There is a research result surprised me in our Free Space project. We almost interviewed every core members so far, and found that they all preferred being a burned-out short time organizers, even they know most participants and community citizens wanted Free Space keep going on, rather than establishing a long-time organization, like SPCA .
At first, I thought it may because these core members are not so serious about building Free Space. They looks like a bunch of young people getting together to come up a dream land, chasing that process without deep and thorough thinking. Since when we asked about the main plan and some concrete ideas of Free Space, they could not offer satisfied answers. Several core members admitted that they didn't think that far and they only wanted this place to be a one-month plan in the first place.
However, when I get to know them, I realized they are not irresponsible or lack of experience. Some them have already involved into NGO for several years and founded their own organization. What’s more, they went to several countries to view other NGOs. And they keep connect with the other same agencies in San Francisco. In this condition, being a short term place seems like a deliberate idea. Then why they choose this idea?
Personally speaking, I think it might be because that free space is a project bigger than what they did before. What they did before focus on small group, like hiking or riding. One of the core members has his own group named Wigg Party. “The Wigg Party is a community organization based in the San Francisco neighborhoods surrounding the bike route known as the Wiggle. Our mission is to make the community that uses the Wiggle a leader in the transformation to sustainability and resilience.” It’s much smaller than Free Space. The requirement of money, facilities and space are also lower too. So they might be considered the conditions and resources they owned, and then decide to make their goal realistic. Next question is why they don’t believe they could cover this project if it was a long one?
I remember that all of the core members are keep talking about making free space totally free. So they don’t like putting big donation jar or ask participants to give money. Almost all of their donations come from online collection. When they run out of money, they tried to cover the cost by their own. So considering their present job and account balance, they thought making a short time project. Why they have to cover the cost all by themselves even they insist free space is all free.
A lot of other successful agencies like Noisebridge is non-profit. But they all have their own ways to raise funds. For example, Noisebridge, a free hacker space, they ask membership fee per month. If participants want to get the right to vote, they need to pay several bucks to become members. But free space insisted that everyone can’t be, even feel, they were pushed to take money out of their pocket. And there was no advertisement allowed. Free Space is a place can’t be tagged. Why free Space has to be totally 100% free even until it can’t make it anymore.
Free Space do has its core spirit, build a place where can be used by anyone. Comparing their survival, the core spirit is more valuable, which is their first principle. So this need to be our first principle too. No matter what kinds of solutions we offered later, we should consider it.
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Hi Rui - You've clearly thought deeply about this issue, but for the 5 whys exercise, you want to be sure each following question stems directly from the answer to the previous question to get to the root of something. I also saw four levels of questions. Just things to think about if you want to use this exercise again.
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