[bsenftner]

We were located "next door" to The Brewery, the world largest freelance artist community (35K freelance artists living and working in a former brewery compound near downtown.) The artists used us far more than the geeks we were tying to attract.

[fit2rule]

That location is pretty famous for having the worlds largest concentration of artistic freeloaders. In fact, LA is a very difficult place to do these sorts of things - every 6 months a new wave of drop-outs hits the scene to become 'the next new up and coming thang' .. so its not really a surprise.

If you want to run a successful hackrrspace in LA, you've got to find a way to make the hackers contribute to the effort. One of the best ways to do this is to have regular open-house events, promoting the contributing artists forward, and thus demoting those who freeload. Form a real community around those who contribute, and dissuade freeloaders.

(Disclaimer: ran a hackrrspace in LA for 10 years, had a hell of a lot of fun, but also experienced immense frustration at just how some folks, who take so much space and creative energy, contribute nevertheless so little...)

[bsenftner]

We were located inside the "Big Art Labs" compound, across the street from the UPS headquarters (next door to The Brewery.) Our specific location was great for not being attractive to the freeloading artists, because there were similar artist intended spaces at Big Art Labs, and they got those freeloaders.

Droplabs started as a web developers space centered around developers using the Drupal CMS. But it soon diversified. I myself was working on my own startup, a animation VFX tech startup. There were periods where the place was packed, but over all not enough to justify the effort. We were not trying to earn a profit, we were trying to create a tech creative community. Simple enough, during the period of Droplabs, the economy overall was not there to grant people that much free time or free income to be active in such a community.