}Adoro esse despudor calvinista quando os gringos falam de grana... {)Também ajuda bastante ter mais acesso a ela, hehehehe!( Ian wrote:
After two years of preparation, we're finally starting the Austrian Metalab (http://metalab.at/). The Metalab is an open space for creative technology enthusiasts from all kinds of fields. We're trying to fill an existing demand, because in Vienna there are no good venues for many of the local clubs and groups to meet, and work on their projects. We're planning to be an innovation center, in the sense that creative people like you'd meet at the ccc congress, can work on their projects here together, and organize workshops, and everything else they'd want to do. We plan to have things happen here that range from p2p coding projects, over discussions about and development of social software, debian vienna (debienne) meetings to open hardware construction, and conferences. Also we already have a lot of hardware-building tools, like CNC cutters, that we'd like to make accessible to the general public, and e.g. the local robot hobbyists are planning to build their robots here. Whilst Public Netbase, which many of you might have known, managed to fill the gap for parts of the scene (especially netart) for years, it never really reached strongly into the more technically focused hacker scenes, which up to now mostly meet in pubs. So while there is enough similarity, to make the comparison unavoidable, there is not too much overlap in the people interested. I think we're catering to a different crowd. Sadly Netbase closed last month after their operation in the multiple hundred thousand euros became unsustainable. In comparison to netbase, we're a fairly low-budget operation: We're focusing on providing great infrastructure for existing communities and clubs, and try to provide a setting in which great things can happen. We're committed to operate the infrastructure strictly using honorary work by members, and are planning to release our software infrastructure and documentation as packages to be reused by, and developed together with similar projects around the world. Right now we have over 130 Wiki Users, 160 Mailinglist Subscribers and 50 paying members, and were the strongest contestant in a community voting for NetCulture Infrastructure Grants with 170 participants this week. For the first year we already have commitments for 12000€ from members, 6800€ from 4 sponsors, and 10000€ from the city netculture grant (which is the upper limit in this year's new netculture funding system), which brings our total capacity for year 1 to 28800€. Our expected annual costs for rent and operating costs should be at about 26400€. So normally this would suffice to secure operations, especially with expected membership growth, and the sale of beverages to members and guests. But in the first year we have a need for additional resources, to be able to get our location. We're short about 8000€ in the first year, which directly goes into deposit and commission. We're aiming to move to a mostly self-financed mode of operation by the second year. We've decided yesterday by a 22 to 1 (2 abstain) vote, that we're going to start without these funds, in the expectation that with a running operation, it will be easier to acquire additional funds, and that if we don't start soon, and pass the chance on this ideal location, we'll lose the necessary momentum in the community for this to actually take off. There's a lot of risk in that, and that's why i'd like to ask this list for advice. I know many of you have experience in similar endeavors, and plugging the holes in the budgets of NGOs. So i'd really like to hear your advice. Also more specifically, i'm interested in pointers to any international funders (or local ones) that you think might be worth applying to. 8000€ is not a lot of money, and i think that we'd be able to do a lot of good things, once we get this thing running.
begin:vcard note;quoted-printable:"Da =C3=A1gua estagnada se espera o veneno" (W.Blake) version:2.1 end:vcard
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