The Wolf Returns!

What is the wolf? The wolf stops us being lazy, the wolf stops us being greedy... the wolf behind us drives us. What are we with out the wolf...

About this time last year Nottingham Hackspace had some very serious and potentially devastating news. We learned that we had to move out of our Hackspace. This quite literally was putting us out of our comfort zone. We paid the princely and, I admit at the time, scary sum of £100 per month for a suite of rooms above the Tesco's on Station Street in Nottingham. It's an old Police Station and I guess that it was falling into a very poor state of repair.

David H in the workshop of Nottingham Hackspace Circa 2011

At that time we had seemingly few options. Our total income from membership dues was about £200 per month, maybe a little more. We had about £500 in the bank in money earned from kit sales and workshops and we had a lot of good will. In some ways it felt like the Hackspace ride was over, how could we possibly move forward with our backs to the walls and no capital? We scratched around for a new home. We spoke to our landlords, the Art Organisation, who had other highly dilapidated space. Everywhere we looked seemed way too expensive. How could we afford £400 and £500 a month rents when we had an income of only £200? Not only could we not afford the spaces we saw, they didn't meet our ambition. They just weren't big enough. They often had just one room and we'd be climbing over each other to get anything done. Working on code and sawing up wood often doesn't mix. Saw dust is not nice on textiles!

I don't clearly recall when everyone stopped telling me that we couldn't possibly move into the huge set of rooms at Roden House. Before long everyone seemed to believe we could do it. Pull together £2000 in deposit and build up membership over the course of a few months to cover our £1k a month rent. We all did some napkin maths. RepRap Matt, Michael-the-Money and James all did big spreadsheets working out how our income would need to build and how many members we'd need month on month. We negotiated with our (soon to be) landlord and worked out a stepped rent building up month on month starting with two months for free!

In late April 2012 Nottingham Hackspace has received an invoice for a little under £3k in unpaid rent...just like it says in those large famously friendly letters on the cover of the hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy

DON'T PANIC...

We've discussed for sometime that we aren't quite paying our full rent at the moment and had in the past queried this with our landlords. It's important to remember that's we've in no-way defaulted on our monthly payments to the landlord either as we've been paying exactly what they invoice the Hackspace for by direct debit! It seems that since July 2011 our landlords believe they have been under billing us. The board checked Nottinghack's books too and Hackspace accounts show that our landlords are right though we feel that the figure calculated needs some explanation and may not be exactly correct. Hackspace has some negotiating to do as it's the end of it's one year tenancy agreement too. Nottingham Hackspace's landlords apologised for the error and graciously have allowed Hackspace to negotiate a payment plan with no interest being charged on the owed money. 

If anything this new large bill for the Hackspace has been a timely reminder to me that we need to keep the project moving forward. The Hackspace can never afford to get too comfortable or stop actively looking to organise new workshops, events and bring in exciting new members. We need more people and more money to make Hackspace a success. More than that, we need the wolf. Don't get me wrong a sudden unexpected bill for £3k isn't great but it does keep us on our toes. What doesn't kill us will make us stonger. Too many cook's will... not wait a minute that doesn't work.

...the road to success!

Something happened in the Hackspace on a Monday craft night early in April which made me feel really good about Nottingham Hackspace. It was the making of a bird box. Though the design was somewhat rustic and the finishing result (though fabulous) remains to be seen if it's practical, the journey to completion for the Hacker who made it is worthy of a brief mention somewhere.

One of the founders of hackspace and my fellow podcaster @KateMonkey, the RingMaster of craft night decided she was going to make a "goddamn birdhouse" out of roofing shingles and nothing was going to stop her, except the self imposed restriction on using "power tools" as she's promised her husband she wouldn't.

Taking a shingle and firmly clamping it upright, grabbing a handy looking saw, a gold marker pen to make the cut lines and a bunch of enthusiasm, it didn't take Kate long to realise that it might be time to try the band saw.

10 minutes later with a pile of shingles cut to size, a hammer and a fist full of nails, Kate chose the flimsiest trestle table to start hammering these boards together. Politely fending off offers of help, advise about the wobbly table and flatly refusing to use the air-powered nail gun we left her too it.

Moments later Kate appears at the proper work benches hammer in hand. At this point we'd set up the nail gun and offered to show Kate how it worked...

One of the greatest things about Hackspaces is that they put new tools into the hands of creative people to the extent of providing experience and encouragement that creativ

e people may dismiss in different environments. From thinking such tools are potentially "dangerous" in her hands, Kate went full circle (in my opinion) seeing that on the contrary using the wrong tools and environment for a task could prove equally dangerous. Had Kate tried to hammer the birdhouse together on the trestle or sawn the wood clamped vertically in the bench vice the difficulty and tedium of the task not to mention the potential for harm would have been enough to leave the birdhouse a pipedream... at least it would have been unlikely to finish up as the bird mansion (cream coloured, glitter covered, pink writing) it became.

Kate recently posted in our Google group that she'll be running a planter making workshop. Had she not made a successful stab at the bird box with the sort of environment and tools that

the Hackspace can provide would this have been likely? The birdhouse, band saw and nail gun are fairly simple projects and tools. Take this learning up a level to working with

autoCAD, CNC and laser cutting for example, or the lathe and welding equipment we can see that individual's creativity and experience can be grown in a Hackspace with the right level of encouragement and more importantly empowerment.

If there is a lesson in this tail it should be that we should all challenge ourselves to make ourselves a goddamn birdhouse!

Don't touch the precious things!

Hackerspace globally must be fighting the battle of the accumulation of crap.

One of the many challenges facing the movement is this... the sort of folk who like hackerspaces, like to hoard stuff.... useful stuff.... PRECIOUS stuff.

It's interesting to use a LOTRs example as I think that Mathom is the right term for this stuff. There is a Nottingham word for it too rammel which I prefer.

The essence of a mathom is something with no actual value which is far to precious to throw away. In Hackerspace circles this can literally be almost anything at all. To the intellect of most hackers, who can imagine any number of projects, almost anything "could" be useful.

Personally I think one of the top under rated assets of any hackerspace is the SPACE... it's in the name after all if you call it Hackerspacer, Hackspace or Makerspace. I've been to quite a few UK Hackspaces and I know that the key issue is how the space is used and how it is presented.

One Nottinghack rule I would highlight is No CRTs Thank You in the very early day of Nottinghack we were offered these at a rate of about 1 a week. That 17" monitor you coveted so much in the mid 90's is now worse than junk. It's vacuum chamber and mercury make it the worst kind of hazardous waste! You hackspace taking them, even if you CAN imagine some sort of multi-screen uber project is a BAD idea. Some hackerspaces have a ban on old PCs too. Good idea. I'd say the same about pre Windows XP laptops.

If you consider that most hackspaces have at least 10% of their spaces devoted to these mathoms we can see they are very important and worthy of investment! As they have not often been touch in periods longer than a month or more, it would not be completely illogical to store them elsewhere, say an hours drive from your hackspace.

It's my understanding that there are large and profitable businesses devoted to the storage of crap for a monetary fee... perhaps the procurement of less useful space elsewhere for your mathoms could be considered?

A waste of money? Surely not if these rarely touched precious things aren't important enough to pay to store less time away than they were last touched then it can only make sense to REDUCE your storage cost by moving them elsewhere?