You're really excited to land a new client, but you don't have a place to meet with a projection screen. You think it's the best way to show off your ideas. What do you do?

We'd like to be able to offer potential members the ability to sign up for a membership to Bucketworks, and thus enter the building, while using their phone and standing outside the front door. In other words, fully automate the process of becoming a member, so it's fair, easy, and automatic. If Bucketworks can keep its overhead low with automation, the formula for membership fees becomes simple:

Automation + Utilities + Rent + Insurance + Internet + Improvements + Cleaning + Maintenance + Infrastructure / # of Regular Users = Basic Membership Fee

In the past, we've lumped people into categories based on whether they have a key or not, or whether they can store stuff at Bucketworks, or even have their own desk. We've also created separate tenancies, organizations who sublet a portion of Bucketworks. We did this to encompass all of the various requirements that people had for using space. Volunteer staff made all of these adjustments to make all of the users of Bucketworks compatible with one another and the space, and that takes time.

By using a combination of social technologies and access control techniques, it should be possible to create a system that fully automates the use of a social environment--and provides the security needed to make this kind of quick access safe for everyone in the community.

Let's go back to the scenario in the beginning: someone is standing outside Bucketworks and wants to get in, and that person is not a member.

• An IP based access control system controls the doors being locked or unlocked from the outside. This system enables the door to be controlled using any computer connected to the internet--in other words, the one hosting our Drupal website.
• A reputation-based referral system controls whether or not the person can get instant access to the building. When a member joins Bucketworks, they can refer other people to join or link their profile to anyone else's through typical social media channels. If someone attempts to use Bucketworks the referral system checks to see if this person is authentically referenced by existing members--ideally, more than 2 or 3 existing members. If they are, they're approved instantly.
• An inventory control system manages what portions of Bucketworks are available for use at any time, for any use. Every room from the conference rooms to the meetup spaces to the individual desks in the co-working spaces is listed in this system, and any user can select which portion they want to use and for what duration. Durations vary by month, week, day, hour--even year. 
• A commerce system manages transactions between the members and Bucketworks, facilitating purchases, receipts, and automated renewals of use.

So this non-member pulls out their phone and visits Bucketworks.org, and clicks "Sign Up." During a brief registration process--made even briefer with Twitter Auth, OpenID, Facebook Connect, and any other third-party social media authentication methods--the various systems listed above take payment, reserve the requested resources within Bucketworks (rooms, desks, etc.), generates and sends a single-use door code to the person entering the building that they can use to open the door (say, for the next 10 minutes, even!) and then logs all of these happenings to all the other members, the public website, and Foursquare--automatically, as they enter. Of course, depending on their options, a couple of days later one of us would mail that person a door fob, but--I think we're off to a good start.

I think the transparency offered by a system like this would make Bucketworks a self-policing environment. After all, at the end of the day if you are trying to game the system the other honest users will notice, and hopefully, that kind of social policing would be easy to handle with good old-fashioned face to face conversation. Meanwhile, the only thing the staff needs to do is make sure the cleaning gets done, the decorating looks cool, and the events are interesting to the members--and I think a whole lot of us would be willing to help with those tasks since they can bring us together.

What do you think?

For me, setting up a system like this is appealing because I'd like to spend more of my time working with members on their ideas and their skills and practices, as opposed to merely enabling them to use the environment. Even getting people access and tracking their use takes time and energy. I'd like to free up Jenn's time as well, so she can work more on telling the stories about what our members are doing. An intern could monitor this system and even find new ways to take advantage of it. The social technology integrations have enormous potential for us to do research on the health and growth of our economy--and make its performance transparent and visible.