Okay, so hackerspace-adelaide has finally submitted the paper work to
become incorporated(after having regular meetings to socalize build etc),
and is now looking at membership structure/fee's so we can get some stable
income so we can start looking at a place to rent/lease as well as getting
tools together.

So I figured I'd email around the oz-spaces (current and future(closest
point of contact)) to see if anyone would be nice enough as to share the
story of how your space got started up.

Was there any tricky parts?

How did you initially get funded?

Any lucky breaks?

What should we attempt to do/avoid?

Looking forward to some cool/funny/and serious stories!

--
Ryan Leach

Fyi Ryan

http://groups.google.com/group/ozhs-net?hl=en

 Email can be sent to ozhs-net@googlegroups.com

While I have not been involved with HSBNE from day 1, I've been very
heavily involved with the day to day running and decision making of the
space for the last two years.

Getting incorporated for us was quite a tricky part, as our rules were very
insufficient compared to the requirements of incorporation. We chose to
modify the model rules to suit our requirements and went ahead with that.
It worked well for us, but is daunting to read and was quite a daunting
task to make them fit our structure. I am considering writing up a set of
community guidelines to make it easier for people to understand and to
complement our incorporation rules.

A decent site has always, and probably always will be, a challenge for any
hackerspace. We've gotten pretty lucky with this one thankfully, our
current site is pretty good. 300sqm warehouse less than 2km from Brisbane
CBD. The downsides to it are that we are on rolling 30 day notice, right
next to a residential area and we have no running water on site >_<. The
new site we are in negotiations for atm is looking pretty good. 1200sqm
floor space, on about 4000sqm of land. Getting it pretty cheap from the
State government too which is nice.

Good times have been a few events we've had here, robot wars, soldering
workshop, welding workshop and various working bees. Bad times have been
when the building nearly flooded (not in the january floods) and various
other accidents and things. Thankfully no-one has been badly injured. In
fact the worst injury was done by yours truly about a week after we moved
into the building. I busted up my ankle pretty good and was on crutches for
a few weeks.

Safety is something that you need to be aware of, as far as we can tell a
hackerspace is not covered under the same safety requirements as say, an
industrial workplace, but basic duty of care still applies and you, and
your members, need to keep this in mind. Just little things like don't
leave naked mains wiring around, even if it's not plugged in, someone might
plug it in thinking is supposed to be, and then someone else takes the
brunt of it. Machine tools are a big one for this, we actually have a
member who is specifically a member of our space to induct other people on
how to use them. Teach people how to use the tool safely and properly and
things will go smoothly.

Cleaning is the one bugbear I really have, getting a bunch of geeks,
hackers, makers and crafts people to keep a communal space clean can be a
bit of a nightmare. Organize regular cleanups and get a commercial bin,
they are surprisingly cheap and it's worth doing for just the ease of being
able to get rid of big stuff. I don't know about the fees down there, but
it actually works out cheaper for us to have the bin than to do a dump run
each month.

I hope all of this helps and if you ever want some advice or someone to
bitch too, feel free to give me a shout. Sgt_lemming on freenode, via email
here, or come for an IRL visit :-D

Lawrence "Lemming" Dixon.

On 24 May 2012 01:41, Ryan Leach <ryan.the.le...@gmail.com> wrote: