Summary:
- Maker Night open to all, November 20th (please RSVP)
- Social nights continue, open to all: next up, 8pm, Thursday November 8th, Arts Picturehouse bar
- We’re tidying and fitting out the space now
- We are probably looking at early 2013 for a grand opening – but we won’t commit to a date yet!
The next Maker Night is now being planned for November 20th – an evening to bring your own projects and tools and work on them in Makespace and with others! This will be a great chance to finish old projects and start new ones – we’ll also be preparing projects for our upcoming Show and Tell (date TBC) where we’ll be showcasing all kinds of Makespace community projects to demonstrate to potential sponsors why they should support Makespace. Makespace will be open and we may have some basic tools available, but mostly this is about bringing your own things along, just like used to happen at SuperHappyDevClub. If there’s something specific you’d like to use but can’t bring yourself, ask on the Google group mailing list and see if someone else can bring one along. Please note we won’t be ready to support serious power tools, but soldering, sewing etc will be fine. If in doubt please check on the mailing list – we will endeavour to support as many activities as we can, but as we won’t be fully open there may be some limitations. It’s likely that there will be pizza at some point, too. We also, as ever, welcome donations of cake, especially from people who’ve not been to Makespace maker night before! (Please RSVP on the meetup group so we can get some idea of numbers.)
Fortnightly social meetings continue on Thursdays, with the next on November 8th, from 8pm at the Arts Picturehouse cafe. We’ve moved to an earlier time in response to feedback, but please note the Founder members who’ve been at the planning meeting that night won’t be along until 9:30. These are always great opportunities to natter about making and makespace and more – here’s a pic from the last one:
The space is looking a lot better already, and it will soon be even nicer – the Founder Members will be painting the space this week, after much effort to patch up damaged sections of wall and remove rawlplugs and so on. We have quite a few bits of kit and a collection of tables and chairs, almost all of which have been donated or found. Founders are meeting twice weekly to work on their own projects, improve the space, and plan things. If you’d like to stay in touch with this activity, the Google group is the best place, and you can also see some of the plans emerging on the wiki.
We are still waiting on the University for the Licence to Alter sadly – we’ve agreed the specification of works, which I expected to be the tough part, but the process for sign off at the University end is dragging out. I’d hoped we’d have informal permissions in place before now and we haven’t even managed to get those, although our solicitor is holding all the signed papers now. However, I am optimistic that we’ll have this sorted within two weeks, and we plan to fit access control in the week of the 19th. Fingers crossed!
We have our insurers coming around on Wednesday 7th November to see how things are looking. Fire exit signage, first aid kit and accident book, and a first (temporary) version of health and safety, fire and first aid policies, alongside some risk assessments, are all in place, and there will be much work in the coming weeks to enhance these. There will be new versions for once we have access control in place, and wholly new versions before we open fully. The University’s insurers unfortunately failed to make our scheduled inspection time, so that will be happening now towards the end of November. We’re also starting work to get Founding Sponsors in place – these will be corporate supporters of Makespace.
We also had a great day helping the Cambridge Science Centre‘s Science Xchange again this year, 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… Thanks to all the Makespace volunteers who helped prepare sections of the Chain Reaction in advance, and on the day!