{"id":7039,"date":"2018-05-13T09:57:26","date_gmt":"2018-05-13T09:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/?page_id=7039"},"modified":"2018-07-06T12:33:10","modified_gmt":"2018-07-06T12:33:10","slug":"the-distorting-effect-of-money","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/issues\/issue-12-makerspaces-and-institutions\/practitioner-reflections\/the-distorting-effect-of-money\/","title":{"rendered":"The distorting effect of money, and other lessons learned by a makerspace funder"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Molly Rubenstein, Benjamin Linder & Kofi Taha<\/strong><\/p>\n

Open as PDF<\/a><\/p>\n

When the Artisan\u2019s Asylum<\/a>, a makerspace in Somerville, MA, started back in 2010, neither the maker movement nor the concept of innovation had yet captured the imagination of educators, policy makers or the general public. Institutional funders looking to use collaborative fabrication spaces to achieve their education or development goals were virtually non-existent — we know because two of us were part of the leadership team beating the bushes for funding in those early days. Most makerspaces were started just as Artisan\u2019s Asylum was — by groups of loosely connected people looking to serve their individual needs by pooling their own scant resources. It was “stone soup” for creative people and money was scarce.<\/p>\n

As the movement grew, people began to ask how we were able to create, in such a short time and with so little institutional financial support, such a large and vibrant community and space. We always offered the same advice: don\u2019t look for a magic pre-designed solution. Don\u2019t get distracted by shiny new cutting-edge digital fabrication tools. Stop drafting architectural plans and lists of equipment, and engage with your users instead. Find out what those users want and need the space to accomplish, and what they are excited to bring to it. Engage users in the launching and leadership of the space. Create structures that distribute decision-making power and ownership (along with appropriate boundaries and systems in order to minimize conflict). Make sure that there are opportunities and reasons for the community to interact, collaborate, and have fun together both inside the center and outside in the community. The rest will follow.<\/p>\n

It was a constant challenge for Artisan\u2019s Asylum to raise the increasing funding we needed to operate comfortably, however, and other grassroots makerspaces struggled with the same problem. The constant struggle to achieve and maintain financial sustainability made it difficult for us to serve our communities and to have the impacts we dreamed about. After we each moved on from our work with the Asylum, we often wondered, without devaluing the amazing people that made exciting things happen every day, what the organization might have achieved if more financial resources had been available. And we wondered how we might proceed if we had the chance to start over again with a full complement of human and financial capital when launching or supporting a new makerspace. In 2012, we had the opportunity to find out.<\/p>\n

That year our teams at Olin College<\/a> and MIT D-Lab<\/a> joined a consortium of colleges and universities that banded together as the International Development Innovation Network<\/a> (IDIN). IDIN obtained a grant from USAID\u2019s Global Development Lab<\/a> to execute a program aimed at training and supporting innovators around the world to develop technological solutions to problems related to poverty. One part of that plan was to fund and support the establishment of collaborative design and fabrication centers based in developing economy countries.These centers became our partners in the IDIN Innovation Center Program<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As the lead implementers of this new program, we were suddenly the ones offering funds rather than the ones desperately trying to raise them. We thought that our decades of experience in development combined with our grassroots makerspace experience in the US would protect us from some of the failure modes we had observed in other social impact ventures and makerspaces. We were going to ensure that users were effectively engaged, that the right emphasis was placed on tooling, programming and community building, but now we could just take off some of that financial pressure. We were cautious, but this could work, right? Not perfectly.<\/p>\n

We started out well enough, working to implement many of the best practices we had learned from experience. We took a number of actions to encourage centers to respond dynamically to the needs of their unique participants and context. We worked with leaders who had experience in design, fabrication, or engineering and were already doing community engagement, co-design, or social impact work in the communities around their centers. We partnered with centers where communities had explicitly expressed interest in the services that an innovation center would provide. We offered no standard model and encouraged local partners and community members to design and evolve their centers in whatever way felt most appropriate and compelling to them.<\/p>\n

But we also had money to grant, and this money came from an entity that had specific development goals that it needed to achieve in order to continue to receive its own funding. As the maker movement and innovation itself attracted more and more attention, pressure mounted to quantifiably demonstrate what outcomes could emerge from these creative spaces. With the simultaneous increase in both interest and pressure, the IDIN Innovation Center Partner program doubled its cohort size three years in a row. We found that despite our experience and best intentions, these centers were experiencing familiar challenges generating both user participation and funding. This indicated to us that in certain specific and consistent ways they were still struggling to effectively engage their community members:<\/p>\n

Many center leaders were hesitant to depart from what they understood our model to be. <\/strong>Even though we didn\u2019t believe we were presenting a standard vision or model of what an innovation center was supposed to be, local leaders looked to IDIN examples. They tried to replicate what they saw at fabrication shops at our partner colleges and universities or ones set up for our collaborative design trainings (International Development Design Summits<\/a>), without sufficiently adjusting those designs to leverage the inherent strengths or address the unique needs of the communities they worked in. In some cases, they also focused on serving stakeholder groups they had seen IDIN engage when there were other local community members more interested in the services they could provide.<\/p>\n

Some in-country leaders were still considered outsiders in the communities they were engaging. <\/strong>Although they came from the same country as the center\u2019s community, many of the leaders we selected had higher levels of formal education and international exposure than the primary community participants they were trying to engage. They often came from different economic strata or spoke a different local language. While some were able to overcome these differences, others could not use their own interests and experiences as relatable models for their users, which made it more challenging for them to find the best ways to engage local leaders and participants.<\/p>\n

Centers struggled to find the right mix of stakeholders to engage. <\/strong>Many makerspaces in advanced economy countries struggle to financially sustain themselves; in contexts where the primary users are earning only a few dollars a day, the challenge is even greater. In these contexts, it is critical that leaders engage a variety of different stakeholders, including some with more resources, as participants, clients, or sponsors. In large part due to requirements from our own funders, some innovation centers felt pressured to serve the greatest number of users with the highest need rather than engage with a variety of stakeholders in order to develop a locally sustainable set of programs. Others veered too far in the other direction, splitting their attentions between very different stakeholder groups. This divided focus made it more difficult for them to present a coherent picture of their mission to potential funders and to have a meaningful impact.<\/p>\n

These are not easy challenges to overcome but, in collaboration with our IDIN Innovation Center Partners, we have been iterating on a variety of strategies to address them.<\/p>\n

Experimenting with the Model<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Increasingly, centers are working to depart from the examples they have seen in traditional IDIN fabrication shops and events in order to find a better fit, balancing what they are able to provide with the needs and interests of\u00a0 their local community.<\/p>\n