Establishing POLICY and Renting Space (was Re: [Noisebridge-discuss] Keys)

[Andy Isaacson]

Strongly agreed with everything Shannon wrote.  Two points:

On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 01:20:26PM -0700, Shannon Lee wrote:
> The problems that we have worried about having have largely not
> materialized.  We haven't experienced any theft, we haven't experienced

We've lost at least one book out of our library.  (If you have the
Noisebridge copy of "TCP/IP Illustrated Vol. 1" at home, bring it back!)
There is some question if a few electronics doodads may have walked off
too.  Given that we've got over $80k in donated/project gear and around
a thousand people have visted Noisebridge over the last 8 months, I
think we're doing incredibly well.

(All numbers in the above paragraph are my wild-ass guesses at list
replacement values and visitor numbers, but I'm pretty sure I'm not off
by a factor of 2 on either number.)

> anyone hanging around the space assaulting people (well, aside from Mike),
> we haven't had an influx of homeless people living in the space (we do, in
> fact, have homeless Noisebridgers, and they've all done a magnificent job of
> not dominating the use of the space).  This stuff hasn't happened because
> everybody who has the use of the space feels "at home" here and wouldn't
> want to hurt it.

Exactly!  We didn't solve the overuse-of-noisebridge problem in advance.
When it became an issue last fall, we addressed the concrete issue and
avoided attempting to establish "policy" governing future cases.  Based
on my knowledge of NBers' living situations, we now have *more*
opportunities for abuse and are experiencing *less* abuse.

> If
> everybody who wrote into the list the last couple of days had instead spent
> the time browsing Craigslist and calling rental ads, we might have solved
> our problem, rather than borrowing five more.

Bill Pollock (publisher of No Starch Press and a good friend to
Noisebridge) wrote some excellent advice last month:

https://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/2009-May/004543.html

Every member (or supporter!) of Noisebridge is qualified to call
brokers, agents and landlords.  If you've never done this before and
want some pointers, talk to me, Shannon, Jacob, David Molnar, Rachel,
Mitch, or Bill.

-andy