One key service you should provide is hosting and facilitation: the host is a catalyst agent of the community, who unleashes the potential contained in the members’ ideas, projects, connections and resources.

She should create the conditions for collaboration by setting the culture in a collaborative space, ensuring intangible assets like the atmosphere, spirit and code of conduct to contribute to members’ realization of their ideas. A host should connect, facilitate the organisation of events and programs to inspire, support and empower members of the community.

This means creating formats of events for members to meet, exchange and share common experiences. Community members’ exchange of knowledge, ideas, thoughts, skills should be promoted both offline and online to have an even wider and delocalized reach.

Hosts create a safe yet challenging space, for people to display themselves and their projects, get feedback, consider other perspectives, invite creative tension and take risks. Members should be engaged and invited to take ownership of the space, to actively contribute to the space value.

Hosts need to be open, listen and engage with their members in meaningful conversations about their ideas and the progress of their initiatives. To do so, they should have a clear knowledge about what members do, as well as their perspectives and plans.

Look at this open source site to explore the world of Art of Hosting.

There is an important link between a collaborative space and its territory. In order to develop the place and its users, the host must interact with organisations of the environment to bring out virtuous exchanges in terms of information, activities, users, see same participation in governance or even cooperation.

In the long term, exchanges between players in the territory allows partners to contribute to the development of the collaborative space for the co-design of its spaces and services. Such synergies can reduce the financial burden of expensive infrastructure and equipment.

This guide is designed to support the process of defining partnership and getting to implementation.

You should define a clear yet open system to be shared with potential members from the first visit on and throughout the member’s experience. This includes rules as well as cultural norms shaping the space identity.

Small adjustments to your approach and expectations will surely happen as long as the community experience goes on, varying with the community members vision and requests.

Defining the attributes of the community and the level of involvement that a member could have in the operations is central to feed this kind of evolution in space culture and norms. With your core team and key stakeholders, you can design a first draft of Service Blueprint, a map where you will be able to visualize and discuss users’ interactions, backstage operations and instruments needed for managing and implementing the project.