Fwd: Glasgow Makerspace

[William Nelson]

Hey everyone,

Just thought I'd share this on the LUG list due to the interest I know
exists in this section of Glasgow regarding Maker/Hacker spaces. Looks
like another section of interested people are moving on this subject,
may be worth getting together, see what can be done/come of it.
--
  William Nelson
  wnelson at cmdcore.net



----- Original message -----
From: Glasgow Makers <glasgowmakersgroup at gmail.com>
To:  Will Nelson <wnelson at cmdcore.net>
Subject: Glasgow Makerspace
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2017 23:18:42 +0000

Hi everyone,
                    First of all thanks for everyone getting back to me.
                    It's great to have so much interest in helping set a
                    space like this up. Just want to mention my vision
                    for a place like this so we can make sure we're all
                    on the same page before we go any further. I'd like
                    a place like a traditional hackerspace following the
                    guidelines on hackerspaces.org.
Some of the main things I'm thinking of:

- It will be a community run space. There's no one in charge. All
  decisions will be made together.- To pay for rent and other bills I'd be looking at a membership fee.
  I'd want this to be as low as possible. Weekly open evenings that are
  free to all could be available to attract more members. We could also
  offer workshops free for members but at a cost for non members.- Makerspaces aren't a good business model so I'm not looking to make
  money here and I'd expect people to be involved in running it doing so
  on a voluntary basis. Hopefully, benefits will come in other ways like
  lower membership fees or maybe even free.- The place would have 24 hour access to members with keys. Initially
  only available to us as we're helping set the place up.- Once the place was established we could trust more people with keys
  (this sounds a bit of a risk but hasn't caused problems in other
  hackerspaces) meaning there would be less work for us and it would
  eventually run itself, just being a space we could all use. The way
  TOG do it in Dublin is members are on probation for the first 3 months
  and after that they are trusted with a key so could implement a
  similar measure here.- Funding wise I don't want to take a property we wouldn't be in
  complete control of, like a university space. I want us to run
  everything and not be controlled by others. Same thing when it comes
  to funding. Wouldn't say no to some but not if it controlled the way
  we ran it in anyway.
Like I said in my first point though I want it to be a community so if
there's any points there you really disagree with it's definitely up
for discussion. I'm not trying to be in charge just trying to get the
ball rolling.
If you're still keen to be involved the next step is for us all to meet
up to discuss ideas. I've set up a doodle poll[1] to try and find a time
that would suit everyone (I've selfishly only added the dates I'm
available and missed out weekends but if weekends are best for people
please let me know).
I'd also like to get the conversation going somewhere a bit better than
an email chain. Do people have any preferences? I was thinking Slack and
was thinking of setting up a project somewhere like Asana or Trello.
Again does anyone have any preferences for a project management tool?
As always let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Martin


Links:

  1. https://doodle.com/poll/xzskws7qv6cn5bwg