing up to hear you tell them how, when, why, and for how long they're allowed to use it. As part of the training, have them maintain tools -- replace 3D printer drive belts, calibrate stop switches, hit the E-STOP on your CNC, lubricate joints with the correct grease, change the blade in your jigsaw.
Once you have a trained user base, waive fees for masters who spend time mentoring apprentices.
Also, document and promote achievements in your makerspace. Did a group of three multi-skill certified masters build a working cellphone from scratch? Did your recent repair-a-thon save 100 broken appliances from the landfill with custom repairs? Did a junior apprentice fabricate a novel tool that made the news? This stuff should be on your walls! Incentivize members to make your facility and culture famous.
Gamify the credentials by celebrating member accomplishments, and advertising them on a leader board. Talk about your elite members with reverence. Talk to your new members with respect. And compliment new members who do well on things like keeping benches clean when they're finished.
Align your certifications with local trade programs. The industrial tech instructors will love it when their students come in with experience in your maker space. They will recommend your organization to students and prospective students.
Structure your org into a non profit that owns a for-profit. Solicit contributions from wealthy elites. I've heard Jeff Bezos will personally send you six figures if he thinks what you're doing is worthwhile, but 1000 other businesses will do the same if you put their name somewhere on the wall. This will provide rent-security, budget for high-end equipment. Why can't your makerspace have the world's only 12-nozzle 3D printer? Or a 10um lithography machine for making 555 timers from scratch?
With money, you can also host internships, paying undergrads to build meta functions, like setting up and hardening your IT, industrial automation, filming for your youtube channel, fundraising campaigns. With a good challenge and classy tools, your interns will make their fellow classmen jealous with incredible accomplishments to add to their resume.
Expand into a regional movement; mentor and support other makerspaces who are doing good things.
At each step you'll have to train people to carry on what you started. But you won't be worrying about slobs any more.
> No one should be able to use a hot glue gun or X-Acto in your facility without first paying you and consistently physically showing up to hear you tell them how, when, why, and for how long they're allowed to use it.
This is why I end up just buying my own tools. By the time I factor in a couple months of membership just so I can get trained up to use the machines, plus the gas & time sinks of driving to the place, I've blown the time and the money to get my own gear instead. A 3d printer, a variable power supply, a soldering iron, and all the X-Acto blades I can break cost me less than 4 months at Hacker Dojo, and they're here in my garage, and if they get ruined and set me back on my project it's my own fault.
Governance: basically anarchic, but with one person ultimately calling the shots.
That's the classic problem with pseudo-anarchies. They're really dictatorships.
The larger scale form of this is the non-profit with the self-perpetuating board, where the board of directors appoints its successors. It's the standard form for big non-profits, such as hospitals or national organizations. Non-profit organizations with real elected officials, where the incumbents get kicked out now and then, are rare. They take too much attention by the members.
Nobody knows how to run a meeting under Robert's Rules of Order any more. The whole point of such meetings is that the group is in charge and the outcome is a binding decision. Most organizational leaders don't want that.
I think there's a pretty critical difference between a "dictatorship" and what this is, which is rule-by-the-least-apathetic; maybe let's call this "pathocracy" (from pathos). The minimum number of pathocrats needed to sustain such an organization is one, and the pathocracy either successfully grows until it warrants a more formal organizational structure or it dies when the sole remaining pathocrat bows out. For plenty of community events--maybe even nearly all of them--this is sufficient; the bi-monthly knitting circle at your local library probably does not greatly benefit from imposing a bureaucracy upon itself. And I say this as someone who's sitting within thirty feet of a copy of Robert's Rules of Order.
> rule-by-the-least-apathetic
That is a great phrase.
Many small organizations don't need much governance. Those are usually the ones with no real assets. At the community space level, you have assets and constraints. At that point you need some degree of governance.
This article would have been more interesting if it wasn't just one guy and his space, but an article by someone who had visited a few community spaces to see how they were organized.
I've watched Bay Area maker spaces come and go. TechShop is gone. TheShop is gone. The gym model didn't work. HumanMade has some government funding for its job training function, and is quite expensive. Noisebridge, the most anarchic space, is still running. They've had to shut down for months for cleanup, or move, twice. Some spaces were taken over by arts and crafts people, and now are more into paper-folding and glue guns than CNC milling. Some spaces ended up in the teen college resume building niche.
It may have something to do with the audience though. I would say it is closer to Pratchett's idea of monarchy in Ramptops than anarchy. It is not that people there were not interested. They may even cheer the king on principle. After all, kings are supposed to be kings.
It is rather that when kings did something stupid enough, pitchforks were there to remind them. In this case, the audience can simply stop being part of the group.
thanks for sharing this. not sure if you are the author, but it's really useful reading this right now.
I am working, quite literally as I write this, on starting a community space like yours for 'digital makers' in Portland.
I wake up every morning feeling charged and ready; I go to sleep every night full of anxiety and doubts -- "who am I to start this thing? does anyone want this? I don't know what I'm doing!". ultimately, I feel, failure is better than not trying.
and it helps to know it's not about me. every person I talk to in my community feels the need for this thing. and that's why we want help from other people like us. we're just getting started!
if you live here and this sounds interesting to you, you can find us here: https://rcdc.space
This looks awesome, the owner of this substack is a good resource and writes lots of case studies.
I am not based in Portland myself but I run the ticketing and membership program for Synth Library Portland which is a really cool spot. The biggest thing with all these spaces is how to make it work financially over the long term.
Feel free to ping me.
hello!! I have been planning to reach out to Synth Library Portland; it's awesome to hear from someone connected to it. I know they recently got kicked out of their Lloyd Center location and were looking for a home. I was hoping to talk to them about this. I will email you
Shoot me email, I might not be the best for the details on that but I could intro someone on their who might be better on their team. I run their memberships as part of a platform called Pools https://pools.events/o/synth_library_portland/
hey man, live on the other side of the country from you but just want to share that the collective desire for a third space is so strong that i think no matter what you do you are doing the right thing (so long as it isn't like actively harmful or exclusive, etc.).
like, i live in a big city with a tech scene and i still yearn for a space to just go and hang out to hack in that isn't a college. you are doing a service!
FWIW, not sure how you're funding it and i have no experience just offering a take: I've always felt like I would definitely be fine with spending like $15/mo on having access to a barebones space. Maybe $20-30/mo if there was more that came with it (e.g. coffee machine, occasional events). I know rent is a PITA but I get turned off by coworking spaces that charge upwards of $200+/mo, it's just not feasible obviously for a community space.
Take with that what you will, just offering one person's pov prob in your primary demographic. i'm also kinda cheap lol so maybe i'm the low end, lol
Awesome. Good luck. Unfortunately I'm no longer in PDX or I'd be there. I always wanted a "hacking dojo" -- a sacred place to think and create with other in flow, together. Shower before entering, robes and laptops only :)
Highly recommend the Recurse Center (https://www.recurse.com/), also in NYC, as a communal space for programmers.
> In the end, spending time with other people is the most important thing. Everything else comes from that.
yes!
> Tons of people helped out – more than I ever expected – but none of them had the bandwidth to take it on as a full-time job with me, which was what I really needed.
Even in the best case, that wouldn't have ended well:
Author: I found a retired domain expert willing to devote full-time energy! The two of us combined will be unstoppable!
Retired domain expert: Author's funding is 1/10 of what this place needs to thrive. Looks like I'm going to need to find at least ten donors at that same level.
> just start. Find a space that’ll work well enough, start inviting people to it, and be the best host you can be. In the end, spending time with other people is the most important thing. Everything else comes from that.
It doesn’t go over costs. Starting a “community space” in Brooklyn cannot be cheap. There seems to be an ever growing divide in art as those who can even afford to open a community space. “Just start”? I work 5 days a week and my parents would not give me the rent money to open a Brooklyn art space. This reads like someone had no money problems to worry about even when profitability was a question.
It's interesting that people will label someone as "well off" pejoratively even after the article in question described how it started and how it was financed.
I wasn’t being perjorative about their financial standing. I was merely pointing out the lack of information relative to just starting a community center. “With what money” is a valid question. And for the record it appears this author is a highly paid software engineer at Amazon. The average person isn’t going to be able to afford to live in and rent out a warehouse in Brooklyn to “just start” a community center. Let a lone the social connections to do so without money.
i threw some good parties in the 90s at warehouse spaces I lived in, and this is distinct from a community space, but closely related. with hindsight, there is a specific talent for doing that.
Alex Danco's writing on "Scenes" [1] codifies a lot of the details, but nobody so far has been able to scale it.
The main factor when I did a hacker/artist space, it was the effect of relationships with musicians and scene people, not the affect of a vision to make something cool.
The defining factor of the spaces I've seen succeed vs. fail was something physical, and explicitly not software, and to a lesser extent, politics. You can have software and politics flavored things, but unless you are doing something physical like robotics, motorcycles, puppeteering, bookselling, pyrotechnics, music production, mma, it's not going to survive. Sure, there are spaces that don't do anything physical, but if you scratch the surface there is always a mysterious source of funding by the usual suspects who want to direct the scene to some other end.
The physical activity creates the competence hierarchy that is a stable and self regulating social dynamic.
[1] https://danco.substack.com/p/how-scenes-work-with-jim-oshaug...
> nobody so far has been able to scale it
I'd say the point is that community spaces should "scale" in the sense they inspire imitators to create their own spaces. We know this kind of scale works because this was how art and culture endured through human history for thousands of years. If anything, the urge to scale up, centralize, and delegate everything to for-profit corporations is what destroyed these sorts of community spaces.
"Artists are the storm troopers of gentrification," was some famous Toronto graffiti and I've been a part of the gentrifying class in a few cycles and neighborhoods in my life. It's never organic. Everything cool is a real estate play.
By this point there should be a 3-5 year formula where someone can finance buying a crappy strip mall or corner building and turn it around as the hip new thing and exit for 5x anywhere in the world. Invest in loss making restaurants and music venues operated by the people who care about them.