Boston Makers Prospectus

BOSTON MAKERSBOSTON’S NEWEST MAKER COMMUNITY

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Boston Makers is young not-for-profit 501c3 working to engage with the local maker community and create a makerspace in the Boston area. The goal is to provide a safe, affordable, and collaborative community-operated workspace with access to mentors, peers, classes, after-school programs, tools and other resources for the purpose of cultivating a community of makers who share their work and expertise in art, technology and culture.

Over the past 5 years, makerspaces, fablabs, hackerspaces, co-workspaces, and artists’ collaboratives have popped up around the globe. They offer opportunities to pursue creative passions in areas such as to DIY electronics, robotics, furniture, sculpture, textile and fashion art, jewelry, woodworking, software, media, and computer-aided design. This allows creative people to get out of your home or solo studio space, work amongst your neighbors, friends, and peers to share tools, and resources and be empowered by other people who like to make things and learn from each other. Makerspaces can also host special events, offer classes for adults, teens and kids, provide co-working spaces, provide shared tools, serve up cappuccino, sell supplies and provide consulting services.

We envision being resident in a makerspace between 3,000 -10,000 sq. feet, hosting weekly meet ups, hackathons, and demo nights, teaching hands-on classes, and providing studio space and storage for rent. Boston Makers members will have access to state-of-the-art digital production tools like 3D printers, CNC routers, and laser cutters as well as small-scale fabrication tools, computer stations and open multipurpose workstations. Boston Makers will also team up with local Boston organizations to design and implement community based workshops, projects, and special events that will inspire everyone to join the maker movement.

The following prospectus outlines how Boston Makers will engage with the maker community and open a local makerspace. It also describes the intentions, origins, and progress of Boston Makers thus far, and outlines how you can help to develop these resources.

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OUR VISION

BOSTON MAKERSBOSTON’S NEWEST MAKER COMMUNITY

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WHY IS THE MAKER MOVEMENT IMPORTANT?Makerspaces bring opportunities to a diverse demographic. They are places where entrepreneurs intersect with teens and skilled hobbyists share well-honed skills with curious novices. They provide access to state of the art technology to people who use them to create things for businesses, homes, markets and just plain fun. Makerspaces are highly collaborative, where the sharing of tools and space nuture innovative ideas.

Juliet Shor, a Boston College Professor of Sociology wrote in ‘After the Jobs Disappear’: “Community fabrication spaces like Artisan’s Asylum are becoming popular across the United States and Europe. For many, they represent an appealing vision of the future of work. Unlike in the classic industrial setting, where the manual and mental aspects of work are separated between blue- and white-collar employees, those tasks are integrated in these “makerspaces.” There’s a commitment to ecological sustainability.”

Make Magazine’s ‘Playbook’ describes: “The model of 21st-century learning calls for engaging and empowering learning

experiences for all learners. The model asks that we focus on what and how we teach to match what people need to know, how they learn, where and when they will learn, and who needs to learn. It brings state-of the art technology into learning to enable, motivate, and inspire all students, regardless of background, languages, or disabilities, to achieve. It leverages the power of technology to provide personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits-all curriculum, pace of teaching, and instructional practices.’

This is our challenge. It isn’t enough to train current students for the world of today — we have to train them for tomorrow...

We believe the Maker movement captures something about the future for a new direction in education....[and] exemplifies the kind of passion and personal motivation that inspires innovation. We can engage students as makers who learn how to use tools and processes to help them reach their own goals and realize their own ideas.”

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“ACCESS TO A SPACE OF THIS TYPE CAN CHANGE LIVES, UNITE

DIVERSE GROUPS, AND MAYBE CHANGE THE WORLD - EVEN IF

ONLY A LITTLE BIT.”—ANONYMOUS SURVEY RESPONDER

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Makers: The New Industrial Revolution” by Chris Anderson, 2012 EXCERPT: Here’s the history of two decades of innovation in two sentences: The past ten years have been about discovering new ways to create, invent, and work together on the Web. The next ten years will be about applying those lessons to the real world.

This book is about the next ten years.

Wondrous as the Web is, it doesn’t compare to the real world. Not in economic size (online commerce is less than 10 percent of all sales), and not in its place in our lives. The digital revolution has been largely limited to screens. We love screens, of course, on our laptops, our TVs, our phones. But we live in homes, drive in cars, and work in offices. We are surrounded by physical goods, most of them products of a manufacturing economy that over the past century has been transformed in all ways but one: unlike the Web, it hasn’t been opened to all. Because of the expertise, equipment, and costs of producing things on a large scale, manufacturing has been mostly the provenance of big companies and trained professionals.

That’s about to change.Why? Because making things has gone digital: physical objects now begin as designs on screens, and those designs can be shared online as files. This has been happening over the past few decades in factories and industrial design shops, but now it’s happening on consumer desktops and in basements, too. And once an industry goes digital, it changes in profound ways, as we’ve seen in everything from retail to publishing. The biggest transformation is not in the way things are done, but in who’s doing it. Once things can be done on regular computers, they can be done by anyone. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing happen now in manufacturing.

Today, anyone with an invention or good design can upload files to a service to have that product made, in small batches or large, or make it themselves with increasingly powerful digital desktop fabrication tools such as 3-D printers. Would-be entrepreneurs and inventors are no longer at the mercy of large companies to manufacture their ideas.

This appeals to the Web generation in a way that tinkering in the workshops of old did not. At the same time, the digital natives are starting to hunger for life beyond the screen. Making something that starts virtual but quickly becomes tactile and usable in the everyday world is satisfying in a way that pure pixels are not. The quest for “reality” ends up with making real things. This is not just speculation or wishful thinking—it can already be felt in a movement that’s gathering steam at a rate that rivals the First Industrial Revolution and hasn’t been seen since, well, the Web itself.

Today there are nearly a thousand “makerspaces”—shared production facilities—around the world, and they’re growing at an astounding rate: Shanghai alone is building one hundred of them. Many makerspaces are created by local communities, but they also include a chain of gym-style membership workshops called TechShop, run by a former executive of the Kinko’s printing and copying chain and aiming to be as ubiquitous. Meanwhile, consider the rise of Etsy, a Web marketplace for Makers, with nearly a million sellers who sold more than $0.5 billion worth of their products on the site in 2011. Or the 100,000 people who come to the Maker Faire in San Mateo each year to share their work and learn from other Makers, just as they do at the scores of other Maker Faires around the world.

What started as a cultural shift—a fascination with new digital prototyping tools and a desire to extend the online phenomenon into real-world impact—is now starting to become an economic shift, too. The Maker Movement is beginning to change the face of industry, as entrepreneurial instincts kick in and hobbies become small companies.

This nascent movement is less than seven years old, but it’s already accelerating as fast as the early days of the PC, where the garage tinkerers who were part of the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975 created the Apple II, the first consumer desktop computer, which led to desktop computing and the explosion of a new industry.

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“I WANT US ALL TO THINK ABOUT NEW AND CREATIVE WAYS TO ENGAGE YOUNG PEOPLE

IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, WHETHER IT’S SCIENCE FESTIVALS, ROBOTICS

COMPETITIONS, FAIRS THAT ENCOURAGE YOUNG PEOPLE TO CREATE AND BUILD AND

INVENT—TO BE MAKERS OF THINGS, NOT JUST CONSUMERS OF THINGS.”

—PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, APRIL 2009, NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES ANNUAL MEETING

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THE TEAM

Dominic Burdick President, Treasurer

Dominic is a lifelong maker. As a kid he started out building a solar panel water heater, electronic toys, fireworks and skateboards. He also destroyed several perfectly good working clocks, locks and other items in an effort to figure out how they worked. Professionally, Dominic has been developing products for the blind for 20+ years. Early in his career he was involved with start-up companies in wireless and fiber optic technologies. Dominic has been actively engaged with

community organizations in Jamaica Plain including the afterschool program at the Curley K-8 School and Jamaica Plain Children’s Soccer. Dominic has grown increasingly excited about the DIY movement and has been looking for ways to develop the idea in his own community. Dominic studied Electronic Engineering at Sussex University, UK and Electro-Optics at Tufts University.

Eileen McMahon Ed. M., Clerk

Eileen was a Program Manager at MITx where she was in charge of developing

free, massive open online MIT courses. She founded UMass Boston’s Open Course-Ware Collection and taught at the University’s Communication Studies Department for more than a decade. She has produced hundreds of interactive media products for Disney, Dreamworks, the Criterion Collection, CBS, Paramount, Activision Studios, Sega, Sony, Universal Studios, PBS, NBC, National Geographic and others. Eileen is passionate about open platforms, collaborative communities and the fertile intersections of art and technology. Eileen earned her Ed. M. at Harvard Graduate School of Education where she concentrated in Technology Innovation in Education.

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Darien Fortier, LEED AP BD+CCreative Director

Darien is an Architectural Designer and Marketing | Graphics Coordinator at Hacin + Associates. Working on projects like Living Proof’s Style | Lab prototype, Boston’s first innovation center, District Hall, and Hyundai’s new World Headquarters she focuses on creating innovative and sustainable environments that encourage collaboration. In her spare time, Darien thrives on the excitement of creating things by hand and helping others turn their ideas into reality. She has extensively served as a volunteer and instructor teaching digital skills, construction skills, and performance art.

Charles McEnerneyAdvisor

Charlie a Principal at Layers Marketing, an agency handling traditional, web, and mobile marketing. Charlie has worked in marketing roles at arts and entertainment companies for more than 26 years, including ArtsBoston, Fast Company magazine, HBO, MovieMaker

magazine, the Seattle International Film Festival, WGBH, and in film, audio, and music production. Layers Marketing clients include The Arts Fuse, The Eliot School of Fine & Applied Arts, Future of Music Coalition, and Jamaica Plain Music Festival. Charlie teaches courses at Emerson College as well as workshops and seminars on marketing. Charlie’s family inspires his desire to bring a makerspace to Boston for adults and children as a creative space and a place to learn.

Abigail NormanAdvisor

Abigail the Director of the Eliot School of Fine & Applied Arts, which inspires lifelong learning in craftsmanship and creativity for all ages, through classes in its Boston schoolhouse and partnerships with Boston Public Schools and community centers; its specialties include woodworking, fiber arts, book arts and mixed media. She has over 20 years experience in nonprofit administration, focused on community-based arts and media, including years with Women Make Movies and Somerville Community Access Television. She is a current member of the Boston Cultural Council.

SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR VOUNTEERS!

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Dominic Burdick and Eileen McMahon set up a table at the Jamaica Plain Wake Up The Earth festival in Spring of 2013 to gauge interest in a local makerspace. The response encouraged them to start a series of public meetings and continue the conversation. Six months later there was an online presence, an active mailing list and people gathering for maker meetups and pop-up classes. In June of 2014 Boston Makers filed the paperwork with the State of Massachusetts to become a not-for-profit and is currently fundraising and looking for a proper space.

Public MeetingsTo better understand the local maker community’s interests and needs, in the fall of 2013 Boston Makers conducted an open survey and held a series of public meetings in Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, West Roxbury, and Hyde Park. More than 80 people attended these meetings and expressed interest in being involved in a maker community. Over 250 responded to the survey. Boston Makers continues to hold public meetings and encourage feedback.

Workshops, Pop-up Events and DemonstrationsBoston Makers actively coordinates workshops, meet-ups, and pop-up events. In 2013, the group ran Maker Vacation Camps at

the Curley K-8 school in Jamaica Plain where students learned how to solder and program a microcontroller. Later, campers and counselors presented the Arduino-controlled Electronic Keep-out Signs they created at the Cambridge Science Festival DIY throw down at the Artisan’s Asylum in Somerville. Boston Makers held their first pop-up maker event in May of 2014 during JP First Thursdays, where they gathered community organizations such as Stonybrook Fine Arts, JP Knit and Stitch, and the Eliot School, and a number of local makers to hold intereractive demonstrations and activities. During the summer of 2014, free maker classes were offered in wearable electronics, electronic greeting cards, and electronic instruments to the Boston Community in collaboration with the Hyde Square Task Force, and in the Fall, the group launched a weekly donation-based Maker Club. Boston Makers continues to develop programs and upcoming events can be seen on our blog and event calendar!

CollaborationBoston Makers believes in collaborating with organizations that are part of the local creative community to jointly develop programs, events, and marketing | outreach programs to spread the word and grow the community network.

ORIGINS | CURRENT ACTIVITIES

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“Because I salivate every month at the classes offered at Artisan’s Asylum, but don’t have the wherewithal to travel all the way over there! More than that, I think we need a place for “re-skilling” for 21st century livelihoods and companies—a place for innovation, design, and prototyping. Boston has a long history of creativity and craftsmanship - let’s help take that into the future!”

—2013 SURVEY RESPONDER

“This city is filled with smart and creative people who need collaborative and affordable space to make things with their hands.”


“Access to a space of this type can change lives, unite diverse groups, and maybe change the world - even if only a little bit.”


“It’s not always possible to set up your studio at home. I think this side of Boston should have as much space available as the other parts of Greater Boston offer.”

— 2013 SURVEY RESPONDER

“Art is essential. People should have a comfortable place to go where they can be surrounded by those of the same cloth; makers and dreamers and minds that think 3Dimensionally.”


“To share space, expertise and tools for artists, crafters, and techies. I’m excited!”


“Makerspace will provide a place for individuals to connect with neighbors and share their talents.”


COMMMUNITY FEEDBACK: WHY DO YOU WANT A MAKERSPACE?

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We are actively seeking sponsors, space, tools and volunteers to help us achieve our goals. Here are a few ways you can get involved:

Make a donationSponsor an activity or eventShare your expertiseHelp us find a spaceCome to our next public meetingVolunteer your timeHelp coordinate a workshop or eventOrganize a fundraiser, or research and apply for grantsConnect with us on social media Tell others about us!

We also encourage all local makers to attend our upcoming events and join our community! Stay tuned for early membership sign-up opportunities and check out website, blog and event calendar to learn more about our organization.

HOW CAN YOU HELP?

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WWW.BOSTONMAKERS.ORGCONTACT US: [email protected]

THANK YOU!

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Prepared by: Boston Makers, October 2014

Photography: Boston Makers Brett Dikeman Photography

References: Make Magazine, ‘Makerspace Playbook’ Chris Anderson, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution Juliet Shor: ‘When the Jobs Disappear’, New York TImes

Special thanks to all organizations and individuals with whom we’ve worked with thus far:

The Hyde Square Task Force The Elliot School Stoneybrook FIne Arts The Dream Factory Spontaneous Celebrations JP Knit and Stitch JP Main Streets Hacin + Associates Layers Marketing`

WWW.BOSTONMAKERS.ORGCONTACT US: [email protected] MAKERS

Boston Makers Prospectus

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