I am Sunoj Shrestha, co-founder of a makerspace and an eudcation company called Karkhana based in Kathmandu, Nepal. I love to design experiential learning experiences for middle school students while trying to create a social business out of it. I would love to share how karkhana is trying to sustain itself as a makerspace working in education.
Looking forward to your presentation, as I am interested in this idea of self-sufficiency of shared machine shops. Here is a nice intro to a book (in Spanish only ) that reflects a bit the work and practices of certain collectives in the so-called “periphery” of the world economy some years ago, through the concept of “technological sovereignty”:
Technological sovereignty deals with technologies developed from and for civil society, and the initiatives that comprise it try to create alternatives to commercial and / or military technologies. Their actions prove to be based on social responsibility, transparency and interactivity imperatives, which reinforce the degrees of trust that can be deposited in them. They are based on software, hardware or free licenses because they use or develop them (often coinciding both dynamics ), but its characteristics go beyond this contribution.
The very development of its initiatives promotes social transformation through the empowerment of its participants. Whether it is through participatory development methodologies that unite “do it yourself” with “do it together”, or models that focus on cooperativism, barter, peer-to-peer exchange and other expressions of social economy.
I am also interested to explore how hackerspaces and makerspaces can sustain themselves with a model that is unique to their locality based on their specialization and needs. I am trying to find such spaces that are self-sufficient http://www.makertour.fr/en/home/ is doing similar work and they were also at Karkhana a few months ago. They did a good job of documenting about our work http://www.makertour.fr/en/fiche_identite/karkhana-makerspace/.
) that reflects a bit the work and practices of certain collectives in the so-called “periphery” of the world economy some years ago, through the concept of “technological sovereignty”: