[Swansea Hackspace] What next

[Etched Pixels]

> Hang on! You can't just rent premises used for one thing at the moment 
> and turn it into a hackspace.

Unless people are planning on doing drastic things it will be B1 usage.
Pretty much any office space would be B1 usage. The only thing which
would be likely to be a problem would be retail as it's currently Swansea
council policy to try and preserve retail rows.

> why we should have a closed list that is not internet searchable.

Rubbish. Firstly any planning is intentionally as public as possible. The
planning system itself then deals with the removal of bogus objections.

Secondly anywhere you set up involves having neighbours. We will need to
get on with them and being open and constructive is both the best way of
doing that and also the best way of finding out a potential site has
neighbours who would be a problem (whether for good or bad reason) so we
can simply go somewhere else.

> The moment anyone posts a message about a particular place we are open 
> to misguided planning objections which could jeopardise the project.

Oh yes all those people who spend all day trawling the internet for
planning to object to. Ok there are a couple but they have "wind farm" in
the search box 8)

Even if you needed permission (which is very very unlikely) I can't think
of a better way to get objections than to ensure the first thing that the
people next door get is a council letter out of the blue.

Alan