NewYork Times : manufacturing cooperative set up in NY

[Dante-Gabryell Monson]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/nyregion/brooklyn-navy-yard-is-home-to-manufacturing-cooperative.html

excerpted :

" Across the partition from the roboticist who was making coffee tables with magnetized cubes, an artist was boxing up woodcuts that, when held to the ear, sounded like a forest. Beyond him, just past the software designer on the treadmill, a muscular man in a T-shirt tinkered with his design for a motorcycle.

This eclectic mix of entrepreneurs, among the first tenants of a communal space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, did not in any way resemble workers in a traditional factory, but their landlords and city officials hope they represent the seedlings of a rebirth of manufacturing in New York City.

The idea driving the project was to bring together a variety of creative people and have them share equipment, like laser cutters and three-dimensional printers, that would be too costly for them to rent or buy on their own.  That communal core, which will fill about 40 percent of the space, would be operated by a nonprofit company. "

[Tux Lab]

Is there any interest for something similar in Los Angeles, SGV area.
Nothing on the scale of the NY coop. Something slightly larger than
the typical hackerspace with shared access to cnc machines, injection
molding machines, carbon fiber layup, electronic workbench and etc.

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[Dante-Gabryell Monson]

Nice to read some feedback on the article.

I have no doubt there is a great potential for it in L.A.

For now I personally focus on Europe, and the N.Y. project inspires me to pursue, and believe in certain kinds of scalability potentials.

Anyone interested in europe, feel free to let us know - I personally would like to partner , with individuals off course , but also with existing frameworks, and/or set up a legal entity that we could use to converge funding to experiment with, starting with thematic collectives that could be held for a few weeks or more, covering participants living costs ( it could be hosted at existing hacker spaces, or - additional ? - spaces could be rented )

I for example see potential in Berlin or Leipzig. ( well, all over europe, but for some reason I've had a closer look at the situation in these cities, even though I'm based in Brussels )

http://sharewiki.org/en/Leipzig_project

Brainstormed around the topic - not only for a open manufacturing coop,

but housing coop too, and ultimately have a diversity along the libre spirit enabling regional economics using complementary currency architectures, ... etc - and using semantic tools such as - in development - http://netention.org ; https://github.com/automenta/netentionjs2

Because of a recent speculative bubble on housing in Germany, prices went up dramatically, so instead of buying places as in an initial scenario expressed on the Leipzig project brainstorming, I imagine alternative step by step approaches can be taken.

I also like the idea of using the open hardware approach to enable... the infrastructure itself, or at least some kind of "furnitecture" approach, which can also be used to create habitable spaces within existing spaces, experiment as a cooperative lean startup ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Startup ) in a context of lower cost surplus empty factory and office space. 

For more on this topic, I appreciate Eric Hunting's formulations in his reply , which I labeled under "spime housing"

http://sharewiki.org/en/Spime_Housing

I also use this opportunity to share some older post by Eric I personally encountered more recently :

http://p2pfoundation.net/Defining_a_Post-Industrial_Style#Precepts_for_Industrial_Design

Best,

Dante

http://hitchwiki.org/en/Dante