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What’s a hackerspace, you might ask?
The standard definition is that first of all, the term HACKER here has nothing to do with breaking systems, opening secret firewalls, and finding sensitive information.
A hacker, in the sense, is anyone who wants to tweak something – be it a startup, be it a program,or be it some sort of system.
Why do they exist?
Perhaps a place has a strong community, where people meetup regularly, have fun, and meet with really cool mentors.
Maybe a place has a lot of media types hanging around it, and they converge there to hangout. It can be in a university, or an educational system. It can be a place where there are lots of students. It can be in a place where a lot of startups converge together, like PEZA zones and TechnoHubs.
Maybe they have real coders working on the next big thing, a place where cool people like to hangout. (for the ADMU people, you know the back of Faura? that’s some kind of ‘hackerspace).
Maybe a bunch of companies secretly want to merge and instead of creating a new company or one losing devs to another, aha, let’s build a hackerspace where both of our devs can work after work hours together.
I have yet to research on how such a thing occurs here in the Philippines.
Some key points to take note of, the climate here is something like this:
We have something we like to call “Silicon Alley”. It’s right near Loyola Heights. Katipunan Avenue is a place where students from Ateneo, Miriam, and UP converge. There are techno hubs up north in Ayala Hub, in DOST/ASTI UP. It’s not as big as a valley, but it’s like a tiny spot where everything converges.
If you place a hackerspace there, mostly college students working on cool stuff would go there, and work on stuff. If you have a house there that’s like not in a subdivision but accessible to everyone, that could be a possible venue for a hackerspace. You could say maybe get a house rented out from an owner at, let’s say, 30,000 pesos monthly. Not sure how much real estate is there. At 30,000 pesos monthly, and about 30 members participating, each member would have to pay 1000 pesos a month to keep the thing going. Possible problem – lots of students in the area, so expect traffic. A little hard to get to via public commute. The nearest MRT, actually LRT 2, is Katipunan and for public transport, it’s a little bit complicated I believe. The jeeps go around UP then you have to take another jeep down Katipunan Avenue. Taxis are somewhat plentiful in the area, but the place is not that heavy on foot traffic because of the almost non-existent sidewalk and lack of shade from the trees that used to line up there. Katipunan Ave. is now mostly a congested road during the day and the best place to hangout is the parallel road beside Katipunan, where there not a lot of cars really pass through.
The next best bet is somewhere in QC that’s near the MRT or near major thoroughfares. Eastwood maybe. But to the people who basically revolve around the metro, Eastwood is a little far. It’s at least a jeep ride away. I haven’t commuted to Eastwood, but I believe it’s just so inconvenient. There are no MRTs going to Eastwood, and to get there cheaply, one must take a jeep from Cubao.
Then there’s probably Cubao. As you know, Cubao is this marketplace where a lot of passengers get down from the provinces, from everywhere. It’s basically the most middle ground in the metro. It is about halfway down to Ortigas. Rent in any house or office in Cubao might be possibly cheap. I think a startup is somewhere in Cubao, or so I heard.
Ortigas is possibly quite a good place. Lots of IT there, nearly accessible to the MRT, easy to get around in, during the day there aren’t a lot of Startups though. A couple of IT shops are around here, and as a business district, it’s pretty expensive possibly for an office/house to be converted to an open hackerspace.
Then there’s Pasig/Pioneer. They’re near enough the MRT. There’s a small group of IT shops around the Greenhills and mostly BPO-type IT around this area.
Makati is another good one, but expensive if you will find a place near the main buildings. Any building within 1-2 km radius of the Ayala Triangle would be expensive. Unless that building doesn’t look too good (some cheap ones would be found maybe near Export Plaza area/ Buendia / Gil Puyat and Taft)
Then another place is near Lasalle. But I don’t know how much officespace is there.
Accessiblity to Makati depends on – how many startups are there, how many people live in Makati who attended Startup Weekend.
Aside from the monthly thing you have to pay rent for, you have to consider the electricity and internet and maybe a small pantry for food to provide those who are going to it. Electricity is tough because we are in a tropical country (so you need aircon), and it is way expensive here (just telling the truth).
I would expect a hackerspace monthly to cost between 30-80k monthly, depending on things like will you turn the aircon on during the day, how will it sustain itself – community projects etcetera, and if maybe the businesses would support it.
It really depends on the businesses. Businesses into new technologies , avant-garde agile shops, and possibly foreign-owned companies would be able to talk to each other and build one, for what benefit I do not know what. There are a lot of shops in IT who are willilng to share their space openly with others. I know some business / startup people who would share office space in Eastwood, another in Ortigas, another in Pioneer. But sharing an office with a company is not the same as a real space where only co-working people hangout,
Maybe the best idea is to let those who want to run a startup but need office space, and are willing to pay for such space, to talk to other startups talk amongst themselves if the idea of sharing an office space (much like sharing a condo with room mates to lessen the rent, except that this one is not for sleeping but for doing cool stuff). I’m not sure what paperwork such a space needs to pass through, maybe for one you have to register all the businesses that you’re sharing the space with, or if it’s a house, you have to sort of make sure that the area is somewhat secure, if it’s a house in a secluded subdivision – you need to get it near somewhere accessible.
This is not a profitable thing to do – working together, paying monthly bills together when you don’t know if your startups will ever get the traction, but it certainly will help things to get started. If someone could help me on how it could work out, do send me an email at my gmail – jose *dot* palala *at* gmail *dot* com. TO me, ideas come into fruition when a lot of people are thinking the same thing. SEnd me your comments to my email address, I’ll reply to them as soon as I can. I am currently an employee, but after work hours I’m willing to help this idea come into fruition, in whatever way I possibly can. I need someone to be able to do some legwork – going up to companies and talking to the incubators, if such an idea is possible, talking to venture capitalists here, or talking to some rich philanthropist. Do let me know.
Cheers,
Jose Palala
(jose.palala@gmail.com / squawknet.net / pitchapie.com/ halubilo.com / jpalala.net)
