When I talk to people about my plans for a coworking space I often get questions such as "will you charge to use the photocopier?" or "how will you allocate bandwidth?".
My answer has always been along the lines of "the community will decide what works best and those who don't fit in will be encouraged to change their habits". (Those who know more about the coworking movement will know this is how things tend to work, but it is a concept that is a bit foreign to people working in large corporates... a reason many of us left corporates, but that's a whole other topic!).
My view is that most people can, and like to, be trusted. In the book I'm currently reading, The Speed of Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey, there is a quote from Gordon Forward, former President and CEO of Chaparral Steel:
"We don't have policies. What we started with essentially were some very basic ideas. First, we decided that such things as trust and honesty were going to play a big role in what we were doing. We felt that a lot of the procedures in many organizations were designed to catch the 3 percent who were trying to cheat in one way or another. We decideed to design our rules for the 97 percent we can trust. The others would stand out like sore thumbs, we figured, and they'd eventually leave. That's exactly what happened."
My thoughts are pretty much that... run the place for those we can trust, do our best to fill the place with those people, and the very occasional person that doesn't fit in will hopefully change their habits or leave. (But if they don't we'll have a last resort option such as a committee to review such issues - but hopefully that's never required).
More recently I've modified this idea, and instead of just letting people do what they want (which might make those who need to make occasional heavy use of services like the printer feel guilty) is to create some facility whereby members can pay for usage they consider more than "average". For example, a simple box next to the printer/photocopier (together with information on the cost of such items) would allow them to drop a few dollars in the box when they feel they should. My guess is that more often than not we'll get too much money paid by members rather than not enough, and we can use that money to subsidise food and drink for our events, or buy fruit for the workspace.