Could the person borrowing the desk bring a small something as a gesture…i dunno something small with personality might be fun, lendors collect gifts from visitors and visitors may develop trademark gestures….build into profile
Or you could Flaming Desks could suggest standard gesture of a cup of tea or a drink of choice to be brought on arrival…might help give flaming Desks a personality in itself beyond just facilitating of introducing two people…

Maybe desk lenders can give users gold stars if they make a significant difference to their business so that other lenders know that a desk user can add rwal value to their business?

Draft FCB London used to have a think call The Sandpit. Jonathan Rigby, the MD, got a load of small entrepreneurial companies to use the desk space for free including commercial graphiti artists, Urban Junkies, Weapon 7 etc.. In return for the free desk space, clients and the agency could access these talents on tap, the building got a cool vibe and loads of creative energy, and the small businesses got a cool address, big meeting rooms, fully serviced offices for free. (The Americans then came along and fired Rigby because they couldn’t see a relationship between all the new business wins and Sandpit on the balance sheet - despite the fact that I personally worked on 2 new business wins for them for free etc.)

Anyway - thought this might be interesting. You might even want to find Rigby and pick his brain?

As for taking the “it’s a nice thing to do” approach, I agree that this is a really nice angle to take. Since becoming a member of Freecycle this is exactly the vibe I’ve got from that. Everyone I’ve spoke to via Freecycle during my hunt for a desk has been extremely pleasant, with a handful even having offered to “keep an eye out” for me and let me know if anything comes up that I may miss (being a new user and all)! This nice community feel that has evolved has most definitely encouraged me to consider using Freecycle from a ‘giving’ perspective as opposed to my initial ‘take take take’ attitude when initially registering!

I would imagine that Freecycle would have had similar concerns when setting that up, as people generally tend to ‘take’ far more than they would ever ‘give’! So it’s good to know that the ‘nice’ angle does work as loads of people list stuff on there. Let’s hope that Flaming Desks evolves into a friendly environment in a similar way!

1. Yes, I’ll re-write a more succinct answer.

2. It struck me that me don’t need a 1:1 ratio of desks:people-who-want-desks… i.e. 1 x desk-listing will serve more than one of our visitors’ needs. Obviously analytics will tell us what’s happening when its running, but if you look at the votes we’ve got a very close to a 1:2 ratio at the mo’. So, as long as each desk is used by at least 2 people, we’ll be fine!

This doesn’t account for the extremely likely scenario that one person may use more than one desk “in a given time period” though… which will obviously work out of our favour. So, perhaps we should do a bit of a push to likely desk-sharers at some point!