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?

The Story of a Picture

In early March 2010, just before the UK Maker Faire in Newcastle, four hansom young men met in a Nottingham pub. It was a heady time for hacking in the city with another group, LAB just starting up in the very same week! Having met up on MEETUP.COM on the now defunct Nottinghack Meetup page they decided to start a sort of club with the idea of meeting and making things. It would be like a hackspace but in a room somewhere behind a bar no doubt.

JP (front right) and myself went to the Maker Faire in Newcastle driving up so early that it wasn't open when we arrived. We had a pretty good time meeting all the makers and it only fired our enthusiasm for Nottinghack all the more. The four of us in the picture above met up at The Art Org cafe in the Hopkinson Building on Station Street to plan a meetup at the Navigation pub. It wasn't much later that we had that first meetup, the show and tell when we met other founders of Nottingham Hackspace like Matt Lloyd and John Crouchley.

The picture above was taken at the Nottingham Hackspace 2.0 BIG OPEN DAY event on the 28th May 2011. It shows Me (front left) Matt Little (back left), David Hayward (very back right) and JP Hastings (front right). Matt, David and I are all now trustees of the Hackspace, JP next did become a member but remains a supporter of the space and a good friend.

It's been an amazing journey and it's getting better all the time. I've met so many great people and good friends through Hackspace and I hope it continues for a very long time. We've some super things coming up like the BIG OPEN DAY II which will be on the 5th May 2012 and the Derby Mini Maker Faire which is on Sunday 3rd June 2012 at the Old Silk Mill Museum.

Next week I hope to tell you a little more about Bristol Hackspace and also about my visit to Cardiff Hackspace planned for Tuesday 20th March.

What is Hack-the-Space day?

On Sunday 11th March 2012 we had (what I think was) our 5th Hack-the-Space day at the Nottingham Hackspace. A Hack-the-Space day is a day dedicated to the larger project of making the Hackspace more awesome.

Nottinghack (as ever) is in need of a good tidy and sort out. After months of cold weather making the Hackspace occasionally less than pleasant to be in and after a few good large hauls of donations we have virtually no clear space left in the workshop.

The area between the metal working bench and the bike repair/storage area in particular needs attentions. Part of the problem is one that every Hackerspace probably faces. The sort of people who like Hackspaces are the self same sort of people who like to hoard stuff... I'm not sure if there is an anti-pattern here but I always think of it as "Don't Touch the Precious Things!" Basically it's a large amount of junk that is both at the same time completely useless and potentially useful. We try and address this problem at the Nottingham Hackspace by having several rules which include:

The 35L Rule which is probably the worst enforced rule we have. The rule basically says that every member should use one or more 35L jelly boxes to store their projects in and no more. However in reality lots of members have much larger projects and WIPs that need stashing about the space. I'm probably as guilty of that as anyone is!

Probably the better rule to help us is the No CRTs Thank You rule which pretty much says what it is in the name of the rule. At London Hackspace (I think) this has been stretched to include PC tower units and laptops. At Bristol Hackspace there is a shelf literally piled with about 60 laptops circa 1990 and of a type we recently threw 2 away of! Stuff that is just a little too good to throw away but that NO ONE WILL USE any more........ usually.... but that is the

problem. Sometimes WE DO use these obsolete items and where else would you expect to find them but in a Hackerspace?

Jake Howe spent a considerable amount of time and effort on the donations boxes, putting up signs as well as slips to be filled in when items are donated. As a Hackspace we've been fairly soft on the donations box. The idea is that items are put in it for a limited amount of time, and if members what the items they take them and use them. Anything that is in there for a month or more gets thrown away. The items is considered to have had a long enough amount of time to sit and wait to be appropriated. Items will then either be stripped for useful parts for the Hackspace parts bins or taken for appropriate disposal.

Filling the parts tubs and bins is an ongoing

ordeal and to help with this David Clarke has provided two milk cages so we can remove the plastic and metal for hacking from the large

shelving unit behind the electronics bench. As the milk cages have 3 shelves it should be easier to retrieve items, we also sorted through and took out anything that could go in a storage box of it's own.

I was pleased to be able to sort out the laser cutter area making it a lot clearer and further from the woodworking area. I've set up an area where the materials for sale are much easier to find and much more straightforward to see what the prices are too. The shelf consists of an area with a black bin for large off cuts of various materials at 50p each as well as a rack I hacked out of a VHS tape holder from Ikea which holds individually prices sheets of perspex, birch ply and MDF. The prices are written on the top left corner of each item! There are 2 black bins on the floor with scraps of material that you can use for small parts or cuts for free. Please do save any useless scraps of ply or MDF waste for me to put in the wood burner on my boat as kindling! You can put this in the small pink trug-tub that is under the desk.

These Hack-all-the-space days are always enjoyable though we may have made more mess than we cleared up! We did however make a start of organising and sorting. Over the next few weeks when possible we can try and finish the job.

Thank you to all involved!

A tale of 2 Hackerspaces

In February I moved from Nottingham to Bristol. Though I will miss Nottingham Hackspace very much I am delighted that there is a Hackspace in Bristol. I visited them on Thursday 23rd February. They are located in Bedminster just close to the Asda and unwittingly I'd walked past their door about a year earlier without knowing it. It's just 15 minutes walk from my work and new home down by the harbour.

You can become a member from as little as £10 a month, though they say it's 24hr access you can not get keys without having to be approved by a particular member who *might* give you the keys *if* they feel it's right!?

The Hackspace itself is not large, but is well appointed and well equipped with an emphasis on electronics and test. There are a number of scopes, bench power supplies and the like. Additionally there is a band saw and a bench pillar drill. They have *A LOT* of junk taking up the shelving. Additionally they have a good amount of bench space and some table top space to work at a laptop or on a project.

The space is in a room shared with an artist and some architects who work there in the daytime. It has access to a kitchenette and a very remote toilet. There is WiFi for all (not just members) and they occasionally run workshops.

The natives seem friendly but isolated from the rest of the UK movement I think perhaps because they feel a closer kinship to the Dorkbot movement. They have recently re-elected their directors and this could be a time of great change and growth for Bristol Hackspace as myself and Barney (a director from Build Brighton) join the membership with perhaps a greater Hackerspace world view? Bristol is a vibrant city and I am looking forward to running some

workshops there.

On Wednesday 29th February I visited FizzPop for their show-and-tell which they have on the last Wednesday at the end of each month. I did a

talk on Nottingham Hackspace and how we got started and the Hackerspace movement in general. This started a debate about how to increase the membership of FizzPop which is the Birmingham Hackspace as well as how to go forward and get a space for themselves available 24 hours a day like that of Nottingham, London, Bristol and others.

In the last few weeks I've spoken to folk all over the country about Hackspaces and size. It's interesting to hear why some larger cities think they have smaller Hackspaces than other smaller cities. I've been amazed for instance by the amount of traffic and interest in the Reading Hackspace mailing list which has well over a 1000 posts and the list itself has more than 100 subscribers. It offers an interesting model in Hackerspace building and I will be watching them with interest!

Making for the sake of making, but is it art?

Sometimes I get an idea in my head. They aren't generally very original. The important thing, the satisfying thing is making the idea real.

I'd been pondering doing another bit of decorating in the Hackspace after the satisfaction I got out of making 3 flying drills and I decided I might like to make something with telephones.

My inspiration was the decoration in one of the upstairs rooms at M5 Industries Inc that you can occasionally see on Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel. It's very hard to find a picture of it to show you.

When we had a recent donation of a load of stuff including a pile of telephones. So here is the result!

I took the phone apart including all the boards which are in two layers. I also dismantled the handset. I worked out where to run threaded rod to avoid parts that weren't suitable or too flimsy.

I then popped the whole thing on the Hackspace drill press and ran 8mm holes all the way through. I'm rather pleased with the result.

Wonder what I'll do next?