[Swansea Hackspace] What next

[Etched Pixels]

> The majority of industrial unit type spaces seem to be a fair way out of
> town, llansamlet area or further, now whilst they are nice big spaces
> with good parking they pretty much suck for public transport access,
> especially out of business hours.

Like a small hackspace can afford an industrial unit rent, rates and
insurance, plus rubbish disposal and other charges you get hit with on a
business location.

> the town, in areas like sandfields, brynmill, walter road type areas
> which are relatively cheap and close to busy bus routes and other
> amenities.

In particular look for non ramp accessible or non ground floor space
providing you don't have plans to lug giant machinery into it and
providing it's not a problem to any members. The disability law is
gradually making this less and less usable by businesses so its cheaper
(or getting turned into housing).

For that matter for a smaller operation a garden shed or garage might be
simpler. Sheds are also much cheaper to rebuild if you burn one down with
a laser or something. It also has some considerable other advantages as
within reason it's probably not a business if its a bunch of nutters
meeting in a shed so doesn't attract rates and other such joys. You can
do quite a lot in a shed, and with a concrete base you can even install
rather heavy machinery (indeed the moulding machine currently in storage
somewhere previously lived in a shed, and the number of lathes, cnc
machines and the like that lurk in them all over the uk is huge).

It's also a practical consideration, if its a small organisation even
initially then to be useful as a place it needs to be a small set of
assets which are heavily and regularly used, otherwise it's cheaper to
build your own shed 8)

> As for funding, well that's going to depend heavily on how many people
> are likely to be able to commit to paying a membership, and how much it
> costs to rent a suitably sized space.

I think thats an important question to figure out early on - are we
talking £20/member/month, £50/member/month, £100/member/month or what ?

> I believe that a contingent in the university that are on this list have
> investigated if there is any space available there, which may well have
> come cheaply, but i don't think there was any success so far ?

My own experience with the university is that departments want to help
(after all its one of their beloved '3 pillars') but then estates get
involved, and then you discover you can't even plug in your own phone
charger until you've paid someone in estates tp spend 3 weeks waiting to
PAT test it and send their own man to plug it in for you. Let alone what
might happen if you dared to brew your own tea rather than using catering
services.

Possibly Swansea Met are better but I don't know if we have any of the
right contacts. At least it's run by people who have some concept of the
real world.
 
> Re: tools etc, i had hoped to get a feeling for this with my initial
> statement of what people expected from a hackspace, i didnt get many
> responses, perhaps those that havent yet done so could take a moment to
> share with us their expectations or aspirations.

From my perspective the main thing of value is actually likely to be the
fact we will all have access to people with other skills, and a place
where we can all bounce ideas around and find new ways to do things.

Alan