We spent a lot of time thinking about our structure and as Alex has
said, lots of talk of models has gone on.
I think there are several dimensions in play here that should be taken
into consideration;
What are the working patterns of your clients / prospective clients
Where do they fit on a Need Flexibility <---------------------------
+----------------------------> Need to Belong kind of scale
What prices make people come out of their home office & starbucks
without it becoming a "I paid for it so I MUST use it" guilt trip
And finally the Peter Krug factor: how quickly can what's on offer be
clearly understood
We puzzled over these, but mostly we just opened up regularly which
(by accident more than design) allowed us to observe these things
interacting. In the end I came up with 3 models that seem to work for
us;
They are in the licence here: https://coworking.pbwiki.com/Licences+and+Agreements
James
It sounds counter-intuitive, but we found that the more 'flexible' we made a membership, the less people were likely to use them. Now we have two memberships: you have desk or you are a drop-in. :) Our desks are all full and we have a waiting list.
It could be because we don't do any promotion and people find out
about us through the web or word or mouth, but it's just not been an
issue.
Now, *were* it to become an issue and we became insanely popular with
15-20 dropins showing up, that's different, but that would radically
change our business, and make it worthwhile to invest in some kind of
scheduling or charging scenario. One thing we've learned though, given
how easy it is to build a custom Rails app these days, is to not
prematurely optimize or to invest in behavior that may never
materialize. It's almost as though you want to reach a pain threshold
where you *must* take action... taking action in advance of something
is a risk that a bootstrapped project probably should avoid, if only
to limit wasting resources.
Y'know? Now, that isn't to say that you *can't* build something like
this, maybe to attract new folks, but we've seen personal connections
and community tend to be *much* ways to build interest. Anyway...! ;)
Chris
--
Chris Messina
Citizen-Participant &
Open Source Advocate-at-Large
Work: http://citizenagency.com
Blog: http://factoryjoe.com/blog
Cell: 412.225.1051
IM: factoryjoe
This email is: [ ] bloggable [X] ask first [ ] private
James McCarthy
http://thewerks.org.uk
Has anyone looked into the FireEagle API?