Succinct version: you can still be a Founder Member! And there’s lots of ways to get involved, Founder or not…

What’s happening now?

We’re now in the “Building Makespace” phase, when the space is fitted out, equipment bought, sponsors selected, and the community starts to come together to figure out how it should all work. You can see this on our Timeline.

The main activity at the moment is Founder member meetings. These take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays and each week we have a planning meeting (sitting down planning stuff, such as rules and policies – not as dull as that might sound!) and a making/designing meeting, which is more freeform and has people working on Makespace projects (eg patching holes in walls, or planning automated storage robots) and their own projects. For both these meetings, we think it’s great to follow the old SuperHappyDevClub principle, that you should come with an idea of what you want to work on, even if you abandon that and do something else the moment you walk through the door. For the planning meetings, we’ll work out what topics need discussion (on the wiki) and perhaps vote for what should be on each week’s agenda there too. (For the first weeks, the making that can be done in the space may be limited whilst insurance and health and safety details are worked out and put in place, and the space will only be able to be open when someone with the key is available.) These meetings are open to paid-up Founders only – it’s a perk of having supported Makespace financially up front. (Meeting calendar: Makespace on Google Calendar)

We’re also aiming to have open Maker Night type events each month. There will be a couple of bigger events too once we have a few key bits and piece in place (like fire detection), which will help us raise our profile and secure sponsorship and so on. When we’ve got all the necessary parts in place, we’ll have a Grand Opening, at which point the bootstrapping period ends, normal members can join, and Makespace will be making things.

As well as events, we are working on getting the fitout permissions we need from the University and hope to start fitting out the space with access control very soon!

About Founder Membership

Originally we planned to stop accepting new Founders once we began this phase – having a deadline was helpful because we could see roughly how many people we had and could budget accordingly. There’s been a lot of interest in becoming a Founder though, and some great people have approached us and are keen, and we don’t want to exclude them. So we are open to more Founder applications! We ask that potential founders tell us a bit about themselves and in most cases meet us before we go ahead with the membership, because Founder Membership entails shared responsibility for the space, kit and community. If you would like to become a founder, fill in our simple form: http://bit.ly/MakespaceFounderDetails and we’ll arrange to meet you if we don’t know you, or if we do, we’ll send you payment information.

Being a Founder Member of Makespace means that you are supporting Makespace up front financially, and also helping create the space. Founders will be most actively involved in the coming weeks designing, planning, building and collaborating on space layout, features, kit, rules, community and more, both online and in person at Makespace. The £250 payment gives you 6 months of membership starting now, including our building-Makespace phase and once we are fully open. Founders will also get RFID access to the space as soon as we can offer this, sothey can help create the space and work within it even before we are open to the public, so we all share some of the responsibility for Makespace, and so if we haven’t met you in person yet, we’d very much like to before we take any payment from you.

Note that once we are ready to open properly, we will stop taking new Founders!

Join in!

Plans for Makespace (the space, the community, the kit and more) are now being actively discussed on our mailing list: do sign up and get involved: Google Group for CamMakespace

Our wiki is also now becoming more active with ideas, lists of potential kit, potential donations and more: Makespace wiki. If you want to learn more about how Makespace will work, I’d recommend:

• The Guiding Principles
• Discussion from Founder Planning meeting 11th October
• Community values

If you want to leap in and get involved, there’s a page listing what’s being actively worked on at the moment. If you aren’t sure about wikis, try our Wiki HOWTO thread on the mailing list.

You can also join the community in IRC: we are #makespace on freenode (and if you aren’t familiar with IRC, there’s help. You can also join #makespace via the web)

Last night was Madespace, an event to bring together Founder Members to start planning Makespace.

Thirty Founder Members attended, even though it was “Bring a chair” – because the space is still pretty much empty!

Some nice chairs in Makespace colours:

This event marks the start of building Makespace now we have the space. There’s notes below, but you’re probably wondering what happens next…

• If you want to be involved in the discussions around Makespace plans, join the discussion list (this is not the meetup group – it’s a separate, higher volume list for Makespace planning, and anyone can join)
• Come to the next Maker Night in around a month
• Founder Members will be having more planning meetings and also meetups to design things for the space – if you’re a Founder you’ll hear more about these shortly. They will likely be on Tuesdays and Thursdays and some might involve adjourning to a nearby pub where others are welcome to join (perhaps this could mix with the existing fortnightly pubmeets?)
• Join our IRC channel to keep in touch with other Makespace supporters – we’re at #makespace on freenode (and if you aren’t familiar with IRC, there’s help. You can also join #makespace via the web)
• Dive into the Makespace wiki, which is where information will be collected and discussed around making Makespace. There are some specific pages you might want to check out:
  • Kit wishlist (should expand soon to include space features and storage needs, etc)
  • People and skills (we’d like to flesh this out to be a place to find out what skills we all have to offer – whether that’s for Makespace building (can you build cabinets, advise on workshop safety, paint walls?) or for projects). There’s also a People page.
  • Donations. A lot of people have kit or furniture to offer, but we don’t want to commit to take everything and get over-crowded or end up with lots of junk which might be costly to dispose of. If you have something you could donate, post here (ideally with photo!) and we can work out what to take.
  • What is Makespace? Where should we fit into the world of makerspaces, FabLabs, hackspaces, TechShops and more?

Notes from the meeting

Simon, Jonny and Laura gave a short presentation on how Makespace came to be – going all the way back to SuperHappyDevClub in 2007 for Simon, BodgeSoc in 2008 for Jonny, and Make-a-Makespace in 2010 for Laura. (The presentation is online as an SVG – which should open in Firefox, but it’s a pretty big file!) All 3 of us have two hats: as Directors of Makespace Cambridge Limited, and as community members, and we’ll do our best to make sure you know which we are wearing; it’s important for us to remember that the company exists solely so we can have the space, and that the space is really run by the community. Then we had discussion on a range of topics around planning Makespace – the space, the community, the kit, the projects, and more.

We still need to get access control and fire detection in before we can really start using the space properly – because we need our insurance to be in full effect before real making of things, even just by founders using their own tools, can begin. Please be patient – we are working on this as fast as we can, and we’re all keen to get started.

Most of the things we talked about will start to be Wiki pages where ideas can be fleshed out. Specific topics we raised included:

• Storage: what storage do we need? Secure? size?
• Rules: what rules should we have or not have?
• Community: how does this form into a committee/group which can make decisions? Is it a Society?
• Priorities: what’s important first? chairs, internet, kit??
• Spatial design: how should we lay out the space we have?
• Features: what features should the space have? Presentation podiums, storage robots, ??
• Where are we on the shiny / less shiny spectrum? (this affects how potential sponsors might view the space, as well as people’s attitudes to the space, whether they feel involved/responsible and so on)
• Donations: what do we take? What do we not take?
• Kit: what are the priorities?
• What have we forgotten? What else should we be talking about?

We also talked about guest membership, how people can bring guests into the space, how events work, and how groups/clubs can work with us. These are big topics all themselves and one for a future planning meeting; because there’s so many possible options and it does tie into legal/financial questions, Simon, Laura and Jonny will try to think of some concrete options/strawmen that we can discuss. So that’s something to come back to in a future week.
There’s lots of interest in storage, both for projects, for large items, and secure storage for personal tools. We made an initial decision that founders with large projects needing storage could bring them in for a couple of weeks, and that at some point we might need to charge a bit of money for longer term storage, or change this decision if the space gets overfull. If you have a big project you need to store in the coming days/weeks, get in touch with Laura.

There was enthusiasm for whiteboards on the walls, for sofas in the mezzanine breakout space, and for the space to be available for hanging out even when not actively making. If you’re interested in running events, that’s super and it would be great to know what sort of thing – maybe a wiki page for potential events will be created

We’d like to be able to put names to faces, and so we agreed that founders should bring a (paper!) photo of themselves; we’ll start to put up founder and later member photos on the walls along the corridor.

There was general interest in Founder members having badges (perhaps interim ones, and then proper ones made on our own printers/cutters later!). T shirts are also of interest. We already have T shirt designs and high res graphics, so get in touch with Jonny / Laura for these and we’ll get them online soon too.

Emails will go out to Founder Members this week to confirm their interest and then we’ll be doing online payments. Because being a Founder involves some responsibility (especially once we are able to give out RFIDs for access!) we want to make sure we’ve met all the paying founders and that we know a bit about how they would like to be involved.

We will split future Founder meetings into two types: one for designing things for the space (such as the storage robot!) and talking about personal making projects, and one for planning Makespace details. These will alternate on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the first “designing” meeting next Tuesday (9th October) and the first “planning” meeting Thursday 11th October. The week after that, it’ll be planning on the Tuesday and designing on the Thursday. For both these meetings, we think it’s great to follow the old SuperHappyDevClub principle, that you should come with an idea of what you want to work on, even if you abandon that and do something else the moment you walk through the door For the planning meetings, we’ll work out what topics need discussion (on the wiki!) and perhaps vote for what should be on each week’s agenda there too.

Thanks to everyone for all your support! We’re all looking forward to more Makespace events – it looks so wonderful already when there are people making things there:

Thursday 27th September was a milestone for Makespace – our first event in the space! This was Maker Night, a chance for people to show off their existing projects and share plans and ideas for new ones. For a lot of people this was also their first time in the space, with a frequent comment: “It’s so big!”

We had 80 people over the evening and it was great to see so much enthusiasm and energy.

Simon, Jonny and Laura gave a short presentation on how Makespace came to be – going all the way back to SuperHappyDevClub in 2007 for Simon, BodgeSoc in 2008 for Jonny, and Make-a-Makespace in 2010 for Laura. (The presentation is online as an SVG – which should open in Firefox, but it’s a pretty big file!)

There’s more photos on our Flickr pool.

If you couldn’t make it, don’t worry – we’ll be running some sort of Maker Night once a month or so until we open.

Makespace Cambridge Limited today completed on the lease for premises at 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge.

To mark this significant step, we are issuing a press release, which says: Makespace is extremely grateful for the patience of our advisors and our enthusiastic future members, without whom we couldn’t have got this far. Many thanks are also due to the University of Cambridge for supporting us with the lease of such a perfect workshop space for a peppercorn rent. We can’t wait to fit the workshop out, build our community and start making things!

The sharp-eyed amongst you will notice that today isn’t Monday – there were some last minute delays as the University needed to secure other parts of the building before we could take possession. The final door was secured this lunchtime and the lease completed this afternoon. Yay!

We are still working on the licence to alter but with final quotes meeting the new university requirements for security coming in this shouldn’t take much longer.

It’s still possible to sign up as a Founder Member if you would like to be involved in the fitout phase and can contribute £250 up front for 6 months of membership. However, this opportunity will end on October 2nd which will be our kickoff Madespace event for Founders (see What happens next).

It’s been a very long time for some of our supporters, but we will be completing on the lease for our space in 16 Mill Lane on Monday. We are incredibly grateful for your support, enthusiasm, and patience. We wouldn’t have got this far without you.

We’re now getting ready for our bootstrap period, which is where Founder Members in particular will be involved in planning and setting up the space. We’ve put together a rough set of next steps that we’re keen to discuss with the Founder Members – these can be seen on our timeline. The first step will be on Monday evening, when there will be a chance for Founders to have a look at the space, and to share a celebratory drink. (If you were planning to go to the Cambridge Science Centre making event on Monday, then we strongly encourage you to still go to that – there will be other chances to see Mill Lane soon.)

Following on from this, we’re planning an event for Founder Members, ‘Madespace’, to initiate our bootstrapping period. We’ve been calling this the “bring-a-chair” event – beacuse that’s what the Founder Members are going to need to do – the space is empty at the moment. It will be a chance to see what’s happened so far, and to work out how we make Makespace. This will be the first time we pull together the enthusiasm and knowledge of our Founding members, so it should be a really great event.

After that, we’ll be taking Founder Membership payments. During the bootstrap period the space will be fitted out, and initial kit and furniture acquired and installed. There will be weekly events (probably Thursday evenings) for Founder Members to meet in the space and plan/discuss/build/make. We’ll work out how the community should operate and prioritise what kit to secure first. There will be a couple of bigger events too once we have a few key bits and piece in place (like fire detection), which will help us raise our profile and secure sponsorship and so on.

When we’ve got all the necessary parts in place, we’ll have a Grand Opening, at which point the bootstrapping period ends, normal members can join, and Makespace will be making things.

We need to work out how we’re going to handle donations of tools, furniture and so on, so please hold off bringing other items for now; if you have something you urgently need to clear out of your shed/garage/newborn child’s bedroom, please get in touch.

If you’ve not been tracking things closely, you can find out what’s been happening and why it’s all taken so long here on the blog. You might find our Guiding Principles interesting too. You can still become a Founder Member: sign up today if you can support us with £250 upfront for 6 months of membership and early involvement. If you sign up before lunchtime on Monday 10th, you’ll be in time to come and visit the space with us on Monday night! We’ll take the very last Founder Member sign-ups on the door at the Madespace event.

Many thanks again for your support!

It’s been an up and down few days with successes and setbacks!

Problems with the University’s security requirements looked bad, but I think are all soluable and I’m working hard to close out on that this week. It’s mostly disorganisation at the University side I’m afraid, of all kinds of unlikely types.

But plans for Thursday are awry – both people who can seal paperwork for the University have gone on holiday! They were supposed to be available. We’ve had an option of escalating to a Pro Vice Chancellor and trying to persuade them to do the sealing – this is within regulations but would be a very unsuual practice and has a bit of risk attached because we might not be able to convince them to do it. There’s a few other factors to think about too; it would be a real rush to get all the papers together for Thursday, and actually getting access on Thursday might be tricky. The space is still full of damp papers that must be cleared (I don’t want to be responsible for them if they aren’t removed in time). There are other doors in the building that ought to be secured so that we don’t have access to other people’s space.

So we’ve agreed to do the sealing on Monday 10th, rather than trying to rush everything and risk annoying people badly to get it through tomorrow. A Special Sealing will be scheduled for us on Monday (these usually only occur at 2pm on Thursdays) – I’m not sure exactly what time yet. Once the University has Sealed (meaning it agrees to grant the lease), the solicitors for either side will be able to exchange the signed lease paperwork, and the space is ours!

It’s September – 13 months after the kick-off meeting where the University said their lawyers might take up to two months to prepare a lease – and I am optimistic that we’ll sign on Thursday!

It’s not quite guaranteed yet, and I will only believe it when I see the University seal on the paperwork, but it’s looking good. We have confirmed that we are happy with the latest version of the lease text, and there’s only a couple of outstanding quibbles. Firstly, some lovely cupboards which are shown as outside our demise on the plan; these are tricky because some of them contain University piping. I hope to secure access to these but if it’s a pain and would delay things, we’ll do without access. Also, although I’ve got estimates of almost all the various costs now, I’ve no figure for shared costs of cleaning the shared toilet block. I’d quite like to see that before we proceed, but again, if we can’t get an estimate before Thursday I’ll probably agree to proceed without, and we’ll just have to trust the University not to fleece us on cleaning bills.

The licence to alter might be ready this week, but that looks tighter. I’ve had final walk-throughs with fire safety and access control contractors, so hope to get final quotes with all the relevant part numbers and so forth that it now turns out we need before Thursday, but if they don’t reach me in time, we’ll go ahead with the lease on the 6th and do the licence in a subsequent week.

The lease has really taken a long time, and so I’ve asked our lawyers to push for a longer initial lease term if possible, ideally 3 years, to reflect the delays so far. I’ve no idea if we’ll get this but we might as well ask; otherwise, I’ll be starting negotiations for the renewal on Friday!

Visiting the space last week to work out final locations for fire detection, we were astonished to find the floors covered in damp papers. The basement of the building has been flooded in the recent torrential rains and sadly many filing cabinets were inundated. The workshop space is being used as a drying room for all kinds of miscellaneous university paperwork, old contracts and so on. They will be moved out – hopefully dry – before we move in It was good to note that although our space is lower ground floor, it didn’t suffer in the rain and indeed I have no evidence that the space has flooded in recent years.

We’re also planning to set up an Advisory Group to help ensure the relationship between our soon-to-be landlord, our wonderful supporters at the IfM, and Makespace runs smoothly. More news on this soon.

In other news, we’ve filed our first annual accounts, up to December 2011. I can report that we made a small operating loss in that period.

We’ve had a lot of people asking if there will be a party on the 6th. Well, assuming that the lease does actually get signed, I think it’s fair to say there will be some kind of celebration in the evening, so you might want to keep your diaries clear! I’m afraid there certainly won’t be wild and crazy making stuff happening in the space straight away – we won’t have had our insurance inspection or fire detectors fitted – but rest assured that we’ll be getting ready for that sort of thing as fast as we can. Keep an eye on our Twitter feed for the latest updates.

Finally, if you’re wondering what happens next, we’re going to be bringing together the Founder Members very soon to plan the next few months in more detail, and there will be ways for everyone to get involved. We’ll keep you posted.

Succinct version: we now have an actual final agreed date for the sealing of the lease, which is Thursday 6th September. I believe this is more likely to be honoured than the previous agreed dates…

Long version:

I’ve been waiting to send out an update in the hope of having some definite news and information to share, and unfortunately, as ever, things have dragged on at the University end and my regime of calling them every day has had only limited effect.

We have a finalised schedule of condition; this is a big document of photos of the space showing the state it is in. It particularly records the less good bits – damp patches, missing carpet tiles, ducting patched with duct tape, and so on. When the lease ends, we’ll need to ensure the general condition of the space is no worse than shown here.

We also now have final costings for utlities which aren’t on meters. Specifically, we will need to pay for gas (heating), water, and some electricity (to cover lighting circuits for example) even though the 13A ring main and 3phase circuits are now on check meters (so we can pay exactly for what we use). These figures aren’t as scary as we thought they might be! This is mostly because our space as a fraction of the whole building is fairly small, and so the dreadful energy performance rating doesn’t matter so much.

We have a plan showing the space and the area around it, and a closeup plan showing the details of the space, which I’ve marked up with the positions of the alterations we plan. (I hope to get versions of the plan showing our area, and the access rights, today or tomorrow…) This has been a particular pain, as the markup needs to be on a plan extracted from the University’s main digital plans of the block. When the surveyor tried to generate our plan, errors were found in the underlying main plan, and this meant things had to be fixed before we could proceed. Even then, the version I have marked up still shows the space inaccurately (for instance, showing doors that are not there, and missing doors that are there).

I’m currently working on our annual accounts for 2011. I also have a revised budget – this looks reasonable based on our estimated costs and membership levels, and I expect to be updating it frequently in the coming weeks as more costs become definite. I hope we’ll get to the end of the year without any cashflow problems, but we’ll be operating carefully during the fitout phase before we have regular membership income coming in just to make sure.

So, the lease has dragged out, with various delays outside my control, such as university lawyers going on holiday and failing to hand our file to a deputy, postponing/cancelling meetings, and so on. As of today, I expect to get revised versions of the lease and licence to alter tonight or tomorrow, which I hope will be OK for us (but of course will need review from our lawyer to confirm). I also expect the remaining plans tonight or tomorrow. We have agreed to try for next Thursday for the sealing of the lease, but we know that is tight with the amount of work outstanding and the bank holiday, and so a last possible date for the sealing has been agreed as September 6th.

However, the licence to alter has run into some last minute problems. The University lawyer wants this to be detailed down to exact part numbers of each item (eg smoke detectors, card readers) which I don’t have final details for. So we may have to separate out the lease and the licence; we’ll get the lease done by the 6th, but if necessary the licence to alter can be sealed a week or two later, once I have the level of detail the lawyer wants to see. This is a real pain; I’ve asked repeatedly what level of detail was needed for this and been told that something less specific would probably be fine, but now we’re down to details the lawyer is more particular. Because of the epic delay since I last got quotes for the various bits of work, and because I’ve not wanted to antagonise the contractors by demanding requotes all the time, the quotes I have are all out of date and I’ll need to get new ones including final part numbers etc. This was stuff I was going to have to do anyway, but it’s brought forward now a little bit and become part of the critical path – it will be my top priority now after the lawyers! Nonetheless, we can get the lease and access sorted, and the licence should be able to follow quickly after that. With the licence to alter in place we can start fit out. Note that we don’t have to put everything in the licence to alter – if we want to do more alterations later, we can get another one in place, but I want to get everything critical (security, fire, kitchen) in this one so we don’t have any more delays before we can open.

Our liability insurance is going to start from the 6th too. I’ve not felt confident enough about any of the previous committed lease dates to activate this in case we ended up wasting money.

Finally, this Friday I’ll be meeting our wonderful supporters Ideaspace for a catchup. Without their generous support we wouldn’t have got this far, and certainly wouldn’t get much further.

As ever, thanks for your support and patience – only a few days left I hope!

TL;DR: We expect all the legals to be ready to sign by mid August at the latest, and hopefully the first week of August.

This week I’ve been chasing Estates Management daily to get things moving. Our contact was on holiday (with snakes!) last week and unfortunately with the local flooding this week he’s had other urgent matters to attend to as well as us, leading to late nights in the office. But things are coming together now.

Sadly the University solicitor at Mills and Reeve did not hand over the Makespace file to a colleague when he went away 2 weeks ago, unlike other jobs, so there’s been no progress from him and we’ll be chasing him first thing on Monday when he’s back.

I’ve got a figure for the University’s buildings insurance for 16 Mill Lane now (very low, because the building is so empty) and even if it goes up a bit for us, the increase should be pretty small, as it will be proportional to the area we lease, which is 350m2 out of 6000m2. Final figure should be with me later today.

The electrical work to fit new check meters on our three phase circuit and 13A circuit was scheduled for the first week of July and we think it’s been done but that’s not confirmed yet.

The university will not bother charging us for lighting directly but will roll that into the general service charge (which also pays for things like the cleaning of the toilets we’ll have access to). I should have a price by the end of today.

There’s a few outstanding bits of work to do on the plans we’ll attach to the lease. We want one which shows a lot of the surrounding buildings, so our rights of way over adjacent yards and so forth can be indicated, and that needs to be prepared. Also we’ll probably transfer the licence to alter from being a narrative description of the works we want to do onto a detailed plan in the coming weeks (after checking this with Mills and Reeve on Monday).

Overall then we think 2 weeks for the legal documents to be finalised and converted to the right formats, and 2 weeks to get the plans/licence to alter sorted; these can run in parallel, and we aim to get both done by the first week in August, or mid August at the very latest. Then the package goes for signature by the University. I’ll also be working on our budget with the new figures in place to make sure we have no cashflow issues, and gearing up for some real publicity around when we get our first access to the space.

Although some modest progress was made after we got the photos taken, unfortunately the Estates management team were unable to pull together all the information needed for the lease before our contact went on holiday (he’s away last week and this week).  So we’ll be doing the wrap up of info next week. Unfortunately then the University lawyer is away, so we’ll have to have everything ready for when he gets back, and then it’s over to the Registry for signing. I suspect this is end july / early August, but clearly it’s foolish to get too optimistic.

Many apologies for the continuing delay.  If we’d had any idea when we had the lease kickoff meeting with the University  on August 2nd last year that we’d still be here 12 months later, and not the 2 months the university said it would take to get the lease sorted, we’d've figured out an alternative plan…

Also, we had a pubmeet and there’s even evidence! Julian is working on ideas for outreach and doing some market research in schools in the East of England, and we’re also looking at drafting another submission to the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Ingenious outreach support programme (our third).