MESH Makers

Makerspace 2.0

A couple of weeks ago we reorganized our makerspace, separated the "clean" and the "dirty" areas and all machines got their dedicated place. We really feel that it means a level up with the whole concept, and hope that our community will keep it just as organized as it is. 

Skaperpils // Maker Beer

Do It Together Tuesday at the MESH Makers When planning things for this year, one of our founding members, Filip came up with the idea of dedicating one day every week to be a social building day. We loved the idea, and agreed that Tuesdays from that moment are going to be DIT - Do It Together days.  So every Tuesday afternoon from 16:00 until late me and Adam are there to help everyone with their projects, and generally just working on people's projects. 

It's been 3 weeks since we started with this, and had loads of fun! We tried laser engraving glass and also rubber stamp. Good first trials.

Dear MESH Makers,

As you all know, we have successfully closed our crowdfunding campaign on the 14th of June. We reached and passed our goal and ended up raising more than 200% of what we originally intended. This is a great achievement but it's not ours, it's yours. Yours who believes in our vision, who trusts and backs us with your hard earned kroners and wants to be part of this journey. We can't emphasise how grateful we are for this and it obviously raises the bar on what we have to deliver to you. 

Regarding the schedule, we have just received the first official document from FundedByMe that we have to fill out and send back in order to secure the money on our account. Once it's done we can start ordering the machines and gearing up the space. Knowing the typical lead times in the industry, this will probably take 3-4 weeks at least, therefore we are definitely not going to be able to meet the schedule that we initially wanted. This is due to too much optimism and also the fact that we had a lot of last minute interest so we extended our campaign with one week. Therefore, we are promising to open the space for our funding members in the beginning of August with potentially a beta period in July. We are sorry for the delay and obviously your 6 month membership starts from whenever we are fully up and running. The room is getting into better shape now, the paint is drying on the wall and the electric sockets are ready to be installed at the right places. The floorplan is going to be very flexible and open for both collaboration and focused work on the machines.

We also generated a lot of interest from business angels, volunteers and new members and once again, we are totally overwhelmed by the feedback that we got! We would like to thank you for your support and very much looking forward to this!

Makers gonna make!

Mesh Makers visited Open Design City at Betahaus

We're having our best week ever since we started working on the makerspace. It all started with a gloomy Monday, when nothing exciting happened. Then Tuesday, was a total blast! Our crowdfunding campaign was on 59% on Tuesday morning. After a couple of founding member joined, we reached 50k, which was our minimum goal. This was a big rock falling off our shoulders. But the spiral didn't stop, we got more and more members joining. Around 7pm when we thought we can call it a day, an angel member showed up suddenly we were a tiny bit away from our goal. We posted on facebook: "Who wants to tip us over the funding goal? :)" - and minutes later with the help of a good friend, we reached 100%! 

Dear makers,

We have reached an other milestone with our crowdfunding campaign: thanks to your support we have passed 40k NOK and raised 59% of our funding goal. Please keep up the support and spread the word! There are 12 more days left and our goal is to reach 75k NOK, although we can get started with less than that so we set a minimum goal to 50k NOK.

Last week we took the opportunity during the long weekend and hopped over to Stockholm, visited the guys and gals at FundedByMe and the Stockholm Makerspace.

From left to right: Adam, Kriszti (Mesh Makers), Daniel and Pontus (FundedByMe)

First we stopped by the office of FundedByMe

In the afternoon we dropped into the Stockholm Makerspace. The friendly Swedish makers have raised more than 100k SEK on FundedByMe roughly 6 months ago and now they are in the middle of moving into their supercool and centrally located space on Wallingatan. They have a lot of work to do to build up the infrastructure, but once it's done it's gonna be a truly awesome place. We had a chat with Filippa, one of the founders who is also known as the "Scraphacker" ( http://scraphacker.com/ ). She is very passionate about getting people with various backgrounds and expertise into the space which really resonates with what we represent too. We agreed that many hackerspaces have a tendency to be closed or open but passive with regards to involving a broader community (including girls) in the joy of making. This is something that we have seemed to be quite effective at so far with the Fix-It night and the urban gardening workshop.

Filippa, the heart and soul of the Stockholm Makerspace

Either a CNC or a time travel machine

The main space with the guys hacking the doorlock

The future 3D printing cave

While we were sipping our lemonade and talking, the youngest member (17) of the space was working with a small bunch of others on hacking together the electronic doorlock system, the guys responsible for the IT operations were accurately followed the blueprints documenting how the cables are going to be routed, and the oldest member were doing a research with a Make magazine in his hand on which 3D printer they should buy to start with. It was a nice and friendly atmosphere and they are surely going to do amazing things with such a large and supportive community. This was our first visit but definitely not the last and we also hope that they can pay a visit to our makerspace very soon!

We also had a small meetup in our empty space with 25 lighting designers assembling their society in Norway. It was a good test to see that even the workshop area is comfortable enough for a smaller meetup. We are definitely going to hold courses in the space and luckily we also have the opportunity to use other spaces at MESH if needed, such as the café or even bigger event spaces.

Lighting designers of Oslo, ready to be assembled in the makerspace at MESH