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:
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)