Frequently asked questions

Space management

Hours of Operation

Sanford Dickert asks:

I have a space in the Lower East Side that is available from 8:30am until about 5:30pm - wifi, printer, close to food and transportation, offers conference room-like facilities.

 

The recent conversations I have had with other thought-leaders in this premise is that having a time-constrained space would not offer benefits to people who are in search of coworking or "incubator" space. There is a perception of the immediate need to jump to semi or fully-managed space.

 

I am not in that much agreement - what do you think? I assumed the entire idea of coworking was this ability to have flexible space - and the opportunistic chance at having a shared space that works like this. Yes? No?

 

And would this foster entrepreneurship?

• Reply from ChrisMessina: At CitizenSpace we chose not to offer any set hours but instead to publish a calendar of all the things going on to give people a sense for what's up in the space. To counter the lack of regular office hours, we offer two levels of membership: Coworking and CoworkingLite -- both levels include a key to enter the space whenever they like. So long as a paying member is present, drop-ins are encouraged to come by and use the open area that we've set aside for such occasions. The goal in this model was to keep our operating costs and overhead as low as possible, and allow folks to serve themselves so long as they're paying into the space. I should note that we have also hired an assistant for the space to let people in who are holding events, but her responsibility does not extend to drop-ins.
• Reply from Robert Fischer: At A Place we are taking a slightly different tact: we have key cards, with two level of membership.  One level of membership allows your key card to work during all hours of operation.  Another has limited hours of access (6 am to 5 pm during the work week, or 5 pm to close during the weekend and all weekend).  This is extremely easy to manage through the key card system.  We hope that the community will be self-policing on people staying at a desk into someone else's time, etc.  Another thought we've had is to turn off someone's internet access through WPA and a RADIUS server, but we'll probably only do that if something annoying goes on.
• Reply from Eva Schweber: At CubeSpace we do maintain set hours and we based those hours on market research of our potential users.  We started being open M-F, 7am-9pm, but found that Fridays after 7 we were empty, so we switched to 7am-7pm on Fridays.  We are also open 10am-6pm on Saturdays.  We do get occassional requests to open earlier (mostly from people working with east coast clients), but none have cared enough to have us actually open earlier.  We rarely have to kick people out when we close, and we have accomodated the occassional late night request, so it has worked out well so far.  We do have a lot os people who come in at 7am and we are usually still pretty full at 5:30, so those hours might be tight for people.