Many people aren't willing to financially support community spaces, especially if they haven't had the chance to develop memories from it. Many people can't seem to fathom that rent is an ongoing concern, and we'd rather someone commit to paying $32 a month than give us a one-time $100 donation.

I find it difficult to trust that people will contribute their share of work necessary to upkeep a space. Many users are slobs, and are happy to leave the space worse than it already is.

That's the classic problem with pseudo-anarchies. They're really dictatorships.

The larger scale form of this is the non-profit with the self-perpetuating board, where the board of directors appoints its successors. It's the standard form for big non-profits, such as hospitals or national organizations. Non-profit organizations with real elected officials, where the incumbents get kicked out now and then, are rare. They take too much attention by the members.

Nobody knows how to run a meeting under Robert's Rules of Order any more. The whole point of such meetings is that the group is in charge and the outcome is a binding decision. Most organizational leaders don't want that.

I am working, quite literally as I write this, on starting a community space like yours for 'digital makers' in Portland.

I wake up every morning feeling charged and ready; I go to sleep every night full of anxiety and doubts -- "who am I to start this thing? does anyone want this? I don't know what I'm doing!". ultimately, I feel, failure is better than not trying.

and it helps to know it's not about me. every person I talk to in my community feels the need for this thing. and that's why we want help from other people like us. we're just getting started!

if you live here and this sounds interesting to you, you can find us here: https://rcdc.space

> In the end, spending time with other people is the most important thing. Everything else comes from that.

yes!

Even in the best case, that wouldn't have ended well:

Author: I found a retired domain expert willing to devote full-time energy! The two of us combined will be unstoppable!

Retired domain expert: Author's funding is 1/10 of what this place needs to thrive. Looks like I'm going to need to find at least ten donors at that same level.

It doesn’t go over costs. Starting a “community space” in Brooklyn cannot be cheap. There seems to be an ever growing divide in art as those who can even afford to open a community space. “Just start”? I work 5 days a week and my parents would not give me the rent money to open a Brooklyn art space. This reads like someone had no money problems to worry about even when profitability was a question.

Alex Danco's writing on "Scenes" [1] codifies a lot of the details, but nobody so far has been able to scale it.

The main factor when I did a hacker/artist space, it was the effect of relationships with musicians and scene people, not the affect of a vision to make something cool.

The defining factor of the spaces I've seen succeed vs. fail was something physical, and explicitly not software, and to a lesser extent, politics. You can have software and politics flavored things, but unless you are doing something physical like robotics, motorcycles, puppeteering, bookselling, pyrotechnics, music production, mma, it's not going to survive. Sure, there are spaces that don't do anything physical, but if you scratch the surface there is always a mysterious source of funding by the usual suspects who want to direct the scene to some other end.

The physical activity creates the competence hierarchy that is a stable and self regulating social dynamic.

[1] https://danco.substack.com/p/how-scenes-work-with-jim-oshaug...