Two hacker collectives in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area have joined forces to lease space for a shared workshop.
For the past year, Twin Cities Maker have been meeting at coffee shops and members’ homes, slowly gathering funds and members in order to realize their shared dream: to create a hackerspace where members can congregate, work, and share ideas. Simultaneously, a second group of makers calling themselves the Hack Factory of Minnesota were planning the same thing. A couple of weeks ago, the two groups found out about each other and joined forces.
Earlier this month, the two groups toured a light industrial warehouse in southeast Minneapolis, and immediately took a shine to the space. It seemed like a logical fit — the initial lease was for 1,650 square feet, consisting of a large workspace with a garage door and an enclosed, air conditioned office. Even better, there’s the possibility of adding up to 2,850 square feet on the ground floor — including a near-perfect classroom space — as well as additional space in the basement.
The following week, Hack Factory signed the lease, and the two groups voted to merge bringing their combined numbers to about 30 members.
So how will the merger work? Which name will be the one that gets used? TCM and HFM have identical missions and philosophies, they want to merge and will merge; they just have to work out the details of merging. TCM has a larger web presence including a forum, wiki, and Facebook group, while HFM has already filed for nonprofit status with the state and is the official lessor of the workspace. One early thought is to call the workspace the Hack Factory and the organization Twin Cities Maker.
See the Twin Cites Maker Flickr group for pictures of the new space.
Interested in getting in on a Twin Cities hackerspace on the ground floor? Visit twincitiesmaker.com today to learn more.
10 thoughts on “Twin Cities Maker finds a Hack Factory”
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AWESOME!!
The name merge seems a good idea also-
To call the workspace “The Hack Factory” and the organization “Twin Cities Maker(s?)”
Now..A shout out to the central Florida MAKErs- Where y’all at? Plenty of commercial real estate available at cheap prices here right now…
Kip?
BTW… I don’t see your name on the masthead,John B. Welcome! And thanks.
Why am I stuck in Duluth!
I met some of these guys when I was in the Twin Cities shooting the Make: televisions show, and they were a great bunch. Congrats!
TCM is a bit hard to search for, since it’s already the name of a TV station (Turner Classic Movies). TCM is also one of several acronyms used for the Twin Cities Marathon (they occasionally throw in the Medtronic sponsorship, which makes it mtcm), which is pretty well established around here as well. Putting Twin Cities in the name would also make it harder to make it an overarching group if they wanted to branch out to Rochester, Duluth, St Cloud, etc.
Or maybe they could call it “Make Space” (which would be good for all sorts of puns)?