Report

Community-Driven Design:

Open-sourcing a makerspace community

From: Fab City Foundation

Learning about makerspace communities in places that never had one is a challenging task. The closest makerspaces might be too far away to visit regularly. Moreover, the materials these communities post online provide little information on how to make it work. It is hard to start a thriving makerspace community from scratch when you are on your own. Understanding open-sourcing as the gradual process of documenting and making publicly available the inner workings of organisations, this resource pursues three objectives: (1) Telling how to hold a workshop or another significant event in a makerspace. (2) Sharing our lessons learnt on how to create a community through such sorts of events. (3) Establishing a first draft towards a blueprint for communities open-sourcing know-how documentation.

The resource attempts to make sense of an emerging chaotic situation using promising 21st-century frameworks such as distributed design. We aim to provide easy-to-explain processes and activities supported by materials that inspire other emerging makerspace communities to understand themselves, organise and take action.