[hackerspaces] How to Make a Makerspace resources now online

[Gui Cavalcanti]

All,

Back in February, Artisan's Asylum and MAKE teamed up to co-produce an 
event called How to Make a Makerspace, held in Somerville, MA. We had 
around 180 people attend from 4 different countries attend and listen to 
20+ panelists from different spaces around the country talk about their 
nuts-and-bolts experiences in setting up spaces. We generated a ton of 
raw data at the event, and we're now at the point where we're releasing 
the data and codifying it into a series of posts on the MAKE blog (like 
the one I just sent out). I wanted to send you guys the data dump, for 
use in helping set up or tune your own business models. This will 
eventually become prettier in a more centralized location, but it's 
useful in its current state and we wanted to get it out.

This is an email I just sent to the participants of the event - please 
see below for more information.

Thanks!

- - -

Hello!

If you're receiving this email, it means you attended either the 
original How to Make a Makerspace conference in February, or you 
attended the shortened, one-day event before Maker Faire this past 
weekend. I wanted to let you know that all the data presented at the How 
to Make a Makerspace conferences is now online at this dropbox link:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/xn01t8hc8245e5o/SDFKaVqgtY

I also want to draw specific attention to two things. One is a PDF 
worksheet that Molly Rubenstein and I developed for founders interested 
in preparing their first round of business plans for makerspace 
development - I've attached it to this message [EDIT - attachment 
removed to post to the hackerspaces.org mailing list. Please see the 
Dropbox link], and it's in the public dropbox. It's a full-on guide to 
preparing a business plan that makes sense for your space, full of 
appropriate example data from spaces around the U.S.

If you have any data you'd like to contribute to the public dropbox, 
please let me know. I'd be happy to add your voice, and I apologize if 
I'm missing anything right now.

The second thing I wanted to mention is that I'll be writing a long 
series of blog posts for MAKE, condensing the data we've gathered into a 
format that's easy to read and follow. You can find the first two blog 
posts here:

  * My take on an explanation of the difference between hackerspaces,
    makerspaces, TechShops, and FabLabs:
    http://blog.makezine.com/2013/05/22/the-difference-between-hackerspaces-makerspaces-techshops-and-fablabs/
  * A super-detailed primer for how to acquire insurance here:
    http://blog.makezine.com/2013/05/23/making-makerspaces-acquiring-insurance/

If you're interested, you can follow these blog posts by checking this 
link periodically: http://blog.makezine.com/author/robogeek422

One last point - we're currently posting every single tool we have in 
our shops, and all of our training documentation for those tools, to our 
publicly-accessible wiki. You can see it here: 
http://wiki.artisansasylum.com/index.php/Tools . You're welcome to 
peruse this data for reference materials for your own tool training and 
testing syllabi, HOWEVER, I request two things of you before you do that:

 1. Please assume the tool training section of our site is in beta, and
    the documents aren't 100% up to date or accurate. Do not assume
    they're the end-all, be-all of training documentation... or even
    assume that they're that good of a training document in the first
    place. We're in the process of updating everything as we post the
    documents to the internet.
 2. Please do not copy and paste our training documents and use them
    directly for your own purposes. Run this information by experienced
    users in your community, and please create your own documentation
    from scratch.

If you're interested, our most up-to-date training section is our CNC 
plasma cutter page - you can check it out here: 
http://wiki.artisansasylum.com/index.php/Torchmate_CNC_Plasmacutter for 
an idea of what each tool page will eventually look like.

Thanks everyone, and I hope your spaces are coming along!

-- 
Gui Cavalcanti, President
Artisan's Asylum, Inc.
http://www.artisansasylum.com
Cell: (857) 389-7669

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