Met with Noisebridge last night and wanted to capture some of the key points:

• Took one year to plan and secure the hackerspace
• Initially worried about money for rent.
• After one year, membership explosion, turning away members, donations flowing in, expanding to larger space, non-members welcome to hang out, many events
• Organize "work meetings" where Tuesday meetings consist of accomplishing some goal of working on hackerspace. When I went, it was to prep the space for coming event (5 Minutes of Fame)
• Mitch was impressed that we came so far so fast (all the nasty stuff doesn't seem to make it outside, heh heh).
• Tokyo Hackerspace boards got a lot of interest. They were impressed that we were able to create a learning board and it was fully surface mount. Note: I'll probably convert a weekly office hours or hold a special activity where people can learn how to stencil solder paste, place components, and reflow the THS boards on a hot plate.
• Steel shelving along walls with personal boxes and communal "junk" parts that people can take from
• Original space is roughly same size or smaller than Shirokanedai house. Actually Shirokanedai is just slightly smaller if you only count first floor for hackerspace, but we have advantage of backyard and gardening capability
• Interest in others to come out to Tokyo. I invited them all to visit Tokyo Hackerspace.
• Mitch coming out for next spring Make meeting. Possibly November one, but he's not sure yet.
• Noisebridge shop consists of lathe, radial saw, band saw, CNC, Makerbot, Dremel, and various hand or small power tools.
• New space is industrial space housed in former sweat shop building. They were able to secure loft space on third floor. Not sure if they also got second floor, but new space is pretty huge.
• Hope Tokyo Hackerspace can survive initial crunch to see us getting large space with heavy shop equipment :)