Not Quite The Same, But Interesting

[kevinphayes]

Here are some people, organizations and places similar in spirit to Maker Spaces, but with interesting differences:

http://publiclab.org/

Public Lab is a community where you can learn how to investigate environmental concerns. Using inexpensive DIY techniques, we seek to change how people see the world in environmental, social, and political terms.

http://thesprouts.org/
Our mission is to make science a cultural activity. We spend our time developing programs to prototype our ideas for hardware, software, & media which support scientific investigation.

What I like about both of these groups is their "get it done, cheap" approach to scientific exploration and learning. 

Public Lab invented and refined "balloon mapping", using cheap Mylar balloons to create maps of environmentally-threatened local ecosystems (Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, for example). This was before quadcopters and drones and is still less expensive than those mechanized approaches. They combine this with mapping software and crowd-sourced analysis to come up with real data on real world problems.

The Sprouts are proposing to start a new high school in Somerville MA: "Over the past year we’ve been working with the City of Somerville—along with local families, businesses, and institutions—to develop a proposal for a new high school in Somerville, an Innovation School extending the themes behind sprout’s work: project-based learning, computational thinking, and a deep integration with the community."

This is all very ground-up, grassroots, low-budget, community based work.