My Dad Asks HN: Should I Build A Hackerspace? | Hacker News Reader

My Dad Asks HN: Should I Build A Hackerspace?

29 pointsnickmolnar240 comments

OK. Quick back story: Over dinner with my, real estate developer, father he got very interested in the idea of owning a building with a large hackerspace in it.

The idea would be that the tenants of the building would be hardware startups who would use the space during the day, and it would be open for hacking and workshops by night. The space would be extremely well stocked with gear (soldering guns to BUGBases and everything in between). The office space would be a separate business entity from the hackerspace, and the hackerspace could be community owned/non-profit with its own management.

So, what makes a great hackerspace? How do you make the community self-sustaining? Would you pay more to run your startup in the same building as one of these spaces?

If you lived in Vancouver, would you join?

Thanks a bunch, and I'll keep you posted as the idea progresses.

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We just went through a lot of these questions ourself while founding Baltimore Node (http://www.baltimorenode.org) which is now a small hackerspace in Baltimore.

From what I am hearing from you I think what you want to do is three fold: (1) have a workshop for people to work in, (2) have a coworking facility (office space) and (3) to have a hackerspace.

The first one requires space and expensive tools.

The second requires a comfortable office space to work in.

The third requires a solid community that perceives the value of sharing ideas and having a place exclusively for workshops.

I'm not going to say that serving all three goals is not possible but as we explored them we found that without a donation of space and/or serious capital investment the first two would be somewhat difficult.

We opted to go with the third option and stick to it (some tools in the space though) and we are now profitable with 19 members at a $50 a month membership fee. I think the real benefit to a hackerspace is being part of a community that is about encouragment, sharing and doing.

It's been a blast so far and I am really glad to be part of this crew, I strongly recommend if anything that you try to establish a simple non-profit hackerspace to encourage general hackery.

Also, not sure why this hasn't come up yet, http://hackerspaces.org

Thanks for responding. It's great to hear from someone who has some first hand experience with this process. It looks like you are running a cool organization over there.

Hackerspaces.org has been a helpful resource for me as I was researching this over the last week. I encourage anyone else who is interested in it to check out some of their awesome projects to see what is possible.

My goal would be to have a serious capital injection to start this off. I don't know where it is going to come from, but I am seriously looking into government grants. I don't know what kind of strings will come attached yet, and it sickens my inner objectivist, but it seems like a great match for this kind of organization. BC happens to have a whole range of accessible grants, from the arts to small business to tech. Maybe it will be too much hassle, but it solves the problem of seed capital.

> The idea would be that the tenants of the building would be hardware startups who would use the space during the day, and it would be open for hacking and workshops by night.

So you're going to look for startups where all the employees leave by 5pm?

...and you're further going to tell them that their space is not secure, and anything that they leave out on a desk will be seen by hundreds of strangers?

That sounds really...suboptimal.

These are fair concerns. I think they can be engineered around, however.

There would be lockers available, as well as secured office space. Also, the office workers wouldn't have to leave by 5pm, it would just become more crowded. There would need to be an efficient registration system to make sure the shared resources were fairly allocated in these busy times.

It just sounds like too many rules and regulations to be useful.

I would love to know how other Hackerspaces have succeeded making their equipment available to different groups with distinct needs.

VHS has been around for a year, and bootstrapped ourselves into our 45W space. Our goal is to get into a bigger space in 6-12 months, as resources allow.

We've talked a lot over the past year about our future, our relation to other similar ventures like Hacker Dojo, Workspace, ..., and where our values lie. We're always looking for more people passionate about hacker spaces and growing our community.

We really agree that top notch tutorials and courses are key, and we've just started scheduling regular kit nights, featuring projects like a laser spirograph, tv-b-gone and minty boosts. We also try to do hardware hacking every tuesday night, and software nights every thursday. I also use VHS's facilities to organize a Super Happy Hacker House every ~6 weeks.

If you haven't already, you should check out the hacker spaces design patters PDF, it has lots of tips for building a great hackerspace.

VHS has a public night tonight - feel free to drop by and check out what we offer. Tonight is a triage/cleanup night where we're going to go through our vast donations and tidy the place up.

http://hackspace.ca

Sounds great. I can't get there until about 9, but sounds like a good time to meet-and-greet-and-clean.

I am not sure will this be useful. But if you are interested in making a hardware hacker space, The FabLab is a good reference point. They have listing of the basic equipments. You probably can find the community of the FabLab(http://fab.cba.mit.edu/).

How to make the community self sustaining is a big question. My opinion is in the long run the hackerspace has to be profitable for its operation. At the other hand, everyone likes to take advantage of low cost/free resources without accountability. So how to design a system to encourage those startups to grow and be profitable, taking accountability and give it back to others, in order to create a positive feedback loop is really important.

I think the system can't not be centrally planning ahead, so you'd better to be keen on community in the long run.

In my ideal vision of the hackerspace, the decisionmaking would be highly decentralized. This would require a few hundred members, which would undoubtedly take time. As an example, I would like to see a Donor's Choose style approach to ongoing purchasing, where a portion of member dues is pre-allocated to buying common goods.

Thanks for pointing out the FabLab. I'm familiar with the concept, but had never read their complete inventory. Very helpful.

I think you should probably contact #VHS to see if they are interested, what they have learned (they are currently running and in the black), and to gauge interest.

http://vancouver.hackspace.ca/doku.php

In short, there seems to be plenty of interest, but other projects like Workspace have failed by over-reaching their targets.

Thanks. They're on my 'to contact' list. Hell, maybe they'd even want to move to an area with less junkies. They seem to have a great community, but they have a terrible address.

I really like their 'principles' page. I think that's important to have up in writing, publicly, and not fixed in stone.

Their insistence on GPL'ing everything might be an issue. I would hope that most projects would be GPL'ed, but it would definitely limit the business potential having it mandated.

something to note.. vhs is not only GPL we have been taking about rewording this for a while. Anything developed by VHS as a vhs group project is CC/GPL/BSD/etc. That being said members are free to show up and work on their proprietary projects. Also, open/group projects do get priority when it comes to shared tools.

p.s. there is alot of awesome aside from the junkies in the dtes. ;]

Thanks for the clarification. That seems far more practical than what I was imagining.

Encouraging open source and group projects is definitely going to be a priority at whatever we end up building. I'd love to chat more with you about other ways of doing that.

is there a reason why you want to build another one and not improve the current one? stop on by.. it is every ones space.. we actively encourage other groups to come try and take us over =].

I would say it's not a good business decision, even though it sounds cool. Just like internet cafes, I just can't see there being enough paying customers to make it worth it.

Indeed. See this for an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberport

The idea was to build a complex with shared resources for high-tech companies. They built the complex, but nobody is renting.

I was there last week, as I have a friend that works there, and there was absolutely nobody there. It is probably the least populated point on Hong Kong Island, including the mountains :)

Their mistake was going too high-end. Expensive glass buildings, deluxe residences, high-end malls. I want something lean, dirty, and productive as hell.

I want something lean, dirty, and productive as hell.

But does anyone else with money want that? Selling to YC startups is probably not a good idea, because they have no money.

Corollary: there's a reason there are so many bland, boring office spaces -- they sell.

My hope would be that the educational side of things would draw people in and build a local market. The space would be able to hold seminars and workshops, which would hopefully inspire people to come back and work on their own. The tenants of the building would also guarantee some use of the hackerspace.

It's a great idea in theory, but I don't think that the execution would go too well. IMHO, startup founders and hackerspace users have much different requirements for the space. If I'm working on a startup, I'd be coming to the space when I need to get work done, first and foremost.

That's very different from the hackerspace environment, which is largely a project space. You don't know what will be worked on there or when; it might just be guys hacking code, maybe a little soldering, but maybe not. Someone might start up a robotics project; now you'll have welding / metalwork noise going on. To get an idea of how widely hackerspace projects can range, check out our project list: http://wiki.freesideatlanta.org/project-list.

The only way I could see this working is if you severely limit the type of activities that can be done in the hackerspace. But if you do this, I'm not sure you'd get enough support for it to be sustainable.

EDIT: missed the fact that this is for hardware startups. In that case, I could see this working if the startups / hackers have separate workspaces as well. That way, you wouldn't have to worry about separate hours.

I would imagine that some companies would start in the open hacker space with a project and a locker and then grow into a closed office space/work-space. Some others might already need their own space, but would just like to go down to the hackerspace and occasionally borrow/use equipment. Others might have a workshop and use the space as an ancillary lab.

I don't see why we couldn't accomodate all of those use-cases. The noise is an issue, but hopefully we could have some areas that are far enough away/sufficiently insulated from the heavy equipment/socializing to be relatively quiet.

Sounds impractical from the standpoint of making your money back. Also the idea of having an equipment free-for-all is terrible. Equipment can only be used by one person/team/company at a time, so you need to make sure there's a reasonable economy to allocate the resources fairly according to supply/demand. You could maybe set it up so that the equipment is rented at some rates, but all tenants get a certain amount of free equipment rental per month.

There definitely needs to be a very powerful reservation system. Some high-paying members might be able to rent out certain pieces of equipment for days at a time, while others would only be able to access it when vacant. You would not want somebody monkeying around with your C&C machine while you were taking a 2 hour break.

It would certainly require some good software, and community support. Maybe the different pricing levels would allow you to book equipment further and further in advance, to ensure availability for big projects.

There aren't a lot of hardware startups in Vancouver. I would argue that there are many less hardware startups in general.

TechShop has actually come up to Vancouver and given a presentation to the VanTec angels. Working on expanding an existing business might be a lot easier.

The Bootup Entrepreneurial Society (http://bootup.ca) of which I am on the board, would likely be interested in supporting this. If your dad wants to buy us a building, we'll run it :P

Its def an idea I have been playing with as well, but have no financial backing yet.

Expenses could be paid in a variety of ways. 1. Membership dues. 2. Promissory notes. That if you did make it big or make a profit a percent or cut of that would go back to the hackerspace. 3. Adverts on the equipment used.

I think the biggest thing was the notes to pay back a certain percentage... So you would def need some capital to make some profit on this one tho.

There are a few other ways to make it self-sustaining.

While you could provide free/open access some of the time, you could charge for 24/7 access and locker space. You could also rent out the space for occasional seminars/workshops/corporate off-sites.

Shipping/receiving for parts orders might be handy if many of the occupants have a day job.

There is also the possibility of government grants which, especially in Canada, are available for this kind of program. They would, at least, get the project off the ground even if they weren't used for running expenses.

I do like the idea of promissory notes. That is a great way to fundraise. I think, no matter how we raise the initial capital, the running profits of the hackerspace will stay invested in the hackerspace. I like the idea of it being a self-sufficient organization and suspect the profits on our end could be made just by what the space does to the real estate value.

Here's an article from Entrepreneur magazine this month that talks about people who are successfully doing it. http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2009/octob...

It would be hard to imagine being profitable (or sustainable) just focusing on hardware. It can sustain itself if you broaden your audience.

Well, if you have a desk you can have a software company. It might be possible to offer memberships that have limited access to the lab but still have access to conference rooms, desks, printers, reception, etc.

Sounds like http://techshop.ws/ or http://portlandtechshop.com/

Both sites have a breakdown of what they have on site, and you could get an idea of the pricing. It may also be a good idea to get in touch with the people who own/run it to get their take on the business side.

Techshop does a killer job with their classes. I think that's an essential part of making this thing self-sustaining.

Assuming that some hackers were using "Workspace" in Vancouver, you should know that it closed in August for lack of business. "The Network Hub", however, seems to be alive and well. I think it's an interesting idea, but I also think lots of research needs to be done - especially finding out how hardware startups like to work. How do we contact you?

iam (at) nicholasmolnar dot com

Love to hear from you. I am hearing good things about The Network Hub all over the place. I'm going to pay a visit next week. I also did hear about Workspace. I'd love to dig deeper and see if there are some lessons to be learned.

If I was still in Vancouver, I know I’d be there for sure!

While you’re researching, check out Montreal’s Foulab: http://www.foulab.org/ http://makekw.org/montreals-foulab-featured-documentary-shor...

Foulab was actually the impetus for this conversation. I used to live in Montreal, although I only heard about it after I left (from an old friend). It's a great, lean, model and I definitely intend to visit next time I am in Montreal.

Saturday House was my other inspiration. I used to attend religiously when I lived in Seattle, and was always impressed with the level of discussion and the collective intelligence of the members. It seemed like it should have been the center of something bigger.

In adding to contacting VHS (dedicated Vancouver hackspace), as suggested by Rantenki, I've heard that Bootup Labs (Boris Mann and co.) are looking for funding for a startup/coworking space (to substitute for the now defunct Workspace). Maybe you can join forces.

I really have to meet those guys anyways. Everywhere I go in Vancouver, I seem to be hearing about them these days. Always good things. It seems like they are successfully kickstarting the startup scene here. Their events are usually more packed than the ones I went to in Seattle, which says something of the growth.

Three or four years ago, the Vancouver startup scene was pretty anemic. There were some gaming companies, a few startups, and a dearth of any events to spread ideas between them.

Since hardware hacking is in some ways similar to making (and practicing) music, perhaps the shared band spaces where many bands group together to share practice space, equipment and recording studios would be a good model to start from.

That's a great thought. They are very similar (high capital costs, skilled machinery, loud).

I'd look to see where built in audiences exist. Are their any congruent groups in the area that you could associate with? Then you have speakers, experts possibly built in.

Anything to get you starting higher than the ground floor would be ideal

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