Opendiscussion

Anything that doesn't fit anywhere else

Use this as a community whiteboard, however actual discussions should probably happen on the mailing list.

Funding

What are you folks thinking about for funding this and what type of funding are you open too? Membership fees, fund raisers, seeking out an investor, hacking the lottery? -- Deltaray 19:40, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

I would like to see this be user supported by membership dues, however I think we're open to about anything to help reduce costs for everyone. I have a spreadsheet (File:HackerSpaceCosts.xls) linked on the front page so that anyone can see what numbers we're looking at for the moment. Obviously variables like the final rent cost and other costs will vary the final amount, but with 10 members a rough shwag would be around $70 a month, 20 members and that can get down below $40 per member per month. Things like startup costs like rent-deposit I think we would look for donations (probably from ourselves). Also, and this should be discussed at some point, there could be some small fee-based services that could be offered like low-budget web hosting out of the space or other things that could help reduce costs. -- Dosman 21:20, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

A few other ideas for funding here and there are:

• Fixing things for people get them to donate or maybe just have a flat rate for the repair.
• Maybe a monthly/annual sale of things that have been created at the hackerspace
• Going to garage sales, finding cheap electronics things that can be resold or whatever. Like $1 items that could be fixed for cheap and sold for $20 or something. I just made $33 on Saturday because I bought a sealed box set of Grey's Anatomy Season 2 for $4 and then took it back to Wal-mart for $37 in cash. Can't do that often though.
• Buying IU Surplus stuff to resell (this can be dangerous though because we could wind up with lots of junk)
• Hold some interesting event in order to take donations.