Ask HN: Advice for Starting a Hacker Space?

This book is the "Gold standard" in starting a successful makerspace / hackerspace. Highly recommend. Covers tool organization, to staffing, to standard operation procedures, agile, entrepreneurship, funding and more.

Direct link: https://www.maker-works.com/operations-book

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Intentional-Makerspace-Operations-Dal...

From experience founding and running Droplabs out of download LA for 5 years, get all official members, whatever their official-ness is, written down in a public shared document that includes expectations and boundaries for all behaviors in the shared space, and all financial obligations to the space and between members outlined with boundaries too, with penalties/teeth for non-compliance. Org and general space member behaviors also need boundaries, one of which is to include group decisions, votes, or whatever made as an official decision are closed when a decision is made, and is not forever a talking point until the relentless get their way. Shared anything brings out the worst in people, and your organization needs to expect it, because the stubborn and mentally ill fail to be entertaining when real finances of multiple people are on the line every month. It's amazing how many normal people are downright crazy when group responsibilities and financial commitments are on the line.

When running a commercial "hacker space" you have a ton of problems with strangers, it sounds like you're focused on a community hacker space which can be much smaller scale with fewer rando issues. I was on the board of a successful commercial/community hacker space for a while and our problems were not around money (we had a great community of paying members who also volunteered to maintain the space) but more people not using the space in ways that were acceptable to the community (mentally ill members trying to live there, people doing stinky projects, people abusing the tools, major disagreements about how to organize scrap wood, plumb the dust collection, etc). You probably want to avoid this complexity (at least, for now, until you start running into scaling limits) and stick to the "computer club" community.

You will probably want an onboarding process with liability waiver. This is partly materials for parents to help them understand what their kids will be up to at your house. You're going to host other people in your place and there is liability that comes along with that.

You will need to figure out how to keep your computer club from devolving into a lan party (unless that's what you want) and focused on learning opportunities by providing guided learning opportunities. LLMs are really good for helping you develop these activities based on an idea, including digging down into the details. Some things that kids might be into: building adder circuits in Minecraft with redstone (requires a basis in binary math and logic gates, which you can teach on paper and in minecraft). Scratch programs to fulfill certain goals (build a gravity model and get a spaceship to orbit; make a clone of a simple platformer video game they like; etc).

After you have some ideas for projects/classes, you're going to want to write up a schedule so parents can help their kids get there. You should also provide volunteer opportunities so kids (and possibly their parents) can help out - maintain the website, fix the computers, etc. This not only helps lessen your workload, it also gives them a sense of community, that they're not just coming to hang out, they're responsible. Make sure to have community standards around cleaning up after yourself and enforce them.

So, maybe after having a couple of scheduled classes, put out a call for donation of old computer hardware, and maybe have the kids try to assemble some working systems from whatever you get. Good luck!

Hacker space in Seattle? Which one?

There's https://devhack.net/ in Seattle's U-District as well as Black Lodge Research https://www.blacklodgeresearch.org/ over in Redmond

They're both a far cry from what you're describing. But a lot of it is just putting the work in to build and foster a community around such a thing. Maintaining positive vibes among all members and making it a "third space" for those that want one

Kids often get extra benefit from the process of salvaging and reusing parts. Getting free or extremely cheap stuff to take apart might be a good thing to look into. ewaste recyclers or landfills with an ewaste area can be awesome

If it's a computer club for a small group of kids in a garage there's not much that needs to be thought out. This isn't like a hacker space where you need to learn how to run an actual org. I mean, how big can your garage get?

You might be able to hook up with your local library. You could donate a major tool or two if they already have one - many do, at least in large towns and up.

I believe it'd require a good chunk of capital to buy the equipment unless you want to focus on a very specific niche at the beginning

No notes, just support for this rad idea. You can just do stuff!

if i had money i'd buy a $500 house in detroit and turn it into a hacker house.

[flagged]