Starting a Computer Co-op?

spacechicken asks: "I am studying at a major university in Australia. As is the case with (almost) all educational facilities there are never enough computers available for students. So I (with some friends) are thinking about setting up a computer co-op at (or near) the university. In exchange for membership, members will get a small amount of storage and reduced usage and printing rates. The hope is to not only provide word processing/web surfing (using Linux, Staroffice6.0 and Netscape) but also access to various apps needed for serious academic work (eg CATIA, ProEngineer). We are planning to run standard PCs, with higher end machines if needed. My question is, does anyone have any experience with this type of facility? Any advice?"

Our solution...

[Papineau]

I have no experience running a co-op either, but I can tell you how part of that problem is solved at my faculty (it's not the whole uni which does that). Actually, there's a co-op on campus, but they sell computers, and they also own the convenience store. And they're not run by students.

At the engineering faculty, the way it works is that the faculty puts some money, the departments put some more, and the students (undergrads) put some also.
The departments have department-wide computer rooms (usually with some lab stuff around), and loaded with the specific software needed by their students (ie, Catia/SolidWorks/IDEAS in ME, Composer Studio in EE, etc.). The faculty has some general purpose labs (Word, PowerPoint, IE, AutoCad LT, etc.). And the students's money? There's a committee of students which directs the money to departments according to the number of registrations, for specific projects: in the last years, they bought a powerful microscope for materials characterization, upgraded the P133 we had in ME, etc. All in all, there's about 250 computers accessible to students, for a total of about 1000 students for the fall semester (there's less at winter and summer because we normally finish in december, and it's almost fully coop, so roughly 40% of the students are away at any given time). And then there are the grad labs (usually more specialized in terms of software/hardware), the staff's computers, etc. But those are normally not accessible to students.

Is the problem that there's no space for additionnal computers, or is it that nobody wants to pay for them? And besides, if it's not on campus, people will rather work from home, even in team assignments.

Sounds like a good idea

[nelsonal]

I've never heard of this application of a co-op before but I ve been in others, and this one sounds like a pretty good one. First, someone else said it but it is truely important you have to make sure that all the members feel like they belong. Not in a freindly way, although that helps, but in the sense of their actions impose a cost on other members. Second, I would suggest incorporating to limit liability. Third, try to think of all the possible nast situations that could come up while you are writing the bylaws. You might want to go visit some established co-ops for ideas here. Finally, after you are more established a good idea to broaden membership is allow people to join without paying out any money, working for the co-op or something similar. Good luck!

Prepare to be leached

[Kris_J]

As someone who runs a set of student labs, you're going to need to figure out how to cope with abuse, such as:

• Viruses, hacking -- people trying to install keyloggers, etc. Mostly from inside, but also from outside. You're going to need to spend a bit on a decent, centralised, rapidly updating, anti-virus system. And/or key very up to date with security patches for your chosen OS and apps.
• Bandwidth hogs. You're going to need to install a quota system and/or traffic shaping, or else whatever pipe you've got is going to be saturated straight away.
• Porn. 'nuff said.
• Don't be surprised if someone uses your labs to cyber-stalk other students.

Expect the printers to spend most of their time down, particularly at the end of semester. It's not a huge amount of fun when someone who has had four months to do an assignment starts yelling at you because the printers are down for the last hour before their deadline.

The only way it will work is if a small group really lay down the law as to what is and isn't going to happen. And that's not much of a co-op. You're better to present the case to the various departments that the current labs have reached capacity and new ones need to be brought on-line.

(Or possibly, someone could teach students that when the lecturer says that the presentation doesn't need to be in Powerpoint that it really doesn't and you don't have to spend 10 hours on the layout when you could just print off a set of overheads from Word.)