Officially Founding 3CS

[kulps @ ENTS Edmonton]

This message was sent to all active makerspaces in Canada as of April 18, 2024.

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Hello,

We hope this message finds you and your space well! 

ENTS is reaching out to makerspaces across Canada because we are hoping to revive an old project: the Coalition of Canadian Creative Spaces (3CS). We’d like your help with that. We want to incorporate a federal charity to represent makerspaces across Canada. As a first step, we’re trying to evaluate the interest of makerspaces in supporting and engaging with this kind of organization. 

This is a long message. We’ll apologize upfront and promise not to waste your time. We think this message is worthwhile, and we think you’ll agree if you stick with us until the end. 

What was it? 

If you’ve been in the makerspace scene for a long time, you may remember the Google Group we created in 2012. At the time, ENTS was a young organization struggling to get off the ground. We faced predictable challenges, from minor annoyances to existential crises. Looking back, many of those challenges have simple solutions or solutions that could be easily implemented with a small amount of support from a mentor organization. We created the group to crowdsource solutions for common and challenging problems within the broader community of makerspaces. 

So, what happened? 

The group grew to over 125 members, representing dozens of makerspaces across Canada. We had several threads where we worked through challenges and organized equipment transfers between makerspaces. This redistributed resources to where they were needed and helped kickstart some makerspaces.
Maintaining momentum within the group while simultaneously keeping ENTS running was challenging for our team. We also struggled to maintain contact with the leadership of the member organizations. This meant that engagement was always ebbing and flowing. We tried to re-engage with makerspaces several times over the years, but eventually, the group fell silent. 

Why should it succeed this time if it didn’t work last time? 

That’s a fair question. Truthfully, there are no guarantees it will succeed. However, we’re 12 years older, ENTS is quite a bit more stable, and makerspaces are now commonplace.
All of this is helpful, but the big difference is that this time, we want to formally incorporate as a federal charity and create a distinct organization. A charity offers the critical function of being able to accept donations and issue federal tax receipts – a limiting factor to ENTS accepting several notable donations over the years. 

What do we need from you? 

We need two things from other makerspaces: money and time. This is obviously a big ask because we’d all be in much better shape if we had spare time and money. So how much of each do we need? Well, that’s easy and hard to say.

We need about $10,000. It’s a big investment, no matter how we cut it. This figure comes from two law firms in our area that have experience setting up charities – MLT Aikins and Prowse Chowne. They both indicated that the process would take 9-12 months. 

The time commitment is a little unclear to us currently. We'd love to connect if anyone has experience setting up a federal charity. However, what we need for the moment is a gauge of whether the makerspace community is actually interested in this. And, if the interest exists, we will need help from everyone who wants to be involved in helping build the organization, decide on the objectives, and then, assuming we can successfully incorporate, run and use the organization's services. 

We don’t anticipate raising all $10,000 right away either, particularly given the scant details of this message. ENTS has committed to paying the initial consultation fee to meet with the team at Prowse Chowne on May 1st, 2024. The cost of the initial meeting is part of the $10,000 estimate and is quoted at $410. We hope to confirm the feasibility with each firm’s teams. Both preliminary calls indicate the nebulous objective of supporting other makerspaces across Canada would meet the CRA’s requirements for a charitable organization. Still, until we meet with the lawyers, that’s not a guarantee. 

What’s in it for your organization? 

The biggest financial draw of 3CS would likely be donations. If 3CS can accept donations and issue tax receipts, we expect to be able to then re-distribute those resources to member organizations. We must figure out how this would work with the founding member organizations. Ideally, it would largely be a flow-through transaction. Unfortunately, we don’t know the feasibility of this until we meet with the lawyers. 

We think the most important draw of 3CS would be shared resources. We anticipate mostly administrative and operating resources to be most available initially, but it would depend on what everyone has to share and the charity’s eventual objectives.
ENTS is working to package the technology stack we’ve developed over the last 10 years. With some training, the stack could be used by other makerspaces and includes our member management system (aMember Pro), our access control system (ESP-RFID), our chat system (Matrix / Element), and a Learning Management System (Moodle). We’re also planning to package the courses themselves, including our upcoming shop safety, laser engraver, and pottery kiln training materials.

We hope to open-source the guides and systems we make so that other makerspaces can benefit and hopefully contribute back.  

Next Steps

We will meet with the lawyers for an initial consultation and report on what we learned in the new Google Groups thread. Let us know if you're interested in participating in that consultation, and we'll work with the firms to teleconference people. Questions and concerns may also be sent to us directly by replying to this email or posting them on the Google Groups thread.

Discussion with other spaces on this project is best done on Google Groups. We plan to schedule a brief conference call before May 1st to discuss the project with interested makerspaces and will monitor our email and the thread throughout this venture. Google Groups is not expected to be the permanent home of 3CS, but it is the currently established communication channel.

Let us know if there's anything that needs some clarification. If you’re on board, please let us know what interests and concerns you about this proposed organization. We're particularly interested to hear from other makerspaces about their operational challenges and what a supportive charity might look like. 

Thank you for reading to the end of this unusually long email. We look forward to working with you to make 3CS an indispensable resource to makerspaces across Canada and hope to see you in the Google Group.

Regards, 

ENTS

[Matt Freund]

Kulps! Long time no see.

> you may remember the Google Group we created in 2012.

https://imgur.com/eR3ooNw

> Why should it succeed this time if it didn’t work last time?

Well, this time you'll be leading the charity effort instead of me, and you're getting lawyers to do it instead of relying on infamously flakey volunteers bumbling through it.

> We need about $10,000.

How many spaces did this go out to? It's not a lot when you chop it up across the country. Bucked up by membership count, it's probably not even $5/head. Here in Alberta, just the opportunity to do a single casino night (a couple dozen volunteers work at a casino doing non-critical tasks and get a government mandated profit share for their charity) is worth 5-10x that much to a single volunteer org. We tried this back in, oh 2015-2016 I think, and our request was rejected, though in ways that made me think a national charity would not.

> Both preliminary calls indicate the nebulous objective of supporting other makerspaces across Canada would meet the CRA’s requirements for a charitable organization. Still, until we meet with the lawyers, that’s not a guarantee.

It would be great to have it confirmed that it's possible and what path it would take. There's a narrow set of allowable criteria to qualify for charitable status that individual spaces probably won't qualify for, but a mothership org might. I'm a sucker for closure. I'll go halfsies with ENTS on the legal costs for the initial consultation, just for my role in dropping the ball a decade ago.

> ENTS is working to package the technology stack we’ve developed over the last 10 years. With some training, the stack could be used by other makerspaces

Back in the day everyone rolled their own everything. Every 3 months someone promised to build things "the right way", and most never got past the design stage. Fast forward 10 years, this should have shaken out who actually put work in and got the job done. Glad to see some projects floated to the surface.

> We hope to open-source the guides and systems we make so that other makerspaces can benefit and hopefully contribute back.

One of the things that the long-abandoned but delightfully-cynical Running-A-Hackerspace tumblr was ever good for, other than commiseration, was revealing to us all that we all struggle with the exact same issues, and don't need to reinvent the wheel. There's so many lessons to be learned. We can stretch our volunteer miles a lot farther if people just write things down and share them. Having a Makerspace Starter Kit can let new spaces (i.e. the people not even in this conversation because those spaces don't exist yet) start up easier and focus on the only thing that actually matters - recruitment of dues-paying members - and let the bureaucracy stay out of the way.

...

I haven't participated at my local space since I started my business many years ago, (deliberately, as I say yes to everything and had to prioritize and put up that wall), but, I'm thrilled to see this revived. One thing that you'll probably need are a few executives on the Charity org's board at arms distance from any local spaces. I don't have time (headspace really) to actually do much of anything, but if you need trustworthy names on paper, I'll consider throwing my hat in the ring if you're short on prisoners. I'm still a paying member of my old space but, that's a technicality I can sever if needed.

Thanks for going above and beyond and being a leader. Leaders were like eagles here. We didn't have any eagles.

[John Craver]

Hey, John from the Vancouver Hack Space here,

This seems like a really interesting idea! VHS is having a quarterly general meeting tomorrow afternoon so I'll bring up this topic and hopefully find out how our membership feels about participating in this.  I'm definitely intrigued!

[Danny Pollard]

Hi Kulps,

It took a few weeks to get my head around things so I'm sorry I didn't respond sooner, and missed the conference call you scheduled last week.

I was excited to see this proposal.  personally was thinking of the exact same thing quite recently. I am a big supporter of the idea, and I think it's certainly worth some effort.

Protospace is (to the best of my knowledge) the biggest and most financially secure makerspace thanks to success with Calgary funding grants and a remarkable membership rebound post covid. It is being discussed in our forums the support of this project. I'm personally pushing the argument that we should support most of it and it's a motion for our next monthly meeting to donate to this fund. I believe that the $10k price tag is easily obtainable.

Regarding the ongoing volunteer effort, I will raise my hand to help with this. I've been thinking about the work that would be required and how I can help. Protospace is ticking along on its own and I've stepped back from most of the volunteering I used to do there, but I'm very interested in committing that back to a group that could help out the smaller makerspaces in Canada.

Danny. 

[Zachary Donsky]

Hey Michael, this sounds like a really neat project!

I'm one of the board members at Hacklab.to. It was great to read through your email. I had a few thoughts I'd like to add:

I wonder have you reached out to Toronto Tool Library or LESPACEMAKER in Montreal?

TTL is a registered charity already (TTL makerspace is a nonprofit, but the same folks run both organizations), and I think LESPACEMAKER may be too. LESPACEMAKER receives some kind of government funding (can't remember if municipal or provincial) and they use it to pay for enough full time staff to form a small admin team for the space.

Also, that pass-through donation model sounds like it could be a good fit for OpenCollective. Canadian Creative Spaces could be an OpenCollective fiscal host, and maker/hackerspaces could be collectives that are hosted by you.

Thanks!

- Zach

[K Stark]

Foulab is still around in Montreal too, we're still a small group with not a lot of equipment (we don't go after grants the way some other groups do, to try to maintain our independence) and could definitely use some support and resources! We're interested.

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[lookfind...@gmail.com]

I was a co-founder of Kamloops Makerspace back in 2015.  The email was forwarded to me from the current chair of the space.  I am not sure how much I contributed to the Google group in the past, however, I sure lurked it and it helped a lot.  Groups like that were a great help knowing that the crazy problems that pop up when starting and running a space happen everywhere.

Kamloops Makerspace has recently changed locations after 8 years at our first building.  Our community had stagnated and was on the brink of folding, however, a few dedicated volunteers orchestrated a move and the space is doing better than it has in years.  The space doesn't have much capacity to take on something like participating in this group heavily, however, I personally would like to participate as I can.  I have helped a few spaces start and have visited many more in my time as part of the Maker Movement.  Gleaning a lot of what does and does not work, most specifically when starting out and scaling.

It is great to see VHS here as they were instrumental in getting me interested in Hackerspaces and eventually starting one.  My partner (who now chairs Kamloops Makerspace) and I recently visited LESPACEMAKER and Foulab and were very impressed.  I have always meant to make my way to ENTS.  Jim from Protospace was also a huge help in us getting started and has been instrumental in putting together our new space.

The lack of charitable status has been a huge burden to Kamloops Makerspace as an organization.  I think a central organization that could confer that benefit without the need for getting and maintaining charitable status would be a great help.  I have gotten charitable status for non-profits and sat on a number of boards with it, it can be a great deal of work.

I like the idea of a software stack as we have struggled with the ''roll your own" syndrome and lost a number of members over the conflict it has created.  I think the KISS principal has to be the main driver in choosing tools.  They also need to reflect on the skills and technical orientation of the whole organization's membership.  Platform fatigue and the need for technical skill has been a problem for us.  I find that tech types and open source advocates (I am one) forget that all our members may not feel the same way about solutions.  The next directors of a space may have little to no interest in learning how to use a tool leading to a flip flop of mission-critical tools. We have switched to more turn-key, intuitive SAS and commercial solutions.  I much as I hate SAS it has been to great benefit.  Will directors in 3,5,10 years be interested in maintaining a server, AWS, Azure, etc?   (stay away from hosting!)  I think it is important not to focus on tools as the best solution or ''industry standard''  Perhaps showcase solutions spaces of different demographics have had work for them.  We had a past chair latch onto "improving" our systems and implementing aMember Pro, rolling a new forum, building an RFID system, and changing all our communications channels.  Not that the tools were the problem, but the bullying and abuse that were used to implement the systems in a haphazard way almost led to losing the organization.  The remaining directors called an early AGM and rebuilt the organization from scratch.  It was a tough time.

I look forward to seeing where this effort goes.  Count me in!

[Danny Pollard]

Hello again folks, 

Protospace will commit to funding $5000 of the estimated $10k for consultation and work with lawyers through the project. We hope to see a timeline and the results of the consultations to determine where and when that money is needed. 

Danny

[Verdi R-D]

Hi friends,

Responding in from the Diyode makerspace in Guelph and the Kwartzlab makerspace in Kitchener Ontario. I don't have much to add regarding this project at the moment. But I'm glad to hear so many of you are still alive and kicking after all these years. I look forward to future conversations between makerspaces through this forum.

Verdi