Facilitating workspace

All,

This is a proposal for you:

I would like to lead an effort to make a bench space at hive13 with various functionalities — foremost education and working in multiple modalities (aka, computer, desktop printer, desktop pcb stuff, all-in-one, optimised for ease of use, and less intimidation).
I will invest grant money received recently in this which supports teaching & community expansion (the first collaboration to be providing learning opportunities for my UC spring semester class on hacking) https://vimeo.com/142439728 (Any students would have to apply for membership the same way you do for workspace outside of class. I teach the course at UC no weekly classes at Hive — I just want them to have an opportunity to experience and work in the real thing). I also think it would be dumb to invest thousands and put facilities in a crappy room at UC to later collect dust when it could be used 24/7 by Hive as well.

  1. Anything I buy for a cooperative class will also be available to Hive Membership. (In fact, it will be a requirement for my UC students to present talks or workshops at Hive)
  2. I have arranged for Hive to be able to obtain stuff from UC assets the same way I can — For free, before the public sale day. So, hive will have 1st dibs and pay nothing (within reason, okay?)
  3. UC wants to make its future makerspace at Langsam library free for Hive members, and not exclusive to UC. This is a big return for playing nice with them now. May even get some hive folks some jobs.

In summary this is a win-win. Technically, if I spend grant money on cool stuff for hive, it is co-owned for now. Donation to Hive officially can be discussed after the 3 year term of the study. There will be some reasonable limitations, like certification requirements on some stuff (but we’ll make this friendly and easy and open to all). The goal is to have a few top-of the line pieces of equipment which are not modded to hell to provide an un-intimidating introduction to fab-lab, open source, arduino, PI, PCB, etc. It would also be manageably small, and a good intro to our much more complicated spaces.

I’d really appreciate it if you let me know what you think, and what you think would help you and the Hive develop a good educational workbench available for ANY education endeavor by ANY teacher of ANY demographic (My whole goal is to empower all teachers or volunteers to educate fluidly at Hive).

What do you think?

Lorin

P.S. Hey engineers, before you harp on the obstacles / oversights here, one thing, I AM GOING TO SPEND LOTS OF MONEY ON STUFF YOU CAN USE so that’s a big positive. However, yes, there will be problems, and I do need to know what people think…

Sounds super exciting!

I would be happy to help.

P.S. Thanks for lumping all the engineers into OCD pessimists. “The glass isn’t half full or half empty. It’s twice as big as it needs to be” :grinning:

Really it was just a jab at Ryan, not all engineers — to paraphrase his quote, “hey, I’m an engineer, I look at the problem”

:wink:

Glad to have your support and enthusiasm, Brad.

No worries.

I was wondering if you were thinking the space might have something like an HP Sprout with a dedicated “sealed” printer for someone to use.