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In Brief

Ipswich Makerspace is a Suffolk based group of like minded makers who get together to learn, build and experiment with a huge variety of hardware, software, and technology in general.

We have recently found a new home in Dove Street and are currently in the process of making it our own. We've been working hard to make it our own with new security including CCTV, work benches galore plus 3D printers, a CNC machine and a laser cutter. Just so you know how busy we've been take a look at one of our working party pages. Please do let us know if you have any specific requirements. We have regular meetings and new members are always welcome. Take a look our makerspace events to find out what's coming up, our membership page for details of how to get more involved or get in contact.

Less Brief

Our aim is to share knowledge, show off our skills and inspire each other to new heights of inventiveness. There's never been a better time to be interested in technology due to the amazing array of tiny devices that can be hooked together to do amazing things. In fact, over the last few years a global movement of hackers, makers and fixers have sprung up doing extraordinary things with technology. Everyone has heard of 3D printers by now, but modern makers also have access to low cost CNC machines and laser cutters. Machines that used to be for specialist industries only have found their way into garages, sheds and spare rooms all over the world. This comes at a time when there's a drive to recycle, upcycle, repurpose, reuse and repair; anything to avoid landfill. The final thread is the open source movement where not only software developers but hardware developers too have thrown open their efforts to be duplicated and modified in a continuous cycle of innovation and improvement. This is where makerspaces and hackspaces live, places to fix the unfixable and build the unlikely, a place to learn skills and share skills.

If you're not in range of our makerspace, there's bound to be one near you. Have a look at the Hackspace.org

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Ipswich Makerspace is a Suffolk based group of like minded makers who get together to learn, build and experiment with a huge variety of hardware, software, and technology in general. We have recently found a new home in Dove Street and are currently in the process of making it our own.

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Promoting engagement with the makerspace movement (California community colleges)

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Promoting engagement with the makerspace movement (California community colleges)

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Example Makerspace business plan from College of the Canyons

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Example Makerspace business plan from College of the Canyons

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Business plans and models for makerspaces

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Business plans and models for makerspaces

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Planning is the key to success, but not all success stories follow the same model. This section will outline just a few of the many models behind commercially successful spaces, after which we will provide suggestions on your makerspace planning process.

TechShop is a member-based makerspace corporation. It operates in the genre of industrial tools and employs technician "Dream Consultants" as lynchpin supports at workshops. For an in-depth look at model and story of TechShop, please navigate to Samples of Makerspaces.

Sprout & Co. began in 2008 as an EdTech venture concept, with the driving mission of science as a cultural activity and an objective of providing programs to schools within their community. Because of their initial concept, securing their own physical space wasn't an issue at the onset- the main concern was the development of programs and services, and afterwards, the tools for implementation, at the various physical locations of their clients. With their initial vision realized, Sprout now boasts a significant repertoire of past and present programs and services covering a great variety of market segments. Sprout has a team of three staff and a board of three seasoned EdTech venturists to guide and realize their mission.

Artisan's Asylum is a nonprofit initiative originally sponsored by Sprout, with the value statement Making Creativity a Way of Life. In addition to artists and hobbyists, Artisan's Asylum specifically supports early entrepreneurs, and some extraordinarily successful projects and businesses have been kickstarted from this site. The initial Sprout sponsorship allowed for a scaffolded mentorship to the entrepreneurs behind the Asylum; as the venture itself had no proven track record and was initially volatile. The space started with a model of paid educational and training workshops, paid memberships, and studio rentals.

Three different models, with three different makerspace visions. If you wish to have a successful space, taking the time to set out your initial vision, and scheduling time to revisit that vision and plan, is essential to keep you on the right track. A solid business plan will help motivate your venture on a deeper level, help you make decisions, and help you to stay realistic through the process. In addition, a written and detailed plan will enable flexible application to funding opportunities that may arise.

Identify your fundamental assumptions and projections:

1. Venture profile - What is your context, your mission and vision, your goals and objectives? What type of space are you trying to put together, and who will comprise your community?

2. Educational Market Research - What is the overview of your intended venture, and what is already locally available to you? What do you intend to make in your space, and what is the market for your creation? Who are you serving, who is your competition, and what is the SWOT analysis?

3. Marketing - How will you gain buy-in to your space? What is your cost/benefit analysis and positioning? What is your pricing and sales strategy? Will you advertise? Can you form alliances with other departments or stakeholders?

4. Operations - Do you have a physical and/or virtual location? How will you address legal issues, staffing, and other risks? How will you manage your space?

5. Finance - What are your startup costs? Are you able to forecast sales, cashflow, or income?

You should provide a pitch summary on each section of your business plan, as well as a detailed breakdown for further analysis.

Depending on your context, there are a variety of tools available to help you get started with planning. You may find the following planning aids helpful when considering business models and business plans:

The Business Model Canvas, is a creative-commons licensed modelling canvas suggested by Hackerlab.org for budding maker entrepreneurs.

MAKE Magazine: Makerspace Business Plans, a comprehensive guide to makerspace business planning.

CYBF Interactive Business Plan Writer, a user-friendly and professional business plan writing tool. For further assistance when writing your business plan, CYBF has created a comprehensive webinar series covering each of their suggested five segments in depth.

Discussion: In addition to those listed above, what are some of the key specific pieces of information that you would expect to see included in a makerspace business plan?

Discussion Summary: Based on the ETEC522 2013 Winter Term 1 cohort discussion, additional important considerations for the development of a business plan include:

Ensuring that your business model is relevant to your local context;

Significant research to develop a strong vision, which will in turn facilitate future growth; and

Seeking support from established spaces if available; and in return, supporting new spaces once yours is established.

Please view the cohort experience in the comments below. If you are accessing this OER after November 3, 2013, you are welcome to further contribute to the discussion.

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Planning is the key to success, but not all success stories follow the same model. This section will outline just a few of the many models behind commercially successful spaces, after which we will provide suggestions on your makerspace planning process. TechShop is a member-based makerspace corporation.

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The business of makerspaces is hard. They are capital-intensive, staff-heavy ventures that have to juggle a lot of different income streams. And, they've only been around (in a commercial sense) for about a decade, and no ideal business model has yet emerged from the churn.

So, you've got to put in the work to build a business plan: research, pro-formas, market analysis, and setting pricing. But, there are also many assumptions that can't be tested until the doors open. The final plan shouldn't be a static blueprint, but more of a living document that will guide your business decisions.

Generally speaking, business plans have 6 main sections: an executive summary, company description, market analysis, organization and management, description of products and services, and a marketing plan. The Small Business Administration has some great online tools and downloadable templates to help you navigate the process. In order to generate a pro-forma and set pricing, the market analysis and description of services are the most important sections.

Industry and Market Analysis

Markets operate at a number of different scales. The price of oil, for instance, may be affected by events all over the globe; the price for getting your oil changed, however, may be very dependent on where you live. Makerspaces fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum: some makerspace services, like 3D printing and laser-cutting, are available globally through companies like Shapeways or Ponoko. Other lines of business, like teaching classes, are hyper-localized.

There are two ways to zero in on comparative pricing: Industry analysis (looking at your competitiors) and market analysis (looking at your audience). At Open Works, we looked at both to figure out our best pricing strategy.

National: using the Hackerspace Wiki and other resources, we compiled data on 318 makerspaces nationally including square footage, membership base, membership cost, zip code, and facilities offered. We used zip codes of makerspace addresses to pull income data from the U.S. Census Bureau and get a sense of how membership prices related to people's income in different regions.

Regional: we dialed in on about 15 makerspaces of similar size that provided a more precise comparison point. We looked for facilities in cities with similar profiles as Baltimore in terms of size and demographics: Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, and St. Louis.

Local: we spent a lot of time getting to know our Maker neighbors here in Baltimore. This led us to prevent duplication of services - for instance, it is why Open Works doesn't have a ceramics kiln, a silkscreen shop, or a jewelry studio. We also pulled data on how much classes cost at all of these spaces (and makerspaces nationally) to arrive a rough retail-cost-per-hour so our services would be in line with the market.

Demographics: returning to the Census bureau website, as well as Policy Map, Cappex, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we compiled data on employment in "Maker" economy sectors and enrollment in "Maker" degree programs at local colleges. Those sectors included engineering, computer science, woodworking, metalworking, fine art, building trades, architecture, and design. This gave us an idea of our core audience size and characteristics. And, as a nonprofit, the data from Policy Map reinforced our case to potential funders that we were bringing new services to underinvested neighborhoods.

Description of Services

Makerspaces generally have two main lines of business, membership and classes. In smaller, club-type makerspaces, the membership fee may take the form of dues; in larger, for-profit makerspaces, it is a formal monthly billing cycle like a gym membership. Classes fall into several categories, including project-based, skills-based, and safety orientations. Depending on the size of your space, and the equipment available, you may also be able to rent studio space or offer contract fabrication services.

Membership: the biggest and most important line of business for any makerspace is membership fees, which generates about half the income for most for-profit or social enterprise makerspaces. However, calculating the prices and total capacity is tricky. The analysis we did of makerspaces nationally suggested that, on average, a space can support 1 member per every 63 square feet. That means Open Works, at 34,000 S.F., can theoretically support around 550 members. This is a rough tool; Tech Shop for instance, manages twice that membership in half the space across all of their spaces.

As for pricing, most makerspaces offer access to tools bundled by either time (nights, weekdays, weekends, etc.) or service (woodshop, sewing studio, etc.). These bundles can be administered with technology like keycards or by staff supervision. We ran almost a dozen membership scenarios in Excel that delimited memberships different ways at different prices before we hit on one that offered the best mix of affordability and revenue potential.

For instance, a fully a la carte membership program - pick any combination of shops for $25/each per month - offered the biggest revenue potential but was an administrative nightmare. Offering time-delimited memberships - weekend, night, and weekday - maximized use of the space, but set up incentives for members to skirt the rules. We settled on bundling the shops by the way our facility was designed: upstairs (light) fabrication, downstairs (heavy) fabrication, or altogether. Prices will be released when our website goes live next month.

Once you build a simple model in Excel, with formulas to calculate total income, it's pretty easy to play around with prices and number of members. Tinker around with a number of different scenarios until you find one that feels realistic and can cover your costs.

Education: classes are an important part of any makerspace. The most basic class that has to be offered everywhere is the shop orientation - a safety class that acquaints newcomers with heavy machinery. Most spaces try to keep the cost of these classes low, as they are a mandatory step to utilizing a membership.

From there, we categorized classes into three verticals: project-based, skill-based, or youth. Project-based are 1-4 hour experiences where a student executes a project start-to-finish and walks away with a tangible item at the end (i.e. How to Build a Birdhouse). Skills-based classes tend to be several recurrent sessions, and teach basic competency in something (i.e. Welding 101). Youth classes are their own universe; dozens of terrific resources for youth maker education are available online, including Baltimore's own Digital Harbor Foundation.

Calculating a cost structure for classes can be a little complicated because there are a lot of variables. In general, you have to account for teacher pay per hour, marketing cost, space overhead, and consumables. On the income side, you need to set a minimum enrollment and price-per-participant that will cover your costs. A profit should kick in once you enroll more than the minimum number of students.

Space rental: not all makerspaces are big enough to accommodate this, but at Open Works we will have 142 small cubicles for rent. Each will be equipped with a workbench, a storage locker, and Wi-Fi. Other makerspaces do it differently, renting out enclosed offices, open workbenches, or event space. Depending on your location, this can be a great way to build an embedded community and strengthen your revenue.

Contract work: digital fabrication tools (laser cutters, CNC mills, vinyl cutters, and 3D printers) offer a great opportunity to provide contract services to non-members. In early mornings, overnight, or dead spots in the week, you can utilize machine time for profit by running a job shop for prototypes, signage, architectural models, CNC-milled furniture, or cabinetry parts.

Pro-forma

The last step in all of this business planning is to build out a pro-forma spreadsheet that itemizes and totals up all of your expenses and revenues in one place. On the expense side, you'll have rent or a mortgage, staff salaries, insurance, IT services, software subscriptions, taxes, credit card fees, web hosting, utilities, shop maintenance, and trash removal. The costs are fairly concrete and easy to estimate.

Revenues, on the other hand, are subject to some estimating. The best way to account for the unknowns is to work backwards from the capacity of your space. At Open Works, for instance, we have two classrooms and we will be open 80 hours a week. This translates to a total of 19 3-hour time slots per classroom per week. If we had classes running 38 times a week, that would represent 100% utilization. Now, that's probably an unrealistic density, so we calculated what our class revenue would look like at 75%, 50%, and 25% utilization. You can do the same thing over time, so you can see how your revenue will grow month-to-month over the first year or two. This may affect your programming, marketing, and pricing plans - for some spaces it is more important to break even early; for others, it may make sense to build slowly but more sustainably.

For our next post, we'll discuss how all of this business planning, fundraising, and community development translated into the physical design of our space.

Construction Update

Since the last post, we have:

1. Finished replacing the roof.

2. Finished the floors in the electrical, mechanical, and storage rooms.

3. Poured the sidewalks up to the front door.

4. Began installing windows and doors throughout the space.

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Made in Baltimore: Business Planning for Makerspaces | Make:

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The business of makerspaces is hard. They are capital-intensive, staff-heavy ventures that have to juggle a lot of different income streams. And, they've only been around (in a commercial sense) for about a decade, and no ideal business model has yet emerged from the churn.

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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 spaces. The first post in the series, discussing how to acquire insurance for makerspaces, can be found here.
Creating a Makerspace Business Model

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. Please don't consider this an exhaustive list of either income or expenses; expenses vary wildly based on location and circumstances, and spaces have found a huge number of ways to make money.

A couple of quick notes before we get started. First of all, you probably want to keep a spreadsheet open as you read through this primer so that you can take notes and write down example figures. Secondly, this is intended to help you create a steady-state model of income versus expenses to help you make sure your plan will be sustainable; this doesn't cover startup costs, which will be explained in a post that's soon to come. Lastly, please regard all your projected numbers from this exercise with a big grain of salt; you need to confirm your actual expenses before starting down the path of creating a sustainable business.

All that said, let's jump in!

Characterizing Your Space

1. Type of Space

Before we jump into the numbers, you need to know what kind of space you want to put together, and how big you want it to be. Are you looking to share a garage with your friends? Establish a small, close-knit community of makers with a couple of shared tools? Create a sustainable, staffed business with a diverse income? Create a community center or hardware incubator for your entire institution or city? It doesn't matter if your space i

sn't all that you want it to be right now; for the purposes of projections, you need to know where you'd like it to end up. This question will affect the rest of your decision making, so spend some time thinking about it. Some of the most common types of makerspaces that I've seen are:

Small, teaching-only space (500 to 3,000 square feet) with a small number of instructors (1-10 people) that is sustainable by requiring relatively little infrastructure or full-time staff

Small, volunteer-run community (10-80 active members) that occasionally teach classes, share some amount of tools and space, and pay rent on a 1,000 to 8,000 square foot space with relatively low membership fees

Shared plots in a large building (4,000 to 25,000+ square feet) where many individuals and small businesses band together to rent a large warehouse space at low per-square-foot cost, sometimes sharing equipment informally, with a generally unpaid small group (1-3 people) nominally in charge

Large (8,000 to 40,000+ square feet) community workshop usually featuring educational programs, membership access to shared tools/workspace, and sometimes featuring storage or studio rental space

Very large (40,000 to 150,000+ square feet) community development facility intended to rent large spaces to startup businesses that each need 200-1,000+ sqft, usually featuring a mentorship network, paid staff, and sometimes featuring shared tools/workspace

2. Size of Space

How big is your space? How big do you want it to be eventually? What kinds of uses do you want out of your space? Classrooms, workshops, storage, and rental studios all take up significant amounts of space. In broad terms, we've found by informal survey that spaces need to be at least 8,000 square feet (in an area with low rental rates) or larger to support continuously paid, full-time staff (with exceptions for spaces that run exclusively off of grants and/or classes, and don't offer much in the way of shared equipment or common workspace). We've seen successful spaces that are smaller than 8,000 square feet, but they usually run on a volunteer basis or are supported by an outside entity. A couple of examples of spaces with staff include:

Artisan's Asylum at 40,000 square feet, supporting 3-5 full-time staff and 40+ part-time instructors

MakerWorks at 30,000 square feet, supporting 2 full-time staff and 8 part-time staff

TechShop at 15,000 square feet on average, supporting 5-15 full-time staff per location

sprout at 2,000 square feet, supporting 3 full-time staff and 5-10 part timers exclusively through grants and classes

3. Space Distribution

How is your space divided up between workshops, classrooms, offices, rental areas, and the like? You don't have to know for sure, but we have some basic suggestions for how large things turn out to be based on experience and architectural recommendation. Read through the following list and note whatever seems most appropriate right now - based on income and expenses you'll identify later. You'll probably choose to come back and adjust these proportions. Most of the population density figures you see below come from The Engineering Toolbox, a handy reference for architects and engineers.

Fire Lanes. Start your layout estimations by taking 25-35% of your floor area and devote it to to-code fire lanes. This is dead space that you cannot use, and must keep clear in order to pass fire and building code inspections. Your percentage will vary based on your architecture.

Welcoming Area. Front desks, sign-in kiosks, and the like generally take 50-250 square feet, if you need them.

Social/Food Area. Your members need to gather somewhere to eat and socialize - if you don't provide them one, they'll carve out their own space. Think about how many people you want gathered at any one time, and realize that seated people need a minimum of 15-40 square feet per person.

Dedicated Classroom/Conference Rooms. Spaces all over the world have found that quiet, noise-isolated classroom areas are invaluable if you're offering educational programs. Consider including one in your floorplan, and consider that you'd probably need 20-50 square feet per seated person.

Workshops. Do you want to dedicate space to tools? If so, you need to allow for enough space for people to work safely. I've found a good minimum size for workshop space of any one craft type is 300-500 square feet, and you need approximately 75-150 square feet per person working independently in a space. Different craft types usually need separate areas (especially woodworking, fabric arts, and welding), so don't expect to multi-task too much in these spaces. Many groups have had success using the Grizzly Workshop Planner to lay out their space.

Rental Studios. One of the big keys to the success of Artisan's Asylum is in offering a large number of private rental studios. Our hometown is a very crowded city with relatively dense real estate, and our members valued studio space above all else. We've found that 50 square feet is the minimum size of a studio, and offer up to 250 square feet.

Storage Space. Members need some way to store their projects, especially if they don't have a studio of their own. Make sure to include some space for shelving (8-12 square feet per shelf unit) if you can. Artisan's Asylum also offers rental space in the form of areas dedicated to pallet-based storage; one pallet takes up 13 square feet.

Gallery/Display Area. Do you want to display member work, or advertise your services? Keep in mind how much space that might take up.

Retail Area. Are you selling material, goods, or services? You'll need to be able to store whatever you're selling, and provide for a sales terminal.

Identifying Expenses

Before we get into potential income, let's figure out how much money it takes to actually run your space. Working on expenses first will put you in a mindset of determining what the bare minimum level of participation in your space must be for you to be sustainable - if the required numbers look unattainable to you and your community, it's time to think about changes to your business model (or ways to start your business that don't cost as much as your steady-state plan - such as renting a small tenant-at-will space first, and growing into a bigger space once you have a dedicated following). Open up a spreadsheet if you haven't already, and let's get started.

1. Rent

To date, our single biggest expense at Artisan's Asylum is rent. It used to be more than 75 percent of our monthly expenses when we were in a 9,000 square foot location; with paid staff and large utility bills, it's now hovering around 25-30 percent of total expenses. Pay attention to how much your rent is, as that will drive the rest of your business plan. A word of caution, though - don't skimp on your building choice in order to pay a lower rent. Fixing broken buildings costs much, much more, over time, than renting good ones, to the point of shutting down makerspaces that don't acknowledge this fact. Redoing the roof of an industrial space (which usually happens once every 10-20 years) can cost upwards of $5-10 per square foot; installing a sprinkler system because the fire marshal caught you woodworking without sprinklers and threatened you with closure costs $10-15 per square foot; and repairing or replacing a broken or ineffective air conditioner with a new industrial-grade air conditioner can easily run $5,000 to $15,000 - just to name a few common building-scale maintenance expenses. If you know what your building's rent will be, record it now.

If you don't have a building chosen yet, think about where you're located and see if you can estimate what you might pay. Keep in mind that the larger you are, the less you pay per floor area, and the closer you are to a city center, the more you pay. Here's a sample of commercial rents we know of in the 5,000 to 25,000 square foot range; come up with an estimate for yourself and record it in your spreadsheet.

Detroit, MI and parts of Oakland, CA are $0.25-1/sq. ft/year for almost any quality of industrial property outside of the city limits

Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, PA vary between $2-8/sq. ft/year depending on distance from city limits and building condition

Somerville, MA is $8-14/sq. ft/year for 20-30 year old industrial property located in a heavily populated (77,000 people/4 square miles) small town adjacent to a large city

Cambridge and Boston, MA are now charging $35-65/sq. ft/year in their extremely centralized "Innovation District" areas, including Kendall Square and the waterfront.

You read those points right - two equally-sized makerspaces, one in Detroit and one in Boston, might have a difference in rent as high as 260,000 percent. Your entire business plan will likely be driven by this expense, so make your choice wisely.

2. Building Maintenance / Property Tax

Unless you have a very invested and very forgiving landlord (or set of state commercial tenancy laws, as the case may be), most large commercial spaces operate under a triple-net (NNN) lease. This means that, unlike in residential leases, tenants are solely responsible for paying for property tax, insurance, and maintenance on the building envelope (i.e., repairing the roof if it leaks, repairing and painting walls, servicing HVAC, maintaining plumbing fixtures, and so on), and the landlord receives rent as a net sum on top of those costs. When it comes to paying for maintenance, this usually manifests itself in one of three different ways: a) your landlord expects you to repair and maintain your own building to code with licensed professionals, b) your landlord repairs your building for you and sends you the bill (which can catch businesses by surprise if they were expecting free repairs), or c) your landlord bills you on a month-to-month basis and repairs your building envelope for you as part of that regular cost. As far as property tax is concerned, your landlord may bill you for it monthly (or yearly), or they may simply leave it up to you to coordinate with your city.

At Artisan's Asylum, our landlord charges us a very significant NNN rate of $2.50-3/sq. ft/year in common area maintenance, with around $1.20/sq. ft/year of that being property tax. Investigate whether your landlord charges this fee on top of rent, and what your responsibilities might be. Even if you're not charged a recurring fee, you should assume that the actual cost of maintaining your building is at least $1-2/sq. ft/year and keep that amount in a separate bank account; if you don't assume that or have a backup plan, you'll likely be very surprised by the size of the repair bill when something breaks. As I mentioned before, repairing or replacing a single industrial air conditioner can cost upwards of $5,000 to $15,000 in one shot - don't get caught off-guard. Record an estimate of building maintenance and property tax in your spreadsheet now.

3. Utilities

Are you used to an electricity bill for your apartment or house in the $50 to $250 per month range? Imagine an electricity bill in the $5,000 to $7,500 per month range. Heating, cooling, and powering large commercial facilities doesn't scale nicely with size. Use this list of example utility bills to generate an appropriately conservative monthly estimate for your utilities, keeping the rates of your local area in mind.

Electricity. We've seen our rates vary between $0.10-$0.20/sq. ft/month in various locations, and we're charged $0.15/kWhr in our area

Natural Gas. We've seen rates as high as $0.15/sq. ft/month at the peak of a Boston winter, in a relatively uninsulated facility

Trash. Maintaining trash pickup for us was always $100-$300, no matter what system we worked out

Internet. Just providing commercial grade service is easily $75-$150/month, to say nothing of maintaining a website or any internet-based services you use.

Other Utilities. You may experience other utility costs; common ones include fees for recycling, hazmat disposal, and the like.

Take a moment to record expected utility costs on your spreadsheet.

4. Salaries

Artisan's Asylum ran as an all-volunteer organization for a year at a size of 9,000 square feet. At the end of the year, all of our volunteers were dead tired, and our programs were starting to fall apart. Classes weren't being advertised or developed on-time, membership payments weren't being collected as effectively as they needed to be, and nobody could work on their personal projects because they were constantly developing the space. We decided, in the end, that we needed to be of a size and of a business model that allowed us to operate sustainably with multiple staff members whose entire job was to keep the space running smoothly, keep classes organized, and keep the tools repaired. One of the real costs of your makerspace is your sanity; if you (or your friends/volunteers/coworkers) don't have the ability to take a break because you're all barely keeping the space running in your free time, the business will suffer.

I will say that the decision to switch to staff was directly related to our expenses, however; we had to pay more than 10 X as much in rent as i3Detroit for a similarly sized space, which after four years still runs as an 8,000 square foot volunteer-run organization with membership dues that equal expenses, that occasionally runs classes for fun (and not because they're absolutely necessary to the business plan). Simply put, our scramble to make enough money every month to meet expenses was tiring us to the point of collapse

What style of business are you interested in becoming? Here are some example roles that you might hire for in your organization, or may fill with volunteers. Note that one person may take on many roles in parallel, if needed. Assign them a monthly salary (whether full or part-time) as you see fit for your mission. We've listed these roles in the rough order in which we've hired for them at Artisan's Asylum, plus a few types of makerspace-related jobs we've heard of but don't have. Your mission and mileage will vary!

Financial Controller: Head bookkeeper and accountant for the business. We hired someone for this position before we hired anyone else, because income, expenses, and filing taxes is such an existence-threatening big deal that we needed to pay someone for this immediately.

CEO/Executive Director: Primary point of contact and main organizer for the early life of the organization, head manager for the later life of the organization.

Facilities Manager: Responsible for repair and maintenance of shop spaces and tools. You need someone like this sooner rather than later; managers and organizers don't have the time to be elbows-deep in broken machines for long periods.

Member Services: Answers phone calls, emails, and any in-person complaints, and makes sure the business runs smoothly.

Development: Seek grants and partnerships with other organizations. A good development lead pays for themselves several times over, especially in a nonprofit setting.

Programs: Develops classes and programs as a source of income.

Marketing: Markets the business and its programs to the public.

Full-Time Trainer: Trains and tests new members on equipment.

You may have ideas for other personnel; take a moment to record their salaries on your spreadsheet. One quick note, though - teachers and trainers may fall under the category of contractors, as opposed to staff. We'll deal with that soon. Before we leave this section, though, take 10-15 percent of your total salary payment, and add that much to your expenses in the form of payroll tax.

5. Health Insurance & Benefits

Some states require employers to pay for health insurance, others don't. The Asylum pays for health insurance for its employees. While we may not pay the best salaries, we want to make sure that our employees have the ability to see a doctor whenever they need to. We've managed to find health insurance for $500/person/month; we've seen quotes from $350 to $1,500/person/month. We also include membership and some rental space as a benefit to employees, which "costs" us between $150 and $300 a month in income we would've otherwise earned. It may not make sense you to record this cost as an expense, but for your own clarity we suggest you record both the expense of the benefit and the income of your staff as members (to a total sum of 0) for the purposes of planning. Take a moment to record the cost of benefits on your spreadsheet.

6. Tool Maintenance / Consumables

It costs a lot of money to keep a shop going. Blades get dull, belts break, welders run out of gas, you name it. After three years of tuning, the Asylum is getting to the point where its monthly maintenance budget is on the order of $500 to $1,000/month, and the shop consumables budget is anywhere from $1,300 to $1,700/month for a heavily-utilized 8,000 square feet of $300,000 worth of shop equipment. Given our example, come up with a scaled maintenance budget appropriate for the size of your space and the number of tools you have. Bear in mind that some spaces require their members to pay for some or all of this; those spaces often require members to bring their own consumables, or purchase them from the space itself. Record a figure you think is appropriate in your spreadsheet.

7. Contractors

Artisan's Asylum employs 35-45 part-time instructors a month to teach our classes. These instructors usually work between 2 and 10 hours a week on their classes, with relatively little oversight from us. As a result, we consider these instructors contractors, pay them hourly, and don't provide them with a salary or benefits. We've paid our instructors 50 percent of class proceeds since we started the space (and 60 percent in our first year). This strategy has proven to be an effective method of getting a lot of interest in teaching at the Asylum, getting our instructors to market their own classes for us, and helping instructors 'bridge the gap' between working a full time job and working for themselves in a sustainable way. Other spaces and related businesses in our area pay their instructors fixed rates that vary between $20 and $75 an hour, depending on the class.

The other major contractor payment we make on a regular basis goes towards a certified public accountant. Every year, we hire someone to do our taxes for us. Trust me when I say it's not worth doing your own, given what can happen if you do them incorrectly (especially for a non-profit, which can lose its 501(c)3 certification for incorrect filings). When we made $100,000 a year at 9,000 square feet, it cost us around $2,500 a year for a full tax preparation. Since then, we've grown to the point where we're required to have a financial review every year (and soon a mandatory audit); our review cost $7,000 a year, and we expect the recurring cost of an audit to be much higher. When we were consulting with attorneys on a regular basis during our incorporation and 501(c)3 filing, we spent on the order of $2,000 to $3,000 in a year for legal services.

This may be hard to estimate now (and you may want to come back to this after you take a look at income), but record an estimate for how much you might pay contractors.

8. Insurance

In order to operate as a legal business in the United States, and fulfill the terms of your commercial lease, you're required to carry insurance. This is one of the most significant barriers to founding new spaces that we've come across, and as such I've gone ahead and written an entire primer on familiarizing yourself with and finding insurance for makerspaces. If you haven't had a chance to read it yet, take a moment to read it now. Example prices for insurance, based on our experience, are as follows:

General Liability & Property. This is largely dependent on the size of your building, the amount of property you control, and how you insure it, but we've found a typical rate to be $.0.20-$0.40/sq. ft/year.

Umbrella Policy. This is generally linked to how much you paid for general liability & property, and is typically between 15-25 percent of the price of general liability & property insurance.

Worker's Compensation. This is linked to how much you pay your staff and what kind of work they do; it typically costs between .61 percent of total yearly salary for clerical and administrative work and 3.17 percent of total yearly salary for trade or vocational instruction.

Miscellaneous Insurance. We carry a variety of other of insurance, including directors and officers insurance, non-owned auto insurance, and a number of other types. This typically costs us around 10-20 percent of our total insurance bill.

This is absolutely not an exhaustive list of what insurance might be required of you. Please check your lease and applicable state laws to see if you must carry any other significant types of insurance. Note that you may need to pay your insurance in one lump sum upfront, but it's easiest to project for now if you consider it a recurring, monthly expense.

9. Charges & Fees

Assume all of your income comes from online transactions or credit card transactions - unless you have trained front door staff, accountant-certified cash handling procedures, and a cash safe, you probably don't want to be accepting cash. As a result, take 3-5 percent of your total income (once you're done filling it out) and record it as a fee you have to pay banks, payment gateways, and credit card companies.

10. Other Expenses

Unfortunately, the list of expenses we have so far are just a sample of the total expenses paid on a monthly basis to run a space like this. Luckily, we've covered the biggest hitters - you can generally expect that you won't have to pay 10-25 percent more than what we've already covered, unless you have a fairly unique business model. Here are some example expenses you might consider putting a monthly number down for:

Advertising and marketing (graphical design work, print materials, etc.)

Supplies for classes

Volunteer food/beer/etc.

Cost of any goods or services you sell

Discounts off of memberships or classes (record these as an expense, so you know how much you're spending on them)

Office supplies

Telephone/cell phone plans

Subscription websites (like SurveyMonkey)

11. Total Expenses

Total your expenses. Does that number look intimidating to you? Good - it should. It takes around $80,000 per month to run Artisan's Asylum right now, and we're understaffed for what we're trying to do at 40,000 square feet. It's expensive to run these kinds of spaces (even the small ones!), and if you don't know that from the very beginning you're in for a rude awakening. Take your expenses seriously, and have a very good plan for how to address them. You don't have to do everything from the get-go. The Asylum didn't pay anyone until the start of our second year, for instance - but have a plan in place for how you're going to grow into a sustainable business that will outlast its overly-enthusiastic founders.

Identifying Income

Let's switch gears and start talking about making money. Now that you have a rough idea of your expenses, use it to guide your decisions about how you make money. Are you going to teach classes? Offer memberships? Rent studio space? Run regular donation drives? Each of these sources of income have benefits and drawbacks, so consider your blend of income carefully.

When making predictions about your income, consider creating three different estimates; a pessimistic estimate where you barely break even, an educated guess as to what you expect will happen, and an optimistic 'maximum capacity' number if everything goes swimmingly. This should help inform you when you start running your business in earnest.

1. Memberships

One of the most common sources of income for makerspaces are memberships. Some makerspaces have a single membership rate, some have sliding scales that vary with your ability to pay, and others like Artisan's Asylum have different membership levels for different levels of access to the space (based on which hours and days of the week you're interested in). Some makerspaces consider membership a service they offer to the community - they don't charge for it, and instead devote themselves to raise money through grants for their running expenses. Brainstorm types of memberships, and come up with rough numbers for how many people your space could support using our guidance. Typical membership rates vary anywhere from $40 per month for a 'starving hacker' membership at Noisebridge, to $175 per month at TechShop. Keep your demographic and what it has the ability to pay in mind when setting rates; Artisan's Asylum's home city of Somerville, MA has a per-capita income of $36,500, a median household income of $61,700 a year, and we charge $150 a month for our most popular 24/7 access membership.

When considering the number of people that might be interested in maintaining a membership at your space, consider example density data from spaces across the U.S.:

Artisan's Asylum has a very low membership density because of all of our rental studios. Our membership numbers have held steady between 120-180 sq. ft/person throughout our history.

All-volunteer MakeIt Labs has grown its membership in a 6,000 square foot space over 2-3 years with very little private space, and is now at 60-100 sq. ft/person.

TechShop has almost no private studio space, an incredibly effective marketing campaign, significant new-member discounts, very good positioning of its locations, and very high end tools. The density of their locations tend to vary between 20-40 sq. ft/person after 5+ years of operation.

Come up with an estimate of how many members your space could sustain, and write down a couple of example income numbers.

2. Rentals

Artisan's Asylum has grown to the extent that it has by offering more than 50 percent of its floor area as rental studio or storage space for projects. The real estate market in our area is relatively expensive (median home sales are around $450,000), and as a result one of the primary things our members look for is additional personal space. This is a mixed bag; on the one hand, you get steady income that doesn't vary with the seasons and people's ability to spare personal time. On the other hand, the income from a studio space is lower than an equivalent floor area of shop space or teaching space for one person.

If you've listed studio space or storage space as space you're interested in offering, use our examples to come up with possible incomes for those spaces (but keep in mind that our 'rent' is fairly high, and tracks the commercial property value of the nearby area for small studios):

50, 100, 200, 250 sqft studios: $2/sq. ft/month

Pallet Storage (13sqft): $30/month

Shelf Storage (2'x2'x2' shelf space, stackable 4 high on a 2'x2' floorplan): $10/month

You may want to factor in some amount of vacancy into your total number due to turnover. Write down a couple of example income numbers from rent, if you're planning on offering any.

3. Classes

Classes provided more than 60-75 percent of the income for Artisan's Asylum in its early stages, and are a fundamental part of almost all makerspaces I've ever seen. Classes train new people in your way of using tools. They provide an easy gateway into the space for those who don't have projects but want to get involved somehow. They offer local craftspeople a new way to use their craft to make a sustainable income as instructors, and they raise the skill level of your community dramatically over time. Classes now represent 25-35 percent of the income of the Asylum, but that's income that is used to pay for our staff on top of infrastructural expenses like rent and utilities.

We charge $10 to $30/student-hour for our classes, and they have an extremely high fill rate at those prices. We have sometimes been accused of 'undercutting the market' for craft classes, and most nearby 'traditional' craft spaces charge higher prices than we do. Once again, bear in mind that Somerville has a per-capita income of $36,500, and a median household income of $61,700 a year, when considering these rates.

Classes are generally 2-3 hours per session, and most of our classes are 4 sessions long (though some engineering, design, and project-based classes are now 6-8 sessions long, and most of our individual tool training and testing classes are simple one-shot sessions). Also note that the Asylum generally fills each of its independent craft areas with classes roughly 50 percent of peak hours; in other words, we have welding classes 2-3 nights of the week and on one weekend day, machining classes on 2-3 nights of the week, and so on. We've found that our members are unhappy with shop availability if classes run any longer than that amount of time. As a final note, bear in mind that tool training loses its efficiency quickly when you have too many students per teacher; we tend to keep classes between 3 and 8 students per instructor, unless the skill is easy to pick up or distribute (like soldering, programming, CAD or other lecture-ready applications).

Figure out how many teachers you have available, how often they're willing to teach, what workshop availabilities might be like, how many people you can teach in a given class (given the workshop constraints from before and the number of people one teacher can teach) and come up with a rough sense of how much classtime you could provide in each of your craft spaces per month. Keep in mind these sample floor-area price densities from classes taught at Artisan's Asylum at maximum, 50 percent peak hour capacity, to get a sense for what's popular and what people are willing to pay in our neck of the woods:

Woodworking: $10-$25/sq. ft/month, mostly due to the space requirements of moving large raw material around

Machining: $15-$30/sq. ft/month, due to small space requirements. but relatively low demand

Welding: $40-$60/sq. ft/month, due to the fact that welding is incredibly popular in our community

Quiet Classroom: $35-$55/sq. ft/month, due to the sheer variety of classes that can be taught

Electronics: $20-$35/sq. ft/month, due to significant demand and modest space requirements

Jewelry and Glassworking: $40-$55/sq. ft/month, due to high demand and small space requirements

Your mileage will vary significantly from ours, depending significantly on your demographics, available instructors, and community interests. When coming up with income numbers for classes, don't forget to charge for materials fees - in some classes, materials can be incredibly expensive. Make some educated guesses as to what your shops and instructors could support, and write up some income possibilities.

4. Grants and Donations

Artisan's Asylum has found that donations can help aid general income in the early stages of makerspace development, and can help acquire specific tools and infrastructural projects in later stages of development. If donations are going to be a part of your business plan, estimate how many events you might have and how well they're attended using our suggestions and average that amount out over a year to come up with monthly income. We've found that we can reliably bring in $25-$40/person at large-scale, once-or-twice-a-year fundraising events, and in the case of fundraising drives for specific items can hit averages as high as $100-$200/person.

The number of people participating in these events is directly related to the size of your social network, the scale of the event, and the urgency of your cause. For our grand-opening fundraising events, we would have 200-300 people attend when our available immediate network was between 1,500 and 2,000 people. Our recent fundraising drives for non-emergency infrastructural improvement had 50 people participate, out of a membership community of 300. Your mileage will vary significantly from ours, but try to estimate what you might see as income from donations. I would strongly suggest that you consider a pessimistic case of donation income being close to $0 for any given period, to make sure that your business model is self-sustaining on earned income.

I'll mention that several spaces (including sprout and The Crucible) run many of their programs by writing and receiving grants as non-profit 501(c)3 organizations. Unfortunately, I don't have much experience in funding programs through such grants, and can't comment on strategies you might find helpful or how much you might acquire.

5. Other Income

Makerspaces have extremely varied sources of income past the standard membership, rentals, classes and donations. Take a look at some of these examples, and see if you can think of other ways you might make money (though bear in mind that all of them require additional staff time and expense to implement):

Feel free to brainstorm potential new types of income, but bear in mind that if you think up something totally novel, it will likely take much more energy and money to implement than you think. Come up with an estimate of how much income you could make from such endeavors, and record it.

6. Total Income

Total your income into a pessimistic (i.e., break-even) projection, a best-educated-guess projection, and a maximum-possible projection. If there's a wide range between those numbers, you're probably in a good place. If there's a very narrow band between your break-even projection and your maximum projection, you're in trouble.

Income vs. Expense

Compare your income versus your expense. Do you come out ahead at the end of a month? If you're like most spaces around the country, the gap should be pretty tight. That's OK! It means you're being realistic, all things considered. Most industries around the globe have a net income margin after taxes that's . If you're consistently in the black, you're doing extremely well.

Make sure you have the ability to put money into your bank account to build up a buffer. It's not enough to simply break even; that will put your space at risk of closing if you have one bill too many. A good rule of thumb is to build up at least 3 months worth of total operating expenses (note: this includes all of your operating expenses, and not just rent and utilities!) in the bank at all times, to make sure you can survive if a worst case scenario occurs.

That's it for now, folks. Let me know what issues are most pressing to you in the comments and I'll work on integrating them into the series as we progress.

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Making Makerspaces: Creating a Business Model | Make:

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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.

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Did you know there are eight makerspaces spread across Michigan State University? A collective group of individuals have been working together since January in order to better inform you about them.

A makerspace traditionally is seen as a workshop with tools, machinery, supplies, and space to make things. It's also meant to be a place where cross-collaboration and pollination can occur to generate bigger and better outcomes.

In the world of academia, makerspaces have been evolving into a broader context involving technology and new approaches to learning. (Check out the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) article, 7 Things You Should Know About Makerspaces.)

Growing interest in campus makerspaces

In December 2014, IT Services helped organize a collective meeting for anyone on campus who was in some way affiliated with one or more of of the makerspaces. In that meeting, we conducted a design studio brainstorm activity to better understand where these spaces overlapped, where they were lacking and how these spaces could better serve faculty and students.We found two distinctive areas that nearly everyone said needed some attention:

1. Faculty development within the context of makerspaces

2. Communication about these spaces on campus

In January 2015, two working groups were formed: one focused on faculty development within makerspaces and the other focused on communications of the spaces. Since that time, I have had the pleasure of working with both of these groups to wrestle through the various challenges posed by the outcomes of the December 2014 meeting.

Faculty makerspace working group

The faculty working group is made up of participants from the College of Business, College of Engineering, MSU Global, MSU Libraries, Office of the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education, and IT Services Teaching and Learning Technology.

We realized early on that we needed to identify faculty perceptions and knowledge of makerspaces, so we designed a survey to gather this information. The survey first went out in June 2015 and we will be sending it out again in September 2015. The survey will close on November 1, and then we'll analyze the data. A report will be delivered to the larger audience of makerspace enthusiasts on campus at our year-end recap meeting in December 2015 to help inform and guide future makerspace endeavors.

Upcoming MSU Makerspace events

The faculty working group also planned a Lilly Seminar with the Office of Faculty and Organizational Development that will take place on Friday, September 25. The seminar, while geared at informing and inspiring faculty, will consist of a panel of faculty, students and staff from each space. The program will be a round-robin style event, with participants gaining insights from each space including how it's been used, what resources are available and how MSU students have utilized the space.

As a follow-up to the Lilly Seminar, the group is hosting a MSU Makerspace Open House on Friday, October 16, from 8:30-11:30 a.m., which is designed to feel a bit like a scavenger hunt experience. Maps of the campus spaces will be provided and participants will have the opportunity to visit each space at their leisure. There are also opportunities to win prizes along the way.

Communications makerspace working group

The communications working group is made up of participants from the College of Arts and Letters, MSU Libraries, MSU Union, and IT Services Teaching and Learning Technology.

The group's initial goal was to create an online presence that would serve as a hub of information to all of the makerspaces on campus. The group worked with each space on campus to collect consistent information about each space, take photos and video, and talk with space leaders about the ways their spaces are currently being utilized.

The group then researched what types of makerspace information is currently shared at other institutions and discovered makerspaces seem to be in their infancy within academia without a central hub of information. Colleges and universities had individual pages or small makerspace sites, but much of it appeared to be on a small scale.

The communications working group is in the process of creating an online hub of makerspace information for Michigan State University. We've worked to design a comprehensive and cohesive site that will serve faculty, staff, and students who want to "make" nearly anything. The MSU Makerspace site will launch by the end of September.

It's our hope that the work performed during 2015 will serve as a springboard to further enhance the cross collaboration between these makerspaces, creating a strong presence of maker culture at MSU.

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Learn about the different MSU makerspaces

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Did you know there are eight makerspaces spread across Michigan State University? A collective group of individuals have been working together since January in order to better inform you about them. A makerspace traditionally is seen as a workshop with tools, machinery, supplies, and space to make things.

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Here is a (rough) transcript of my talk today at the ELI Annual Meeting in Denver. I've also Storified some of the tweets from the session and included a link to my slidedeck. Special thanks to Jentery Sayers (UVic) and Tim Owens (UMW) for the use of their photos from their respective campus makerspaces.
This is not a talk about MOOCs.

This is not a talk about online learning.

This is not a talk about learning analytics or learning management systems, or any of the ed-tech apps that have investors and entrepreneurs, administrators and professors both intrigued and reticent, and/or students fairly indifferent.

This talk isn't about David Brooks and his "campus tsunami" nor is it about Thomas Friedman and his "MOOC revolution" nor is it a response to the technology tabloid Techcrunch and its gleeful pronouncement that this all marks "the end of the university as we know it."

Except that this talk is about all these things just as it wants so desperately to point to something else.

This is not to deny the existence of MOOCs and the like nor to refute their significance. This is a talk that, even when focusing elsewhere, recognizes the hype and the opportunity and the challenges faced by teachers and learners and by educational institutions.

But this talk hopes make a case for schools looking to the Maker culture rather than markets to help them reinvigorate themselves, to help keep them relevant, to help student be engaged and to make their learning meaningful and empowered.

Much of the punditry I hear lately about ed-tech hails this as the moment when teaching and learning will move online. We all know here, of course, that that trend actually isn't all that new. Computers are decades old. The internet is decades old. Ed-tech is decades old.

Ed-tech, so one argument goes, will make education more efficient, more scalable, more personalized. It will liberate students from those wretched large lecture halls... by videotaping the lectures and putting them on the Internet.

Now, whether or not you believe that this will be efficient or scalable or personalized -- and I think we need to debate all of these, quite frankly -- this is the promise from some say we're being offered. And moreover, thanks to the move online and to digital, we'll now be able to do something "different" in our face-to-face learning environments.

But what does that "different" look like?

Now clearly, despite the Internet, despite computers, we can make the case to for offline, face-to-face learning -- for better offline learning, I hope. And I think we can make a case for physical learning spaces -- for better, beautiful learning spaces.

This is a very long-winded introduction to my case for the campus makerspace. It's a case that invokes some of the educational practices that we know work well: small group discussion, collaboration, participatory, project-based, and peer-to-peer learning, experimentation, inquiry, curiosity, play. These practices, their values as we help students learn to build and make their own knowledge.

The makerspace is something that has grown out of what's called the Maker Movement, a loose affiliation of software and hardware hackers and hobbyists of all sorts.

The Maker Movement is a contemporary version, if you will, of the old punk ethos and its DIY culture -- just with newer technology. Perhaps you remember the old illustration that said "here's three chords, now form a band" -- today, it's "here's a motherboard and some cables, now go build a computer."

Makerspaces are a newer version of the old Silicon Valley "home-brew computer club," whose members included Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

But the makerspace takes a more public-facing, more community-oriented form than we've seen with individual DIY hobbyists or small hobby groups -- those who work in basements and garages and sewing rooms and living rooms and workshops.

The Maker Movement brings them out into the open, into the public to share and to learn together.

The Maker Movement is closely associated with Make Magazine -- sometimes described as a 21st century Popular Mechanics -- and the Maker Faires that the publication helps organize around the world. But there are many resources and traditions makers draw from and many places where makers gather.

I recently recognized the Maker Movement as one of the most important ed-tech trends in 2012, and although it is making inroads into schools I think it's notable here that much of what we see in the Maker Movement is the joy of learning -- lifelong learning -- in informal rather than formal environments.

Those of us who work in formal educational settings thus need to ask ourselves: why does the joy and interest lie there and not here?

What does the Maker Movement "get right"? What can we learn from it?

Makers work with Arduino, paper mache, Legos, cardboard, robots, rockets, welding machines, gears, circuit boards, computer-assisted drawing software, string, vinyl cutters, LED lights, the command line, string, rubber bands, wire, duct tape, play dough, steamworks, sensors, hot glue guns, scissors, Raspberry Pis, gyroscopes, tesla coils, musical instruments, fire, water cannons, plastic, wood, motors, solar power, wearable computers, and 3D printers. For starters.

It's the latter, arguably, that's spurred much of the imagination and excitement about the possibilities for a new form of low-cost and local manufacturing. 3D printers will bring about the next industrial revolution, say both the Economist and New Scientist magazine. They will revive American manufacturing, says Forbes.

Now depending on your geography and/or the composition and the focus of your engineering or business departments, your school may or may not give a damn about the future of American manufacturing as part of its curricular mission. There might be faculty on your campus that roll their eyes at all the talk from politicians and pundits about STEM education and STEM majors and STEM jobs; there might be those who are (rightly) concerned what all this STEM talk will mean in terms of budgetary decisions for other non-STEM, i.e. not-21st-century departments.

I'd argue that we all should give a damn about the future of manufacturing. As Make Magazine founder Dale Dougherty says, we must see manufacturing as "a creative enterprise," not something "where you're told to do something but where you're invited to solve a problem or figure things out." And, despite our disciplinary backgrounds, we should all give a damn about the future of science, technology, engineering, and math. Indeed the Maker Movement and makerspaces aren't something for just those in the engineering or computer science or design departments. They aspire to be openly democratic and participatory.

That is one of their great beauties.

Steve Jobs once said that Apple's innovation was a result of the company's existence at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.

With that in mind, I'd argue that we can do more to situate colleges and universities at that intersection too -- not by buying iPads and certainly not by scrapping the humanities but by welcoming the maker ethos onto our campuses.

For many years now, we've talked about what it means to have "writing across the curriculum." We've decided as institutions that all students -- no matter their degree program, should write well, should write critically, should write often.

And so I ask, what would it look like to have "making across the curriculum"?

The opportunities for hands-on learning are so few in modern-day education. Few and getting fewer. Our education system has forgotten -- or ignored, perhaps is a better word -- John Dewey and his argument that we "learn by doing." At the K-12 level, woodshop, metal shop, sewing, cooking, art, heck even science labs -- they're going away to save money and to make more time in the school year for "college prep" and for standardized testing.

Learn by doing. Learn by making. Not learn by clicking.

Makerspaces give students -- all students -- an opportunity for hands-on experimentation, prototyping. problem-solving, and design-thinking.

By letting students make -- whether they're digital artifacts or physical artifacts -- we can support them in gaining these critical skills. By making a pinball machine for a physics class, for example. Making paper or binding a book for a literature class. Building an app for a political science class. 3D modeling for an archeology class. 3D printing for a nursing class. Blacksmithing for history class. The possibilities for projects are endless.

And the costs for creating makerspaces needn't be that high.

And let me reiterate: the project-based component of making is important. "Making" rather than "writing" final projects for a class still demand students research and plan. But it also demands they prototype in ways that neither an essay or an exam really do. Making projects can be -- horrors! -- relevant and relevant. It can be experimental. And it can be technological -- or it can have used tech tools in its construction. It can be technological whether you're a classics or a computer science major. And arguably, these days it should be.

Makerspaces expose students to cutting edge technologies that could in turn lead to employment and entrepreneurial opportunities. And because of makerspaces' connection to open source hardware and software, students aren't learning just how to use proprietary tools. They aren't just learning a specific piece of software. Instead, they learn how to find resources and -- this is key -- they learn how to learn.

Having some technical know-how -- tech literacy, sure, but also a comfort level with technical experimentation and with tinkering -- is becoming increasingly fundamental for all of us, as technology shapes how we learn, how we communicate, how we play and how we work.

There is a growing number of makerspaces that support these sorts of learning and building experiments. Some charge a membership fee. Some charge a materials fee. Some are for-profit. Some are not-for-profit. Regardless of their tax status, makerspaces tend to be community-oriented. No surprise then, makerspaces are popping up in libraries and community centers. They're popping up in K-12 schools. And they're popping up on college campuses.

The ThinkLab at the University of Mary Washington. The MakerLab at the University of Victoria. The garage at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The science library at the University of Nevada, Reno. The library at Valdosta State University. The Open Hardware Makerspace at North Carolina State University. The FabLab at Stanford.

One recent estimate put the number of makerspaces on college campuses at about 60, which for those keeping score at home is not quite double the number of college campuses that have partnered with Coursera.

By and large, these makerspaces are not associated with any one department. Indeed, that's the argument that many librarians are making about opening makerspaces with them. The library is already open to the entire campus community -- students and faculty of all disciplines.

This openness -- openness to the public and openness to all disciplines and skill levels -- makes the makerspace very different than the science lab, for example, or the art studio -- the two places that are perhaps the closest -- in terms of equipment at least -- to the makerspace.

But you needn't take a series of prerequisite classes to gain access to the tools in a makerspace, although they do typically offer instruction and help with the equipment to those who are interested. Classes in makerspaces are casual and usually not-for-credit -- and this offers lots of possibilities too, particularly when it comes to something like learning to code or learning to solder -- skills that students might not have the confidence or opportunity to pursue otherwise.

A makerspace is a safe place to learn.

And unlike the sorts of scripted experiments that often happen in the undergraduate science lab -- look at this slide, identify this rock, add this chemical, measure this arc, and so on -- the experimentation in the makerspace is inquiry-based. It is learner-driven. It is cross-disciplinary and as such undisciplined in the best possible way.

The flourishing Maker Movement shows us that people are hungry for this. We want to play and build and hack and make. Of course we do. We're human.

Informal learning opportunities are widely available -- "you can learn anything you want to online" as the adage goes. And in many ways, these opportunities are a lot more attractive than the formal ones, which at colleges at least can cost a lot of money and often come with a slew of requirements and mandatory assignments. You must study this then this then this to pass the class, to fulfill your major, and so on.

But making can happen at any level with any materials. Caine's Arcade -- a an elaborate cardboard arcade built by a 9 year old in his dad's auto-parts store -- is a brilliant example of what you can do with some cardboard and a rich imagination.

And this isn't just for 9 year olds. From a blog post from Tim Owens' freshmen seminar Makerbots and Mashups at the University of Mary Washingotn, the following:

"Signing up for my freshman seminar class I had no idea what "Mashups and Markerbots" would entail. All I knew was that I needed another class on Tuesdays and Thursdays sometime after 3:15. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the class title with a typo really meant something cooler: 3D printing. Now imagine my even greater surprise to find out the second day that we were to make something out of cardboard. Yes, there were very few directions for this first assignment. Just make something out of cardboard... and it has to move. Most people started working on their "cardboard automata" by looking at well made ones online and then drawing out exactly what the box would do, how the box would do it, and what the box would look like. I, on the other hand, decided to start making the box without a single idea in my mind. The first parts I made were gears. I figured I could probably figure out a use for them while cutting them out. After they were made I attached them to wooden rods and put them together to see how they'd work. After about 10 minutes of playing around with them to see how I could incorporate them into the box, I decided to trash the idea all together and go for new idea."

I'd say that's a fairly big lesson on planning and prototyping for day 2 of your freshman year in college -- a lesson learned via cardboard. A lesson learned via making

Let me repeat something I said at the beginning of this talk: "ed-tech, so one argument goes, will make education more efficient, more scalable, more personalized. It will liberate students from those terrible large lecture halls... by videotaping the lectures and putting them on the Internet."

The ed-tech that fuels makerspaces does something different. It recognizes that learning is messy. It recognizes that small and local still matters. And unlike the adaptive learning software tool, this isn't "personalized" learning as a marketing message. This is personal learning. And yes, sure, by all means, a makerspace can provide an alternative to those large lecture halls -- not via the Internet, but on the campus itself.

What does it mean to create an informal learning space on a college campus? Are the Maker culture and academia even compatible? An interesting question, I'd say, to which I'd respond they may be more compatible than markets and academia.

Regardless: What sort of institutional support will students need -- if any -- to participate in makerspaces? How can we make sure everyone feels welcome? Will some students only want to "make" for a grade or for credit? Does having "making" as a course requirement impact students' willingness to experiment? Does the college campus itself alter the making? Perhaps.

But perhaps too, by bringing makerspaces to college campuses, the influence will flow the other way. The Maker Movement can help shift the academic landscape away from a teacher-focused endeavor to a more learner-centered one. It can prompt us to rethink our assignments. It can prompt us to evolve our expectations of what college students can do.

With makerspaces on campuses we will see more experimentation, and I think too more risk-taking, more iteration. We will see more cross-disciplinary interactions -- the 3D printer is the new water cooler. More sharing. More relevant, more technical projects.

And most importantly here, these technologies are in the hands of the learner. Makerspaces mean that students are not the objects of technology, they're the subjects. They have agency in a makerspace. They are not the consumers of technology, they are creators. They are makers and builders and thinkers.

And really isn't that what we want all learners to be?
[ View the story "The Case for a Campus Makerspace" on Storify]

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Here is a (rough) transcript of my talk today at the ELI Annual Meeting in Denver. I've also Storified some of the tweets from the session and included a link to my slidedeck. Special thanks to Jentery Sayers (UVic) and Tim Owens (UMW) for the use of their photos from their respective campus makerspaces.

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MakeSchools - Home of the Higher Ed Maker Alliance

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Seventy-eight colleges and universities in 32 states representing more than 1.1 million students are committing to take new actions in support of the maker movement on their campuses and in their communities.

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The Institute of Making is a cross-disciplinary research club for those interested in the made world: from makers of molecules to makers of buildings, synthetic skin to spacecraft, soup to diamonds, socks to cities.

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LibGuides: Making & Makerspaces at Cornell University Library: Makerspaces at CUL

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LibGuides: Making & Makerspaces at Cornell University Library: Makerspaces at CUL

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When the University of Southern California opened its new Iovine and Young Academy in August, students zeroed in on a problem - no skateboard stand. So they got together to create a cardboard prototype, then went into the academy's woodshop to build one.

"These are not kids who are going to sit back and say, 'I don't know how to do that,' " says Susan Metros, associate dean of the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation (a program of the USC Roski School of Art and Design) and interim CIO of USC's Marshall School of Business. "They're always thinking about how to make things happen, and nothing seems to stop them."

That was just the idea Beats Electronics founders Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young - aka Dr. Dre - had in mind when they established the academy: Create a program that fuses engineering, business and arts education to produce innovative, entrepreneurial graduates. And because an essential part of the program requires students to build products and spend much of their senior year creating prototypes, USC housed the academy in a makerspace dubbed the Garage.

"It's a very sheltered space where you can unleash your creativity," says freshman Caitlin Tran.

While USC is one of only a few universities to center an entire academy inside a makerspace where students take the majority of their courses, a growing number of institutions are inviting students, faculty and even members of their surrounding communities into makerspaces. The idea is that by providing comfortable settings with high-tech carpentry and crafting tools, visitors will hang out, collaborate, learn and become inspired to build innovative creations.

"Makerspaces are not yet incredibly common in academic libraries, but there's a wave of early adopters," says Steven Bell, associate university librarian at Temple University and a past president of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

He says there's no general agreement as to what constitutes a makerspace in an academic setting, however. While a 3D printer is a typical component, it could also include helping community members use a Raspberry Pi to build a small computer, providing soldering irons so students can create circuits for a motherboard or even nontechnical crafts projects.

"I don't think there are constraints on what it is or how it should work or what's in there," Bell says. "It's a great period of experimentation, and academic librarians are learning from each other."

The Garage

The 31 students at the Iovine and Young Academy aren't typical college freshmen. Their average grade point average is 3.75. Several created businesses, built applications and even sold startups before their first practice SAT exam.

But when they started looking at colleges, many were disappointed. Tran, for instance, is interested in art, technology and business, and while she can envision a career incorporating all three disciplines, she couldn't find a program that covered them all.

"Most said when they found this degree, they felt like this was it - the answer to their prayers," says Metros.

The program's home, the Garage, was created from an undeveloped space on the fourth floor of USC's student center. It's a large rotunda with two nontraditional classrooms, and it has a variety of rooms off the central area, including a fabrication room, a 3D printing space, a workshop and a conference room. High-end audio-visual equipment and displays fill the space. Five group workstations are equipped with 10 Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth and cutting-edge industry-standard design software.

6

The number of 3D printers at the USC Iovine and Young Academy

SOURCE: Ian McCully, facilities manager, USC Iovine and Young Academy

Unlike in traditional classroom and campus spaces, students in the program are in the Garage day and night. They take classes, eat lunch and hang out there.

The curriculum reflects the entrepreneurial spirit of the program, but there's also flexibility built into the schedule. As faculty get to know the students, they learn about their interests and areas in which they strive to build additional knowledge. So they hold what they call "popups" - impromptu lessons and demos that focus on particular concepts and skills, Metros says.

Regardless of the requirements, Tran says the academy's entire culture encourages students to create. When she doesn't know how to do something, she can just ask one of her classmates, whose skills range from graphic design to building drones in the backyard.

"We always have an expert in our midst," says Tran.

Clearing Out Dorms

The makerspace at Massachusett's Wheaton College grew out of the institution's computer science department, where Associate Professor Tom Armstrong had witnessed a growing void in student knowledge.

The problem, he says, is that instead of going to computer labs to access high-tech equipment, students worked in their dorm rooms, where they had access to increasingly powerful computers of their own. That meant they were no longer collaborating on assignments, seeing what others were working on or asking each other questions. But that's how students have traditionally gained knowledge outside of class.

"Students would be these solitary scholars in their rooms, and that's not the environment we wanted," Armstrong says.

About five years ago, with some seed funding, he began purchasing DJ equipment, hand tools, a 3D printer, Arduinos and Raspberry Pi computers - "low-cost things that we thought would bring more folks in," Armstrong says. And that's how the Wheaton Autonomous Learning Lab, affectionately known as the Whale Lab, was born. With additional funding, the college has since purchased other game-changing equipment, including a laser cutter, an industrial design fabricating 3D printer, a computer-controlled milling machine and a jacquard loom.

Having an array of activities in the space is important, Armstrong says, because it helps to expand student knowledge. One person may work at programming while another crochets, and each may think the other's tasks seem impossible. But the more time they spend together, the more those tasks feel approachable.

"The phrase 'I don't know' becomes less scary," he says.

Creating Off Campus

When Fort Hays State University in Kansas opened its makerspace in summer 2013 inside the Forsyth Library, the goal was to provide a space where students could create, innovate and work with tools they wouldn't otherwise have access to. Officials there have since met that goal and more.

The university's education department, for instance, has used the makerspace to teach elementary science education to preservice teachers, who in turn run after-school programs there for students from local schools, explains Paul Adams, interim dean of FHSU's College of Education and Technology and director of the Science and Mathematics Education Institute.

"It's great, because we're getting STEM education for preservice students, and they're beginning to get that out to the children in the community," says Adams.

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When the University of Southern California opened its new Iovine and Young Academy in August, students zeroed in on a problem - no skateboard stand. So they got together to create a cardboard prototype, then went into the academy's woodshop to build one.

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Design and share beautiful flyers just like this one!

Spread the word with an online flyer. They're easy to make and impossible to mess up :)

Try it now

Make, Create, Innovate!

Lewis and Clark's MakerSpace Adventure! As told by Angela Rosheim, Teacher-Librarian

Resources to Borrow or Invest In...

MASL 2016 Presentation Blending Your MakerSpace and Library Standards For Student Success: Teresa Barnett and Angela Rosheim

Invent To Learn by Stager and Martinez

MakerSpace Playbook http://makered.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Makerspace-Playbook-Feb-2013.pdf (download)

MakeSpace: How To Set The Stage For Creative Collaboration by Doorley & Witthoft

The Maker Movement Manifesto by Mark Hatch

The Art of Tinkering by Karen Wilkinson

Worlds of Making: Best Practices for Establishing a MakerSpace in Your School by Laura Fleming

MAKE Magazine

Tinkerlab by Rachelle Doorley

Maker Tutorials and Inspiration

About Me...

I am a teacher-librarian at Lewis & Clark Elementary in Liberty, Missouri. I have been in education for 28 years and every year is an adventure! This last year has been amazing as I brought a MakerSpace to our school to allow our kids to explore, tinker, collaborate, find their passions, problem-solve, fail, persevere, and actively participate in what they learn. Hop on over to my blog if you would like to see our kids and MakerSpace in action...

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Design and share beautiful flyers just like this one! Spread the word with an online flyer. They're easy to make and impossible to mess up :) Try it now Make, Create, Innovate! Lewis and Clark's MakerSpace Adventure!

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A space providing students and staff with resources to work on innovative ideas and projects related to making is now open in the Main Library.

The new University maker space, in Room 1.12 in the Main Library, aims to provide students and staff with the resources to work on innovative ideas and projects related to making, whilst supporting personal development and improving creative and technical skills.

At uCreate Studio you can find a variety of tools such as Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, as well as 3D printers and scanners. Workshops are available and open to students and staff interested in making. These workshops are informal and focus on collaborative multidisciplinary work.

Find out more on the uCreate Studio website: http://www.ucreatestudio.is.ed.ac.uk/

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A space providing students and staff with resources to work on innovative ideas and projects related to making is now open in the Main Library. The new University maker space, in Room 1.12 in the Main Library, aims to provide students and staff with the resources to work on innovative ideas and projects related to making, whilst supporting personal development and improving creative and technical skills.

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Makerspace - School of Computing - University of Kent

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University of Kent - The UK's European University

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A bunch of people who share a large workshop and meet on a regular basis to do projects and get some input. A place where kids can learn to build robots instead of becoming robots. A little community-driven factory, or just a lair for hackers. The world needs more of these spaces, and every hackerspace, makerspace or fab lab has its very own way of making it work. Nevertheless, when and if problems and challenges show up - they are always the same - almost stereotypically, so avoid some of the pitfalls and make use of the learnings from almost a decade of makerspacing to get it just right. Let's take a look at just what it takes to get one of these spaces up and running well.

Choosing A Legal Form

When choosing a legal form for your makerspace - or anything else - you will usually weigh freedoms against the liabilities. Freedoms can be the ability to make profits, or the possibility to hand out tax-deductible donation receipts. Liabilities can arise from taxation or the claim for damages by a third party. Because it excludes the private assets of the founders from the liability of the makerspace as a legal entity, it's generally considered safer to form the country-specific equivalent of a limited liability company - an LLC - than going completely unincorporated. Most countries - and most US states (except Kentucky, Minnesota, Tennessee) provide tax-exemptions for LLCs with a non-profit purpose. Still, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and to use your full potential - first - consult your tax consultant and - second - get legal advice from a lawyer, too.

Dealing With Tax And Accounting

Since makerspaces aren't companies with large numbers of in and outgoing transactions, it's fair to say that the most basic book-keeping software and a dedicated member will do on the accounting side. However, there's no point in manually tracking each monthly membership fee payment, so that's the baseline of functionality you are looking for. At the end of the year, you do good in getting a capable tax consultant to take care of the tax declaration in detail - and in time.

Getting An Insurance

A makerspace needs an insurance, and it's not necessarily a problem to get one. Yet, some insurance companies will want to inspect the spaces and installations beforehand. This usually creates an insurance gap when you're just setting up your space, and this is the time when the most accidents happen. Talk to your insurance about this to be insured before and after you open the doors. Also, check the scope of your insurance, and check if it covers only members or also guests of the makerspace.

Setting A Mission Statement

Some see makerspaces as fully fledged prototyping laboratories, where you find all the fancy tools from waterjet cutters to pick-and place machines. To others, this is reserved only to the small community driven factories named fablabs. Another direction turns to makerspaces as purely educational institutions where kids can learn STEM skills and get excited about technology. Or you're just setting up a repair café. If you want to run a makerspace, there should be clarity about where it's going.

The numbers

Sooner or later in your planning phase, you may want to open a spreadsheet and get a feel for the numbers, both for the setup and the operational costs.

Turnover

The first sustainable income your makerspace is going to have will most certainly be the membership fee, paid by the founders and the first members of the space. Only add other income sources, such as sponsors, if they are secured and not based on speculations.

Operational Cost

This is what will have to cover the basic, recurring cost, such as rent, insurance, electricity, broadband internet, water and the tax consultant at the end of the year. If nobody in the founding team has considerable experience with bookkeeping, you may want to outsource that as well and allocate a reasonable amount for that.

Most costs scale with the growth of your space, but first and foremost, it all boils down to the rent. So basically, all you have to do is gather a few reasonable quotes for square meter prices in the area where you want to open your space and figure out the size of the space. This can be done by thinking big and allocating space for the different subsections of a space, or by being economical to see what you can afford from the start and then squeeze everything in that figure.

For the latter option, a reasonable starting point could be a basic minimum of 50 square meters, and for example two square meters of extra space for each member that is expected to join within the first 6 months. At this point, you may already anticipate growth and weigh the cost of paying for extra space now against the cost of relocating later. Usually, relocating is considerably cheaper, although, for a newly started space, the first location should at least allow for a member growth of at least 100%.

The Setup Cost

The setup cost of a makerspace is dominated by the founding cost, mostly state fees and notary cost, the security deposit for the premises, and the cost of making the space usable by and filling it with equipment. The founding team will probably already own equipment to contribute. A few tools here, maybe a small laser cutter or a reflow oven there. That's good, since it saves you money, and unless you're running your space as a profitable business with a rock solid business plan, a loan might not be the best start for your makerspace.

You will probably still need a bit of capital to fill your space with more equipment and become operational, and it is a challenge on its own to raise that. If you and the other founders don't pour in some money, you will need to go on the hunt for sponsors. Either way, these expenses will come with a reasonable planning effort.

Paid Staff

If you still have your spreadsheet open, you may have noticed how the numbers change with more members. When you're just getting started, it's all about operating efficiently and self-managed. Once you grow, more membership fees come in, and the higher utilization of space and equipment lower the cost per member. Unfortunately, with higher utilization, the impact of equipment downtimes also goes up. If you are just getting started, you probably don't even have to think about this, but for makerspaces that already have grown to a certain size, the requirement for dedicated workshop staff may arise. The threshold for this is quite high, yet when reaching about 500 members and 1,000 square meters (about 10,000 square feet) of space area, even the best self-management efforts can lead to chaos.

Even if you aren't about to open a little factory - at the end of the day, projects are born from possibilities. Therefore, equipment is one of the core values a makerspace can offer its members. The acquisition of equipment requires thorough planning to ensure completeness: You don't need everything, but you need everything to make a project happen.

The First Aid Kit

It's the first thing you need to get, and it deserves being mentioned first. Every other item can be bought when the need comes up.

Quality And Quantity

The concept of sharing allows you to look for more expensive and higher quality equipment, which will help you tackle the issue of increased wear in a workshop environment. A single industrial grade multimeter is always better than a bucket of broken ones. Yet, neither will enable your members to give a proper electronics workshop with 20 participants. The same is true for soldering irons, screwdrivers, pliers, and many other things.

The Laser Cutter

Laser cutters and makerspaces belong together. These amazing machines are affordable, have a high throughput and low operating cost. Everybody can learn how to use them, and since they are fast and reliable, with rare downtimes, even large spaces usually don't maintain more than one machine. So what can possibly go wrong? Well, not too much, if you've read Donald's guideline on the topic. Besides the follow-up costs of fume extraction and cooling systems, CO2 laser cutting systems above a certain power level - about 150 Watts - need an oxygen supply to cut metals, which results in higher operating costs.

The 3D Printers

3D-printers and makerspaces belong together, too. But it's a love-hate relationship. They are easy to use, yet it's also easy enough to produce failure for people who are new to the toolchain. That is - of course - part of any learning experience, but will inevitably result in downtimes. People will throw the most impossible geometries, G-Code instructions and materials at those machines, and 3D printers aren't usually smart enough to notice that they are about to break themselves.

Therefore, avoid fancy dual or triple extrusion setups that complicate things even further and go for simple, reliable machines that come with either a proper toolchain or at least some well-tuned presets for open-source toolchains. When you calculate the budget for this section, consider that you will sooner or later need more than one 3D printer because, with growing member count, the low throughput of 3D printers will become a noticeable limitation.

The Rest Of The Machine Park

For commercial makerspaces, it's typically the way to go for a fully fledged machine park from the start, from the waterjet, 6-axis CNC, press brake and sandblasting chamber, to the TIG welder. The availability of machines accelerates the growth of the member count and quickly compensates for the acquisition costs.

Yet, the force is with NPO makerspaces on this one, and you'd be surprised how much abandoned equipment can be found in the basements of this world. They're waiting for you to be acquired in exchange for a tax relieving donation receipt or a bucket of corporate-responsibility-karma-points. If possible, approach local manufacturers or resellers directly and ask if they can help you out and you might retrieve an unsellable display item.

Electronic Door Lock

Because it takes an organizational effort to run your makerspace with opening hours, most makerspace operate as open workshops, with people coming and going whenever they want. While members will carry keys, to everybody else, the doors are closed and locked, protecting the valuable infrastructure from theft, vandalism, and occupation.

However, handing out more and more mechanical keys to a mechanical lock brings a significant administrative effort, it also perforates the security of the door in which the lock resides. Eventually, it becomes obsolete. Mechanical keys can be copied, they can be lost, and they can only be invalidated with the consent of the current holder. Especially in makerspaces, where unusual machinery such as key-cutting-machines is not unusual at all, mechanical keys are useless.

An electronic door lock based on contactless smart cards or tags is the way to go here, and in many large makerspaces, this is already a reality. Unlike mechanical keys, contactless smart cards offer protection against cloning. Similar solutions based on NFC or other RFID tags don't have this cloning protection, but at least they can be tracked and invalidated if they are lost or otherwise compromised. All of them are cheap to acquire in quantities and can be used around the space in many ways, one of them being machine access control. A great example implementation of an NFC-based system is the Milwaukee Makerspace Access Control System. In addition to that, if your makerspace is rather large and has more than one doors, it's a good idea to implement a form of door lock monitor. This makes it easier to ensure that everything is locked up for the last person that leaves.

Machine Access And Training

Some power tools, such as circular table saws, CNC-machines, lathes and press brakes can be dangerous, but almost all of them are expensive and can take damage quite easily when used inappropriately. With new members entering the machine park, it becomes necessary to provide regular training workshops where members can learn how to use the equipment safely. You may also want to ensure that only members, who have taken the official training, use these machines.

While this should be self-evident and could be implemented as nothing more than a behavioral code, it just doesn't work like this in reality. Trained members are going to pass on their knowledge to others, which is good, but also comes with some amount of information loss, and sooner or later things start to break. There are various ways in how to deal with this, but the most elegant solution so far is probably the MACS Makerspace Access Control System, created by George Carlson and Kolja Windeler from the Texas MakerBarn. Their smartcard-based system only allows card holders that have received a proper training to actually turn on the machine.

Storage Space

Makers need the option to leave their projects and personal equipment in the makerspace. However, some need more, and some need less space, and you need an effective way to keep the clutter low. Therefore, put a price on storage space, even if it's just a small one. The smallest possible hurdle that already avoids a lot of clutter may be if members have to purchase their own box, ideally a stackable standard size that is used throughout the space.

Material Management

The drawer with unsorted, mixed resistors, capacitors, and transistors, or the box with mixed screws may save one's project on build night. However, keep the clutter low, and one preferred series of resistors is usually more than enough. Unsorted materials are a byproduct of makerspace build nights, not the primary raw material. Make sure it's easy to store and retrieve all materials in organizer boxes (not just the electronics) and practice the art of throwing things away. You will encounter members or guests bringing their old toasters, printers and other curiosities that may be tempting to accept and store for later use in the material section. Unless you have a particular use for any of these, be it an immediate workshop or an imminent project, it will save you a truckload of disposal efforts (and costs) to say "no thanks" from the beginning and roll with a no-messy culture.

The Board Can't Do Everything

Every makerspace needs a responsible management team of no less than three members to distribute the responsibilities. The board will initiate the board meetings, poll the members on important decisions, and oversee the whole thing. However, especially in NPO associations, the board members - and probably you if you're about to start a space - often invest a lot of spare time in the administrative effort to keep everything going. If you don't want to burn through board members at a fast rate, give space for and implement a self-managing culture.

Commerce In The Space

It can be extremely healthy for a makerspace to have a core group of individuals with a vested interest in the well-being of the makerspace. This can be a startup or a few freelance developers and engineers, or anybody who uses the infrastructure of the space more frequently, eventually becoming the active core. They substantially benefit from the makerspace and therefore are motivated to take a bit of extra care that everything is going well. Their role in the space is not much different from any other member of the space, but their motivation - based on a fair portion of self-interest - will spread contiguously and adds a whole lot to the self-management capabilities of the space. To implement this actively, many makerspaces go one step further and offer co-working space as well.

DIY Things

Due to the open nature of makerspaces, you will sooner or later find your space becoming an ecosystem for tinkerers, semiprofessionals, and engineers with a wide range of interests and know-how. On the one side, they are coming to build their projects, use the equipment, get input and learn things. On the other side, some of them will hold workshops to pass on their knowledge, which also helps to attract new members, service the machines and figure out ways to improve the overall experience. It's the maker way, so do it yourself.

How To Spend Money

The money for the acquisition of new equipment must come from somewhere, and in an organization where the membership fees are the major income source, it may sound like a good idea to use these funds to buy equipment. However, be aware that there is a very attractive alternative to this top-down approach: earmarked donation campaigns. On the one hand, the raising and allocating of funds increases the administrative efforts for the board, since they have to gather quotes, make suggestions on what to buy and poll the members about them. On the other hand, there will always be members with a low frustration threshold if their membership fees are used to buy a piece of equipment that they deem unnecessary. At least if you are operating as a non-profit, it generally goes smoother to keep the expenses and membership fees low to stimulate growth, wait until a part of the crowd has achieved a consensus about what to buy, and then run a earmarked donation campaign among members and sponsors to buy the thing.

The first and the last thing you have to manage is growth. After you take the leap and go from 0 to 1, you need to reach a critical mass and find the right size for the makerspace in your region. Makerspaces create value for their communities, and therefore, they grow automatically to a certain size by word-of-mouth. Still, growth is a direct result of the amount of community work you're doing.

Public Workshop Offerings

A full and diverse workshop schedule attracts new members like nothing else, so encourage your members to hold some or hire external mentors. Usually, every single individual in a makerspace knows something worthy to pass on to others, so make use of this resource.

The Tour

It's a good culture to welcome guests, give them a tour and show them around. Guests will show up at your door at any given time, and it's everybody's responsibility to give them a little introduction. To these visitors, it is the first impression they get from the community in your makerspace, so be sure to do it right.

Local Events

Being present at local fairs and maker events is probably the most obvious action you can take to promote your makerspace's presence, right after setting up a website. Yet, it's the hardest thing to implement. You'll typically find a certain reluctance among the members to leave the safe constraints of the space and present themselves at a corny stand at a fair. Since it takes a bit of planning ahead, it takes someone to initiate the preparations and sign-up the makerspace for the event. So, if you want this to happen, you need to engage the members to take action in time.

Build-Night

Offer a topic-less, come together once a week, with open doors for members and guests. It's often called build-night, and even if it's not the most productive work environment, it's fun and has a huge retention factor to guests who get hooked up to the energy of making.

The article has grown long, but is still just a crash course of the things involved in starting up a makerspace. These are the social groups of time, and have the potential for great impact on the future of hacking, designing, and engineering. They are well worth the effort and time you and your friends will put into the task.

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A bunch of people who share a large workshop and meet on a regular basis to do projects and get some input. A place where kids can learn to build robots instead of becoming robots. A little community-driven factory, or just a lair for hackers.

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Figuring out how to get (and keep) your makerspace organized can be a daunting task. I don't claim to have a magical organization system that works perfectly 100% of the time. But I have learned a few things about keeping our space organized over the last three years. Here's my advice:

How to Create Makerspace Organization That Actually Works

Get Your Students Involved

Work with your students to create your organization system. Ask them which items they think should go together. Ask your students how they think the space should be organized. If the system doesn't have their input at all, they probably won't stick with it.

Label All the Things!

Just about everything in my makerspace is labeled. I try to use labels that have both text and images when possible. This helps my ELL students to know where to put things, and it can work well for younger kids as well. Label what goes in each box. Label which shelf each box goes on. Adding labels to things can go a long way in creating a makerspace organization system that your students will work with.

Color Code

Many makerspace supplies are easy to color code since they're brightly colored. Think LEGOs, K'nex and markers. Organize these supplies by color. I LOVE Copernicus carts and tubs for this, as they already come in bright colors. Consider using color on your labels too. Have red labels on boxes that go on the red shelf, blue labels for the blue shelf, etc.

Work With What You've Got

Sometimes you might be able to reconfigure or reuse something that you already have. I've seen many schools transform old card catalogs into arts and crafts storage (with labels!). We reused a wire book display rack at Stewart and turned it into cardboard storage ( check it out in this post). Because our libraries are often filled with items that no longer serve their original purpose, we can often easily repurpose them.

Create an In-Progress Space

Students often create projects that they aren't quite done with yet. Create a designated space for them to keep these projects while they work on them. We've dedicated a wall in our Maker Room to this. Post a schedule that says how frequently the space will be cleaned out. Make post-it notes available so students can label their projects.

Balance Security With Accessibility

Lots of makerspace supplies are expensive. But if we lock up everything, we hinder the creativity of our students. Thus, it's important that we find a way to make these items available to our students without creating a bunch of hurdles. Try to find a balance between keeping expensive items safe and making supplies accessible to your students.

What's your favorite makerspace organization tip?

Diana Rendina, MLIS, is the media specialist at Tampa Preparatory School, an independent 6-12 in Tampa, FL. Previously, she was the media specialist at Stewart Middle Magnet School for seven years, where she founded their library makerspace. She is the creator of the blog RenovatedLearning.com & is also a monthly contributor to AASL Knowledge Quest. Diana is the winner of the 2016 ISTE Outstanding Young Educator Award, the 2015 ISTE Librarians Network Secondary Award, the 2015 AASL Frances Henne Award & the 2015 SLJ Build Something Bold Award. She is an international speaker on the Maker Movement and has presented at conferences including AASL, FETC & ISTE. Diana co-authored Challenge-Based Learning in the School Library Makerspace with Colleen and Aaron Graves and is also the author Reimagining Library Spaces: Transform Your Space on Any Budget.

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How to Create Makerspace Organization that Actually Works

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Figuring out how to get (and keep) your makerspace organized can be a daunting task. I don't claim to have a magical organization system that works perfectly 100% of the time. But I have learned a few things about keeping our space organized over the last three years.

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Invent To Learn Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

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Step 1: Decide on an appropriate location.
The library has been recommended as an ideal location for a Makerspace due to its generally central position within the school. It is often seen as a place of community and can offer exciting possibilities in terms of collaboration and cross curriculum development. There is a shift in how libraries are viewed, instead of being seen as a place of research, libraries are now viewed as a place where invention happens ( 4). Makerspaces however don't have to be confined to school libraries. Classrooms can also be Makerspaces - the key is to provide a space where students can engage in complex and personally meaningful projects. You will however have to take into account what resources you currently have, and what space you have available. Some schools may have the luxury of being able to dedicate a whole room, while for other schools, putting together a mobile kit that can be taken from room to room will be the best approach.

Step 2: Decide what type of maker space you would like to create.
Makerspaces tend to reflect a hands on learning approach to creating with tools and technology. The idea is "about creating creative people" through the process of experimenting in a structured learning environment ( 2). Therefore, it is safe to say that a Makerspace could be based on just about anything,as long as it encourages exploration and creativity. The needs of your learners will be different from school to school. Perhaps you want your Makerspace to encourage students to try technology that they wouldn't normally get exposure to, or maybe you simply want to get students to open up their creativity through quick and easy DIY projects. Both these options are great Makerspaces and just a couple of the different approaches you can use.

The possibilities are endless. For inspiration, be sure to check out the examples of working Makerspaces in schools found in the Projects tab.

The most important thing to remember when setting up a Makerspace is that the space should reflect the needs and desires of the learners . While you should have goals for what you want to achieve with your Makerspace it should also be flexible and able to adapt to the needs and wants of your learners. The Makerspace should be easily accessible to all members of the learning community in which it is placed and should reflect the different ways in which people learn and offer different ways of exploration to ensure creative learning is achieved by all. ( 8). Makerspaces don't have to be about spending a lot of money building top of the range fully kitted out, specially designed labs, Every classroom has the possibility to be a Makerspace, where students have the materials, support and time to learn by doing.

There are a few recommended texts that will help with establishing, stocking and maintaining the Makerspace ( 10):

1. Makerspace Playbook: This resource focuses on the Makerspace in a school setting and discusses location, tools, roles, safety and more. There are a number of other resources available from the same website that will further enhance the existing Makerspace and offer new ideas.
2. Makerspace Workbench: A new eBook resource, currently in early release, that further investigates the themes touched upon in the Makerspace Playbook. It is written by a teacher and updated as he discovers new things about creating and maintaining a Makerspace.
3. High School Makerspace Tools and Materials: A resource that explores technology based, Makerspace modules, such as general making, woodworking, metalworking, electronics, textiles, computers and many more.

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Step 1: Decide on an appropriate location. The library has been recommended as an ideal location for a Makerspace due to its generally central position within the school. It is often seen as a...

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Pinterest links on the theme of makerspaces

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Pinterest links on the theme of makerspaces

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Discover recipes, home ideas, style inspiration and other ideas to try.

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Starting a school makerspace from scratch

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Starting a school makerspace from scratch

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Step 2: Get Others Involved

Start a steering committee for your makerspace by involving interested teachers and students. Include your committee in purchasing decisions, goal setting, workshop ideas, and even leading makerspace programming. Learn from other schools and students about what they do by reaching out with Skype or Google Hangouts.

If you can, reach out to the community and get parents and community members involved. You'll also engage students if you enlist mentor experts. Start by finding student experts in your school and around your community. Utilize Twitter or Skype in the Classroom to branch out. Our students love connecting with other maker students around the country, as well as maker experts like the inventors of Makey Makey.

Step 3: Purchasing Makerspace Resources

Here are three guidelines:

1. What purchases will give you the most bang for your buck? Will buying a 3D printer break your budget?

2. Write grants, ask your PTA for funds, or use crowdsource funding like Donors Choose or GoFundMe. You can sign up for monthly emails about grant opportunities from Mackin.

3. Ask for old electronics, popsicle sticks, balloons, old car toys, old electronic toys, wire cutters, old telephone wire, old tennis balls, etc. You'll find lots of great STEM lessons at past Google Maker Camps. Follow STEM accounts and other makerspaces on Instagram, and scour Pinterest for cheap ideas.

Step 4: Building a Community of Makers

Immerse your students in maker supplies. Just as surrounding kids with books motivates them to read, surrounding them with tinkering tools motivates them to create. You don't need a special room for your makerspace. All you need are maker resources, somewhere to store items, and a beginner's knowledge of how to use your resources.

Once I moved our makerspace materials from the back room into an easily accessible area behind our circulation desk and instituted a project shelf, our students started tinkering every day!

Step 5: Hosting Workshops and/or Design Challenges

One of the most important aspects of starting a makerspace is getting the pulse of your community. I have an "iWanna" box on the circulation desk, and the first successful design challenge at Lamar was born from a student idea that ended up there. That student wanted to create catapults, so we ended up throwing down a Catapult Challenge to Diana Rendina's class in Florida, and they in turn challenged us to create games in Scratch and invent controllers with Makey Makey.

Students also love tinkering with Snap Circuits, littleBits, Knex, Lego, Makey Makey, Sphero, and Scratch during our maker mornings (see a resource list here) -- although just owning all of these resources is not going to ensure that making leads to learning. Let kids tinker and play, but eventually, you'll have to guide their learning by creating design challenges.

Design challenges teach problem solving and creative thinking, and they're one of the easiest ways to create a community of makers. Makey Makey co-inventor Jay Silver declares, "Design challenges are so important. . . it introduces time limits, a focused theme, and ends with a show and tell." You can show off student creations by hosting a mini-maker faire, connecting your makers with other students via Skype and Twitter chats, or showcase projects on other social media.

Here are some design challenge ideas that worked for me:

Step 6: Integrating Maker Education Into the Curriculum

While tinkering can lead to learning, remember that makerspace programming can also support classroom curriculum. Here are some ideas for incorporating making in the classroom:

What are some goals that you'd like to set for your school makerspace? Have you incorporated any great makerspace lessons in classrooms at your school? Please share in the comments section of this post.

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Starting a School Makerspace from Scratch

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Start a steering committee for your makerspace by involving interested teachers and students. Include your committee in purchasing decisions, goal setting, workshop ideas, and even leading makerspace programming. Learn from other schools and students about what they do by reaching out with Skype or Google Hangouts.

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6 Things to consider before starting your makerspace

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6 Things to consider before starting your makerspace

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Tom Friedman argues in The World is Flat that all we really need to know to be successful in life is how to come up with an idea and execute on it. Children have the first part down--they are hardwired for creativity. The challenge is what comes next. That's what makerspaces teach kids: the confidence and the competence necessary to execute their creative vision.

Makerspaces have made headlines recently. Several weeks ago New York City hosted the World Maker Faire. The White House had its first Maker Faire this summer, and schools and libraries across the country are installing these spaces.

It is certainly tempting to start thinking about all the amazing tools you could put into your makerspace. If you know anything about Makers, you are probably thinking that you need a CNC machine, a 3-D printer, Dremels for everyone and a laser cutter since they are the gateway tool for making things.

But buying a bunch of tools without first stopping to think about how they will be integrated into the culture and curriculum of your school is a recipe for a dusty and underused workshop.

Don't be tempted by the sexy CNC and laser cutters if you don't need them. Just taking apart a blender offers a wealth of learning opportunities.

From my experience installing makerspaces in several dozen schools, I've developed a process that helps you think through your makerspace and how it fits into the culture and curriculum of your school. Skipping this process, or one like it, will almost certainly result in tension, missed teaching opportunities, and overspending.

1. List the hopes, dreams and ideas you and others have for the space. Be sure to include stakeholders such as parents, board members, administration and other members of the community. It's likely that if you've made it this far, there have been lots of conversations about the space. If you need some help, try telling stories about what kids will do in the space and what they will learn. Write down words, sentences, or pictures.

2. Define the skills, knowledge and habits that kids will learn or develop in your space. Then describe what and how the space will help kids develop these skills. For example, if you would like a student to learn the skill of backwards mapping a project to create a plan and a timeline, then how are you actually going to teach this? Or if you want students to have a habit of employing Design Thinking to solve a complex challenge, how are you going to instill this? Similarly, if you want students to be competent on all the tools in the space, how are you going to teach and assess this competence?

3. Define the culture for the space. In other words, how will people behave in the space and how will those standards be communicated? How will you deal with safety around tools? How will you teach in the space and will it be different from other classes? How will you encourage and perhaps even celebrate failure?

4. Based on the culture and the desired skills, knowledge and abilities, determine appropriate integration points in the rest of your curriculum and the life of the school. Sometimes this is as easy as working with the most (or least) enthusiastic teachers. Math and science are fairly straightforward to integrate into a makerspace, but there are many integration points in history, social sciences and art. Where are you going to start?

5. Based on your integration points, define the arc of the year and the projects you are going to include. For example, if your kids have never held a hammer or turned a wrench, it might make sense to start with simple skill builders before you get to Arduino robots and electric cars. When you pick the projects, consider how you're going to teach them.

6. Design your space and pick the tools based on the decisions above. When designing the space, remember to consider power requirements, guidelines for safety, restricted areas around tools and what zone needs eye and ear protection. Make sure to include workspace for teams and set aside 30% of the room for project storage. As you think about tools, remember that magic of making can start with hot glue guns, string, soda bottles, soldering irons, hammers, nails and other very inexpensive equipment. Don't be tempted by the sexy CNC and laser cutters if you don't need them. Just taking apart a blender offers a wealth of learning opportunities.

This process is a lot of work. But going through it dramatically increases the chance that the makerspace will be integrated into your community and used by many. Next month I'll cover two schools and how this process shaped their experience in creating a maker space.

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6 Things to Consider Before Starting Your Makerspace - EdSurge News

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Tom Friedman argues in The World is Flat that all we really need to know to be successful in life is how to come up with an idea and execute on it. Children have the first part down--they are hardwired for creativity. The challenge is what comes next.