Hackerspaces

Sharing tools and expertise, for technical training and creative collaboration.

Making Makerspaces: Creating a Business Model

Making Makerspaces: Creating a Business Model

This is the second in a series of posts called Making Makerspaces, a distillation of the information gathered for a series of How to Make a Makerspace workshops produced by Artisan’s Asylum and MAKE. These posts will appear on a more-or-less weekly basis, and will focus on mission-critical topics related to founding and running creative manufacturing space. Today, we’ll be discussing common types of expenses and income that makerspaces around the world experience on a regular basis in order to help you create a business model for a space of your own. In the process of identifying these expenses and income, we’ll review examples from several well-established spaces across the U.S. for reference.

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Inside a Brooklyn Hackerspace with Alpha One Labs

Inside a Brooklyn Hackerspace with Alpha One Labs

Amidst the flurry of excitement that was Maker Faire earlier this month, one thing that got overlooked in my own NYC backyard was the Grand re-opening of north Brooklyn’s community hackerspace Alpha One Labs. Thankfully PC Mag’s Chris Snyder & Edward Schneckloth stopped by to interview founder Sean Auriti and member Robert DeLanghe

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Milwaukee Makerspace’s Hacked Water Cooler

Milwaukee Makerspace’s Hacked Water Cooler

Ron Bean has a fascinating post on Milwaukee Makerspace’s wiki about his project to plumb in the hackerspace’s water cooler. In addition to the obligatory refrigerator full of soda (or sometimes empty of soda, depending on whether anyone’s filled it recently), we also have a water cooler that takes the big 5gal water bottles. They […]

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Making Makerspaces: Acquiring Insurance

Making Makerspaces: Acquiring Insurance

This is the first in a series of posts documenting how to start a makerspace of your own in your local community. This post is focused on the one question almost everyone asks when starting a space – how do you get insurance for your makerspace? We’ll start with a quick introduction to the series, and then jump into the meat of the question.

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Is it a Hackerspace, Makerspace, TechShop, or FabLab?

Is it a Hackerspace, Makerspace, TechShop, or FabLab?

The past decade has seen the sudden, dramatic appearance of community spaces offering public, shared access to high-end manufacturing equipment. These spaces are interchangeably referred to as hackerspaces, makerspaces, TechShops, and FabLabs. This can lead the intended audience to become incredibly confused as to why there might be so many names for a single concept. I’d like to take some time to untangle the mess, explain the concepts behind each title, and talk about why I now make significant distinctions between all of these types of spaces.

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The Alternate Makerspace–MAKE:SF

The Alternate Makerspace–MAKE:SF

Among the makerspaces represented in Expo Hall at Maker Faire this weekend is one which offers regular meetings, cheap dues, great venues, and no lease commitments. That’s the formula for MAKE:SF which holds regular meetups at hosting business locations. The cost to join this makerspace is a mere $10/six months and it’s optional. How’s that for a deal?

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Ubiquity Robot Team’s “12 Tasks of Hercules”

Ubiquity Robot Team’s “12 Tasks of Hercules”

Got a passion project and want to build a team around it? Start in your makerspace! Dr. David Crawley desperately wanted to hack robots and build a useful platform, not an inexpensive toy that couldn’t do anything or a useful robot that few could afford. He wanted his to be inexpensive and capable. To pull this off he knew he needed passionate contributors with the right technical backgrounds so he joined Hacker Dojo.

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