This is an easy organization startpage for our ICT Community: together we want to build a hackerspace.
The hackerspace will be community driven (everything runs than "naturally" by engineers) and at the start we want an ideal base for a cool community. So we strive for a cheap, great, open location where regularly good software / hardware meetings are held while engineers have room to work. Since we want to rent an office for this, we need a large group to lower our cost. We can do this by starting at minimal cost (the office only) and naturally grow to more. We expect a large part of the furniture to be obtained by donations. A software hackerspace does not need much: we only need wifi. A hardware hackerspace organization takes much more effort, will need to grow over time.
First Step: our 10 questions for you to start the HackerSpace
We want to know our community possibilities. 10 short questions will help our good thinking! Many thanks for your time ;-)
The Main Plan:
Get some financing, some cheap location and realize a strategy for the coolest space ever. Mail our meetup for ideas! ;-)
1. Financing:
- A good cheap location costs 300 each month (3600 a year, the basis of our costs).
- We search for a cheap location, so we can start with little budget.
- We realize a sponsoringplan for social innovation in Eindhoven (via members, local sponsors, mindhoven and asceindhoven.nl).
- We can search for many members (60?) so we can be a cheap&open hackerspace attractive for many people.
- We establish a bank account for expenses and make it easy for people to pay (say, 30 euro's per person on a year basis).
- If you want to help us with a sponsor, please go to this contact page.
2. Cheap locations:
- Stichting Ruimte has a cheap location at Schellens (180 euro, 18 meters). We will visit this this wednesday at 16:00.
- Wilbert has an option for www.arktheater.nl, see our meetup. Arktheater can be cheap but is far from ready.
- Rene will focus on spare locations in his location Schellens.
- Stichting Ruimte has a monthly list of cheap accomodations (often with WIFI, sometimes also at Schellens...).
- A start room could be about 18 square meters. Also with a small location we can be succesfull and have options to grow.
- We can also try to get a hackerspace every saturday/sunday in a local neighbourhood center (150 euro a month).
- We can also ask our sponsors if they know a location to use for easy weekend events. Maybe an engineering company wants to support.
- Because we have good connections with the local government (and good plans for Eindhoven!) we can easily ask them for advice.
- Deborah has asked Fontys for long term collaboration on getting good locations. They agreed! ;-)
3. Coolest hacking space ever
- We have our own cool website http://www.madspace.nl, with wiki, facebook and social platform.
- Hackerspace design patterns are here. We are building for our open community of 70 engineers (10 very active members) that are related to our organization.
- We share cool hacker space plans via the meetups, via our form, or via sending our organization a mail (asc.eindhoven@gmail.com).
- We have a nice collection of growing hacking projects which we will extend in 2013.
4. Legal (added by Joris)
- Possibly we can use the German model: with 7 people you can be a free company (without startup costs). We will have to register in Germany. Wim investigates
- If we would like to be an organization that has members and dues we will have to become a Vereniging under Dutch law, specifically a vereniging met volledige rechtsbevoegdheid with a chamber of commerce registration. This to not make board members personally liable for our dealings and transactions. A stichting is also possible but then we can not levy membership dues. Typically a vereniging is an organisation founded to acomplish a goal for its membership while a stichting is founded for a more public goal. More about this on the chamber of commerce site.
- I've compared the costs of 8 Notarissen and the cheapest is ActieNotarissen. Registration would cost 375. Other Notarissen have costs ranging from 425 to 800.
- Protospace is a stichting and they generate revenue by holding workshops. They don't worry about liability because they make everyone sign a waiver saying that working their is under their own risk.
- As an example you can find the Statutes of FabLab Zurich here. Here is a general example of Dutch statutes.
- If we are to register ourselves we need 4 things:
-3 board members and copies of their passports, they will have to be present at a short meeting lasting perhaps half an hour.
-A well defined public or private goal. We should brainstorm about this next time so that we can all agree on it.
-A choice between becoming a stichting or vereniging.
-A short discussion on how we want to organise ourselves generally and how we would like decisions to be made.
-We can also do a bit more work and try to register as an ANBI, essentially a recognized charity, which would signify that we have a well defined public purpose for the public good. Or we could just focus on ourselves. If we would like to be an ANBI then the more logical legal entity would be the stichting. Being an ANBI brings with it tax advantages that could be important at a later date but more administrative work now. More importantly though it would change the focus of our organisation from being something by the members for the members to one that serves a public purpose. This is a choice we have to make. You can find the requirements for being an AMBI here.
Note: if you want to be an editor of this page (and help our Main Plan foreward), please mail your google account towards asc.eindhoven@gmail.com