That sounds interesting. How did that work, did you rent a place for coworking and then opened it up for the social aspect?

My tech (I was founding engineer and CTO) company took over a co-working space and expanded it, we ran that portion of it at break even.

We intentionally set out to create a social club/co-working space. A lot goes into it. I'm a non-theist who comes from a multi generational group of theist church planters (like 100s of churches, just over and over), it's a multi factorial process with distinct transitions in space-time and community size, where each transition has to be handled so you don't alienate your communities founding members (who will be very different from later members) and still are able to grow.

People don't do it because they can't see the value while they are in the early mess of it. You have to like people to pull it off, you have to NOT be a high control person who can operate at high control at certain developmental stages. You have to have a moral compass everyone understands and you are consistent with, tech people like 0 trust. You have to create a maximum trust environment which means NOT extracting value from the community but understanding that the value is intrinsic in the community.

You have to design a space to facilitate work and play. It's not hard but you have to get everything right, community can't have mono culture and it must be enjoyable/uncomfortable, and you must design things so people can choose their level of engagement and grow into the community. It's easier once it has enough intertia that they understand they are building a thing with real benefits.

Even things like the flow of foot traffic within the space, chokepoints narrowing, these kinds of thing all effect how people interact.

I've been wanting to setup something like a 3rd place that tries only to break even. I'm unfortunately not a very social person.

Because these 3rd spaces are open to anyone and probably bringing people in from internet commmunties. What do you do when someone comes along and they're not breaking any rules but its clear that no one likes them? I've seen it drive entire groups away but because the person has done nothing wrong I cant/dont want to just say "fuck off kid no likes your weird ass"

A 3rd place isn't a friend group.

It isn't a single conversation or room. It isn't a single relationship cluster.

And someone is paying the insurance bill. Ultimately that person gets final say. A successful 3rd place can have tension, but not fools (in the economic sense, a person whose decision making and choices actively destroy the groups financial opportunities and stability. Theoretically a very clumsy person might be banned.)

There's a lot to unpack, I mean social dynamics, group polity, these really start with understanding what you really want to see brought into the world and why.

These things take fluidity, nuance and effort to get off the ground. Sometimes they just get lucky too. It's hard to tell ahead of time, proximity is important, population density is important, parties are important.

Getting initial traction is the hardest part, most groups die before they get a chance to have problems, that's why tying the groups space to a stable economic engine like an anchor company or a mission agency is so critical for repeatable success. Same with a small friend group as initial anchor, they just can't all be clique people.

The one thing that's very important is to always frame the space as a place for creating and experimenting, celebrate the amateur and the pursuit of mastery, getting started with a group of taste makers instead of doers will 100% kill your group.

Getting started with hypernetworkers who don't do things will kill your group. They'll show up and they are important later on.

All of these people have a place eventually but they can't form the dynamic core. The whole goal is to eventually have a place for every type of person so they can contribute to the whole and find the space where they can be celebrated, but a group has to be larger before certain types of people can bring their core skills to bear.

Hypothetical that I’d be happy to deal with when the time comes. We always imagine the worst case I get that. But once something like this takes off I imagine the whole point is to have created a community. And a community has lots of people that can do things together. I don’t know, I just don’t think this is something worrying about.

I woul love to hear more about this. I am in need of a 3rd place, but unfortunately the only meetups around are sports or churches here. What did the members in your group do after you shut down? Were you open to members offering donations to keep your 3rd place going?

That's very interesting. Do you have time to elaborate a bit?