We’ve long been fascinated with makerspaces, the DIY equivalent of co-ops. They make projects possible by offering tools and classes at a shared cost to those who otherwise wouldn’t have access. If you’re lucky enough to live in a maker-dense region, you’ve likely got plenty of options, from niche shops like the Bike Kitchen to multi-use spaces like TechShop.
San Francisco is one such locale, with such a robust community of builder resources that people needed a tool to keep tabs on them all. So The Maker Map was born. Created by Renee DiResta and Nick Pinkston, the open source DIY outlet-tracking Google Map tries to illuminate all the SF makerspaces and related establishments, dividing them by category and plotting them out geographically.
The project, which started at a hackathon at DiResta’s office, is doubly open source. Not only do Pinkston and DiResta draw on the crowd for data (you can add resources that aren’t yet on the map), the whole project is forked on GitHub, so users can help develop the map itself.
“We kept finding ourselves having the same conversations with people,” says DiResta, an associate at O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures. “Like, where can I get this done? Or hey, I’ve got my prototype, what do I do next?”
“People would ask me for this stuff constantly,” says Pinkston, who has founded several companies including Cloudfab, a distributed manufacturing company, and the upcoming Plethora, an automated manufacturing company. “And I was like oh, it would be nice to have a place I could send them, that they would know where to get it instead of bothering me.”
Pinkston also likes to build. His latest creation was a prototype machine tool-tending robot for Plethora, built primarily at TechShop in San Francisco. As a transplant from Pittsburgh (he founded Hackpittsburgh.org), Pinkston didn’t know as many places to source materials for it. Hence, the map.
Initially limited to the San Francisco Bay Area, the map expanded rapidly as makers kept adding their favorite shops, suppliers, and fabricators around the world. And although their help has helped the project reach new users, the growth may ultimately require community organizers around the world to help keep the information accurate and up to date.
“Otherwise, somebody sitting in San Francisco is going to have to try to validate data that’s being input from France,” says DiResta. “People who are on the ground there have a better sense of what’s going on in France than I do in San Francisco.”
“The hardest thing is the curation,” Pinkston says. “It can become like Yelp. And I mean that in a pejorative way. Stuff doesn’t mean anything, it’s not really useful.”
But with the right people involved, that’s more of a boon than a detriment.
“The coolest thing about what you’re seeing now is how totally different it looks from what I pushed a month ago,” says DiResta. “And that’s because of the community around it.”
People jumped in with design and UX know-how, helping turn it into a collaborative effort that continues to spread.
“It’s nice to have a work in progress that a community is really excited about,” DiResta says.
Crowdsourced 'Maker Map' Charts Nearby Hackerspaces and Hardware Shops
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Crowdsourced 'Maker Map' Charts Nearby Hackerspaces and Hardware Shops
