Makespace was just featured on ITV news to tie in with our opening yesterday! You can see the short clip here:

A new place for inventions

Highlights:

* We are up to 53 (yes, fifty-three!) paid-up Founder Members. Many thanks everyone – your support is incredibly helpful to getting Makespace up and running

* Access control is now installed! Founder Members will start to get their access tokens and sign the membership agreement next week.

* Maker Night last night was a great success

* Two dates for your diary in 2013: January 15th, for an Open Evening to introduce people to Makespace; and a yet-to-be-confirmed date in February, which will be our Opening Day

Around 20 Founders plus over 20 others visited Makespace last night for Maker Night. We had an incredible evening, with the first 3D printed object Made in Makespace, and all kinds of projects underway: novel lights, Raspberry Pi work, science exhibits from Cambridge Science Centre, bike hacking, knitting, electronics, and lots of conversations about making.

First 3D-printed object: a component lead bending jig! Many thanks to Kim Spence-Jones for the printer, and Roger for the printing!

Many more photos in our Flickr Pool.

With membership agreements, some rules and guidelines and health and safety policies in place, and finally access control (commissioned today) we are ready to open up to Founder Members and we’ll be exchanging membership agreements for access control tokens from Monday. This is a huge step for Makespace, enabling the space to be used by Founders and to start to develop more quickly. (If you like documents, the ones for Founders are here.)

We’re also able to start planning how we get from Making Makespace to having a fully open Makespace. Because December is pretty tricky for organising things, we’re going to have our Open Evening on January 15th – this is when we’ll get lots of makers in the space to show everyone what Makespace will be like. It will also be a chance for the press and potential sponsors to see what’s coming. We don’t have a fixed opening day yet – that’s the day when we start to take on normal Members – but it will be in February. Watch this space!

Makespace supported the Cambridge Science Centre‘s Science Xchange on October 27th, with the MakeZone workshop. We helped families and visitors build the second Cambridge Chain Reaction (following a very successful one last year – watch the video!) and the Guildhall was packed in the afternoon to watch Julian Huppert set off the 2012 reaction. We’ll be able to share a video of this soon… It was a great day, although intense work from 11am-4pm when we had the public in the hall especially. Thanks to all the Makespace volunteers who helped prepare sections of the Chain Reaction in advance, and on the day!

At the conclusion of the event, Chris Lennard of Cambridge Science Centre announced that they’ve secured premises and will be opening in February 2013 – this is very exciting news for Cambridge and science outreach!

Makespace is delighted to be collaborating with Cambridge Science Centre, and is looking forward to a race to see which of us opens first…

You can see the MakeZone at the back of the hall in one of our pictures, from the stage as the Reaction was set off:

The following pictures are all from Cambridge Science Centre:

We had a good crowd, both for the build and the Reaction itself, which was wonderful considering the nasty weather on the day:

This week has been especially frustrating, as it’s seemed like we were going to get a draft lease from the University lawyers “tomorrow” every day since Easter.  This week I was very optimistic, but heard on Tuesday that the lawyer has taken leave this week, so it’s next week.  The delays on writing the draft lease seem to be that the University’s lawyers are particularly risk averse – more so than anyone else we’ve dealt with – and so they are raising concerns about almost every clause, it seems. Each concern needs addressing, and then something else comes up. We haven’t seen even a draft yet so the phase where our lawyers raise concerns on our behalf hasn’t even begun.

So, other than repeatedly chasing the draft lease, what’s been happening recently?

Well, we’ve been looking into director’s and officer’s insurance, to protect the company’s directors from bigger risks.

We’ve tried to get access to the space to start storing a few bits of kit we’ve had donated, but been turned down.

We’ve got a postal address for the space now and are looking into how post is handled (because University post doesn’t come from Royal Mail postmen, but from their own courier service).

We’ve determined that water definitely reaches the space, but we don’t know yet whether it’s potable, and want to get that confirmed. We’ll just be taking a cold feed and heating it locally, as that’s easiest for the lease etc.

We’ve discussed how utilities will be paid for a little more.  We’d initially planned to put meters on but this has seemed tricky, and instead for water, gas and some of the electricity supplies (including lighting) we are going to pay a proportionate charge of the entire building block’s costs, based on the floor area of our space. This will be reviewed annually in case our usage (or the university’s!) is exceptionally high or low. We also know how much the block pays for water, gas and electric   For two of the electricity supplies, we’ll be paying for the University to fit check meters so we’ll pay for what we use there.

Still waiting to see how much our share of the University buildings insurance will be…

We had a final planning meeting and agreed a strategy with the university for how this will be handled.

We’ve had a couple more rounds on Membership agreements and website terms of use and privacy policy documents with our lawyers – this is ongoing work.

I spoke last Friday at the Makers Guild event at the V&A in London, as part of an event on Maker Spaces. I felt something of a fraud, as we’re not an open space yet but I wasn’t alone in this! It was great to share experiences (successes and trials and tribulations) with others and to hear about some of the other types of space people are working on.

We attended the first meeting of the UK&Ireland FabLab network up at the Manchester FabLab. It was good to see around their space and pick up on a few more tips for operation, but the best bit was meeting other FabLabs, proto-FabLabs, and other not-quite-FabLabs like Makespace. The various funding streams and business models are fascinating – I’ll blog some thoughts on this soon.  The ideas from Manchester about the Network itself were also thought-provoking.

Jonny, Simon and I had an “onsite” retreat at the end of April, where we created some operational principles and thought more in detail about how the company and community should interact. This was really helpful and I’ll write up our conclusions shortly.  It was good to talk through some difficult scenarios and work through how we think we might handle them, and turn those ideas into principles we all agree with and can hold to, even when times are tough. This should help us best serve the community (you!) and be sustainable. Some of our thinking will also cause tweaks to the Membership agreement. It was also great to be in the space for a day – sticking post-its to the walls as we can’t do much else yet – although it was pretty cold

Hi all,

Welcome to the Makespace Blog!

We want a place to let you know what’s going on with Makespace and to showcase the cool things made by Makespace members. If you want to be able to post here, get in touch with one of the Makespace organisers…

Watch this space

Oh, and thanks to Dan for setting up WordPress for us!