Kickstart Madison Coworking

When I was out in California I was somewhat involved with the group of people starting Hacker Dojo. I've been interested in creating a similar type of space in Madison. I started looking around at spaces when I was telecommuting for PBwiki but the issue is always how to fund it. It's a chicken and egg type problem. Do you get members before you find a space or do you find a space then get members? Well, I can't afford to go out there and sign a lease for office space and then not have any members so the project died off.

Recently with the buzz around Diaspora, I became aware of the site Kickstarter which is a cool tool to raise funds for projects. I started thinking maybe this could be used to seed a Madison coworking space?

I'm going to need to touch bases with some of the other members of the Madison tech community and see if they think this is a good idea. I'm thinking this is a strategy that might work. If enough people donate money to seed the space then one, we have money to start the space and two, we would have people probably interested in being members.

There is a group called Sector67 which seems to be trying to create more of a MakerSpace but I'm thinking about more of a coworking space that can also be used for meetups and smaller events like SuperHappyDevHouse or Ignite.

Published by Andrew Shell on