Community
The space is shaped by its communities. Not the other way around.
How it works
Each space has different communities around it, and sub-communities within those. These communities are core to what the space is. They decide what kind of events and activities take place, and the events and activities shape which communities form. It's a feedback loop, and we want to let it run.
The core team oversees things — making sure nothing gets out of hand and that activity stays connected to the things we care about. But the direction comes from the communities themselves. It's community-driven, not top-down.
Communities don't just come in and do their club thing. If the area allows, they teach. They research. They build. We're working on making that happen smoothly.
Sub-communities
Sub-communities can be of various kinds — named and unnamed, formal and informal. Here are some examples of the kinds of groups we expect to see:
Book Club
Chess Club
Board Game Club
E-waste Recycling
Electronic Music
Plant Lovers
Internet Privacy
+ more to come
Cross-pollination
This is a space that's inclusive of many different niche communities. We want to keep a common thread among every community we work with, and try to remix them when it makes sense.
A set of people who are into books? We'd try to get them into the book binding workshops. Someone interested in e-waste? Maybe they end up teaching a soldering class. The boundaries between communities are porous on purpose.
Amplification
An important part of everything that happens here: we don't want it to go to waste. If there's an event happening, we market and distribute it. We turn it into something people who aren't connected to the space can also consume.
Making a mountain out of a molehill, but in a good and sensible way. This is a separate function, but an important one — the work of the community should reach beyond its walls.
Access & Inclusivity
We should be honest about a tension in this model. Community-driven spaces, despite democratic intentions, inherently favor people with time, cultural capital, and schedule flexibility. A daily wage worker may not have the bandwidth for experimental participation. The community can inadvertently select for privilege while claiming to serve broader populations.
We don't have this figured out. But naming it is the first step. We're actively thinking about how to lower barriers to participation — whether that's through timing, format, language, or removing assumptions about what "showing up" looks like.