Hi Lil!
I’m not involved in Sean’s group at Collins Collective, but I thought I could help with your questions :) Getting people involved in the space and building a community even while we are in the build phase of this project. It sounds like you already have the space, but it’s not fitted out yet? My #1 tip here is to invite your potential members to get involved with that process as MUCH as possible. It might seem a bit scary, but the easiest thing you can do is to write down your fit-out todo list and organize it by things that need to be done by “professionals” (things like electrical, for instance, and other things that require safety and code requirements) vs. things that can be done with a little bit of creativity and elbow grease. For the things in the latter group, share that list with your prospective community and invite them to bring their interests/expertise/experiences to the table and contribute. This could be anything from painting to installing whiteboards to assembling furniture to even installing and configuring your network. You’ll still need to play a role in leading them, but the benefit is that the space turns from being a place that they’ll come into a place that they helped put together, quite literally. I like to think of it like a modern day “barn raising” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_raising), which was both a functional process of installing a new barn but also a community experience that involved people from the community across generations, disciplines, etc. Managing memberships - the amount of members vs the amount of chairs. How have you been tracking how members use the space and how many members you can sign up? I wrote a bit in here about how we manage this. A lot of people overthink this, and it’s much simpler than people think: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/coworking/A9AdyeFAsSQ/k5gDNidJk2oJ Basic rule of thumb is that a full time desk can only be used by one member, and flex desks can be shared by an average of 4+ members (depending on your membership spread, of course, so your milage may vary). Do all of your members have 24/7 access? And for those that do can you recommend an access system? Nope, more on how we handle that here: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/2014/07/the-neighborhood-watch-method-for-coworking-space-security/ If there are any other do's and don'ts you could throw my way that you've learnt since you started it would be greatly appreciated. Definitely peruse this list’s archives - I’ve been here answering questions for a while ;) I’ve also got a lot of more specific articles on my blog, http://dangerouslyawesome.com Good luck and definitely keep us posted on your community in Melbourne! I got to visit there for the Coworking Australia conference early last year and absolutely loved that city, it reminded me a lot of my favorite things about Philadelphia :) -Alex -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
