[Noisebridge-discuss] Noisebridge: Death and Taxes

[Danny O'Brien]

Oh, and while I'm caffeinated, I will also note that only 17 people
have become ex-members, which represents a churn rate over 3 years of
<5%, which is actually very decent. Of course that may go up as I mail
people and they say "feck off, the place stinks of patchouli and drama
now, not like back when I was king", but in terms of people loving the
'Bridge, this looks healthy to me. AOL would kill for these figures.
Um, if they had a few dozen zeros after them.

Of course, that's not very dramaful, so feel free to extrapolate to
mean that in 20 years time, we'll have negative members and need to
start paying random strangers.

I WUV YOU

d.


On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Danny O'Brien <danny at spesh.com> wrote:
> Okay, this is fun! I now have l33t haxx0r access to the membership spreadsheet!
>
> Channelling Julian A., I will now cut and paste their email addresses
> into this mailing list. THE WORLD MUST KNOW
>
> No, actually, what I deduce from this spreadsheet is that despite lots
> of scary potential horrors, our main problem seems to be largely that
> PayPal is flaky, subs didn't go in, and we didn't catch it. I may be
> wrong and we need to start staging coups or rounding up hippies or
> writing special software that makes us cleverer or something, but that
> seems to be the main problem.  This is totally a big problem in
> non-profits btw, ORG in Britain, my second equal favourite non-profit
> has the same annoying problems. We've essentially fixed that
> organizational problem that led to this by noticing and FREAKING OUT
> JUST IN TIME.
>
> Oh I just read Andi's note and he said all of this stuff but better.
> DAMN YOU FOR YOUR TENACITY
>
> I'm sure there were other great suggestions at the meeting yesterday,
> but my main one would be to relax the rules for membership or suggest
> that one of the conditions for membership is to start paying the money
> FIRST, before the membership acceptance.
>
> Alright, let's get mailing!
>
> MY FIRST TEMPLATE LETTER, SENT TO TWO PEOPLE THAT I ALREADY KNOW AND
> ARE AWESOME:
>
> Hi, I'm Danny O'Brien, famous celebrity and Internet  bon vivant. You
> may know me from my roles in the Internet's "It's For The Lulz III",
> and "HTTP: 503 Service Unavailable!"
>
> I'm writing to you personally,
> $FIRST_NAME, and $YOUR_SPOUSE_OTHER_FIRST_NAME because I know that you
> two both jumped through insane amounts of loops to become a
> NOISEBRIDGE member in the past, and that means you *care* about poor
> orphan hackers in the Mission district. Perhaps a little too much. But
> not in a creepy way.
>
> Wait, this isn't going so well. I'll start again.
>
> Turns out this Summer PayPal lovingly cancelled a bunch of recurring
> subscriptions to Noisebridge, and we got a bit flakey (who knew!)
> about chasing down regular subscribers*. As a consequence, the Bay
> Area's third equal bestest hackerspace is in financial trouble. If we
> don't catch up on the payments and refill our coffers to the tune of
> $5K or so in the next month, and $15K in the next few months,
> Noisebridge will be shut down, thrown out onto the streets, kaput, END
> OF LINE.
>
> This means that you will no longer have a steampunk
> gentleman/gentleladyhackers club, and San Francisco will be home to
> roaming packs of homeless, but self-replicating, fabrication devices
> with a grudge. I don't think I have to spell out the risks there, Mr
> Cyberpunk, do I?
>
> You can make this go away by either
> * GIVING US ALL YOUR MONEY, PLZ K THX
> * Paying up the dues that you may have accidentally not paid thanks to
> robot error,.
> * Making an awesome one off donation to help us out of this hole.
> * Starting up your $80 monthly donation again (Noisebridge may still vanish)
> * Or just tell me why you're not paying, so I can make up good excuses
> for my next mailing.
>
> We've been so scatty that you might even have been paying us and we
> didn't notice (though this only happens if you don't use PayPal). Mail
> me about this too, and I'll not send you more email/send you funnier
> jokes as you wish.
>
> Here's how to do pay us:
> https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Donate
>
> Please pay. Apart from supporting an awesome hacking resource in San
> Francisco, you'll also ensure I have somewhere to sleep.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> The Internet's Danny O'Brien
> +1 [MY PHONE NUMBER]  if you want to call and ask me about this, or for sexy
> talk (calls cost $5000 per minute)
>
> * (We may also have blown some of the petty cash on quaaludes and
> kombucha too, but that's water under the bridge, we did it by
> consensus, and no-one can prove nothing. NOTHING WE SAY)
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 1:41 AM, Andy Isaacson <adi at hexapodia.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 08:25:20AM -0800, Danny O'Brien wrote:
>>> I'm still on for gently hassling members. Somebody point me at a
>>> spreadsheet or send me a list of emails or home addresses and set me
>>> at them. I can be very persuasive!
>>
>> Done.  (I didn't realize I could do that.)
>>
>> -andy
>>
>>
>