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DoES Liverpool wants to help people do epic work, whatever that work might be.

It’s a noble aim; but how do we go about enabling and supporting that?

It’s something I was thinking about when reading Bottling Lightning, an essay from Ben Reinhardt thinking about how research institutions should be structured.

DoES Liverpool isn’t a research institute, at least it’s not just a research institute. However, it is somewhere where we collectively play midwife to the future world we want to inhabit.

At different times, and for different people it can ba an art school; a startup incubator; a workshop; a salon; a research lab…

As Reinhardt says:

Context plays a large role, not just in what people think is important, but for the sorts of ideas people have in the first place. Context is a frustratingly nebulous term that I won’t even attempt to circumscribe. When thinking about research ideas, there are two key aspects of context that are worth focusing on: the culture someone swims in and the resources that they believe to be at their disposal.

Culture and resources. Two key elements that make DoES Liverpool unique.

What sort of doing do we want to enable? What is nobody else helping, but that they should? What would that help look like?

What tools should we make available? David Lang talks about supply shocks, where ready access to new tools or supplies unlocks new uses and discoveries because they get into the hands of communities who wouldn’t normally have access. We’ve done a great job of that, first with laser-cutting, and now with an increasing set of other technologies. What should we add to that list? Who else might we take these “supply shocks” to?

One way that DoES Liverpool is radically different from most institutions is that it doesn’t have any funding, and barely has any staff. The only people who can make any of this happen are the community. Naturally, the community should also get to choose what happens.

Lots of these choices happen from the day-to-day doing of work on projects, and the informal (and occasionally more formal) collaborations that come out of being in the community and the space.

Every now and then it’s good to take a step back and look at the space and the community as a whole. At DoES Liverpool we call that future-gazing.

You can read the notes from the last session on the Wiki; it’s a convivial group brainstorming and exploration session.

We’re gathering again for our next session on Wednesday, 10th August 2022, from 6:30pm, in the DoES Liverpool events space. There will be pies. If you’re part of the community, you should come along. (And there’s probably room for the odd interloper too, if you’re nearby and interested…)

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Earlier this year we had the opportunity to present what we’re doing to the members of Fabric District Board. The board leads the Fabric District CIC, which exists to help shape the area of Liverpool that DoES Liverpool calls home.

Hardly any of the presentation is specific to that meeting, so we thought it would make sense to share it here. These are the slides and notes from when we prepared it, so don’t reflect what we said on the day word for word.

Hello, I’m Adrian McEwen, one of the directors of DoES Liverpool. Two of the other directors, Jackie Pease and John McKerrell, are also here. Thanks for letting us share what we’re up to.

DoES Liverpool started back in 2011, down on Hanover Street. We’re a makerspace, a co-working space, and an events space.

The makerspace side was pretty small at first; this photo shows all of our kit: one 3D printer and a soldering iron…

In 2018 we moved into the Tapestry, doubling our space (four times what it was in 2011)

We don’t have any external funding. It’s paid for by the members, to provide the space and kit that they want.

We’ve got a bit more stuff now…

And we’re not just a place for making physical things. Just as important is the…

…space for co-working and for small businesses to start and grow.

So we also have meeting rooms for meeting clients, or jumping on a video call.

There’s an events space that’s free to use for free, open, community events (and for hire at pretty reasonable rates outside that); including a projector and PA.

And we host all sorts of events

Such as the monthly Repair Café (third Sunday each month) where you can get help fixing all manner of things

Or the weekly Maker Night which provides free access to everything in the workshop.

A variety of tech (and non-tech) meetups, like the Liverpool Linux User Group

Some of which, like the Plastics Playgroup, are more hands-on.

We want all sorts of people to use DoES Liverpool. We know that a diverse community of more than just geeks and techies will bring greater benefit to all of us.

Rather than give you loads of numbers of people who’ve used the space, etc. I want to give some examples of the folk in the community…

Startups like Axon Vibe, who make an iPhone transit app.

Product designers like Jade Noon Designs.

Spin-outs like Aeternum, who’ve expanded downstairs in the Tapestry, making air quality sensors.

We’ve had people working remotely since we started, like Zarino who works for the charity My Society.

Artists, such as Laura Pullig.

And people of all ages, like Baylee here who came and 3D printed herself a new prosthetic hand.

As I said, we don’t just want to be a space for geeks and techies. Society isn’t just made up of geeks and techies, and we’d like to be just as diverse.

We haven’t had one since the pandemic started, as it’s been trickier to get us all into a room together, but we periodically hold our “Future-gazing” sessions, where we brainstorm ideas and thoughts about how we’d like the community to evolve and what sort of impact we’d like to make to the lives of community members; to the Fabric District and Liverpool and the rest of the World.

After the last session we drafted our set of DoES Liverpool Values. In typical DoES Liverpool style we got on with doing things first, and wrote the manifesto later.

Getting back to the future, we’ve been wondering about ways that Fabric District Board might be able to help our plans. We’re really happy here in the Tapestry — it’s been a fantastic move for us — but we’re also running out of space, and there isn’t (currently) any other room available in the Tapestry for us to expand into.

With more space we could do more of what we currently do, but it could unlock new facilities too — expanding our wood- and metal-workshops would be excellent; maybe there’d be room for screenprinting; or a kiln…

Are there any spaces available in the area? We might even be open to buying somewhere, or at the opposite end of the scale taking somewhere on a meanwhile use basis.

Thank you.

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Recently I gave a talk at the inaugural Festival of Maintenance. It was a day-long celebration of all things fixing and maintaining, organised in part by DoES Liverpool community members Jackie Pease and Ross Dalziel. It took place down in London, but thanks to help from Matt Croughan and Alex Lennon, it was also live streamed at DoES Liverpool.

My talk was about how we (ab)use Github issue lists to help with communication and management of all the maintenance tasks that need to be done in order to keep the space running. You can read through my slides and the notes of what I planned to say here…

Or if you’d rather watch me (and see what I actually said…) then watch this video.

The talk immediately before mine was from the Guerilla Groundsman, a civic-minded individual who has been fixing up things around Cambridge. As a result, at the end of my talk I briefly mentioned the experiment I’ve been running to take the Somebody Should issue list idea and apply it to all of Liverpool.

Afterword

After the talk there was an interesting discussion on Twitter about whether Github is too geeky a tool and so a barrier to entry for non-software-developers. I didn’t get chance to join the conversation at the time, but figured I’d add some of my thoughts on it here.

I can totally understand that Github isn’t very user-friendly. I’m not especially wedded to Github itself, but I do think the issue list has some big advantages over tools focused more as to-do lists (and I say that as someone who spent a couple of years failing to build a business around a web-based to-do list tool, but thinking lots about it as a result).

We chose Github because a sizeable chunk of the community already had accounts, which reduced one of the barriers to entry during bootstrapping, and we already had some code hosted there. However I think most issue trackers would work – the Labels feature is an important one in the way we organise things (unsurprisingly that—although called “tags”—was a big feature of my to-do list app). Ditto an API for building custom scripts on top of it.

Github is far from perfect, but I think there’s a risk of the perfect being the enemy of the good enough. I also think that we should be applying the same attitude to our software tools that we do to our other tools and enhancing, reworking or replacing them where they don’t suit our particular needs. We’re taking a first step in that to improve the granularity of email notifications.

I also think there’s a balance to strike between making the system easy for non-geeks and helping the non-geeks get to grips with the system. Again, we have a culture of helping people learn how to use tools they’re not familiar with, be that a 3D printer or a hand plane. Software tools shouldn’t be any different. It’s 2018, needing some help and guidance to familiarise yourself with digital tools is fine, refusing to “do digital” is not.

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At the start of the month I was over at Edge Hill University along with a bunch of others from the DoES Liverpool community (including some of the conference organisers!) and a host of others interested in making and education, for the MakerNoise conference.

I gave a talk about maker culture and how it’s important to pay attention to that, as well as the shiny tools, when setting up a makerspace.  You can read my slides and notes below…

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Last week Adrian gave a talk at the Future Makespaces 2nd Symposium organised by the Royal College of Art. His talk was about the less obvious parts of running a makerspace, and here are the slides and his notes (which should be pretty much what he said, but…)

Hello, I’m Adrian McEwen, one of the co-founders of DoES Liverpool. It’s (sort of) a makerspace (and more) in Liverpool.

We’ve been running for over four years now, and I wanted to share some of the non-obvious aspects of that.

When we started DoES Liverpool we thought about what it was trying to achieve and how it would fit into the rest of the city.

An important part of what we set out to do was to grow and encourage the tech and maker community in the city, and help it prosper through more tech and maker businesses. It was one part software-is-eating-the-world, with another part the workers owning the means of production – initially as software engineers, but increasingly with digital fabrication tools, and a dash of being the change we want to see in the world.

So we were never just a makerspace.

The co-working and office space is just as important as the workshop.

Successful businesses require all sorts of skills, and the more diverse our community, the better the things that will come out of it.

We have artists, engineers, coders, designers, but also copywriters, translators, consultants and charity workers. Freelancers, startups, and remote workers from big corporations.

And we also provide a space for the community to meet.

We knew how hard it was to find space to hold meetups, to get together to share knowledge and just hang out with like-minded people. So part of the space is available for the community to book for free.

I think one of the important aspects is that DoES is run by a bunch of people who don’t really want to run a space. We just want to use the facilities it offers, for our businesses or interests.

As a result, our aim is to minimise the amount of effort required to run it, and one of the ways we do that is by engaging with the “dark matter” surrounding DoES Liverpool.

Wouter Vanstiphout came up with the term, and it was popularised by Dan Hill in his pamphlet “Dark Matter and Trojan Horses”.

It is all the stuff that affects the organisation but that you can’t see or touch. If the matter is the building and the tools, the objects produced and the businesses founded, then the dark matter is the culture of the community, the rules, regulations and policy – and not just in the space, those surrounding the space from the council or the Government.

It could be the way we use cake as currency (it doesn’t have to be homemade, although they’re always the best received), to start things off on a convivial and sharing note.

Or the way we make sure we have good coffee (and buy it from a local independent coffee shop to support them)

Which meant that the coffee machine was the first bit of kit we bought.

It’s the way we bring concepts from software into the physical world. Automating the repeated tasks like the weekly newsletter or marking who has been in on which days…

…or repurposing code issue tracking to let people know what needs doing around the space.

Just as important is what we don’t do.

Despite its name, DoES doesn’t do anything.

The only things that happen are those that the members are committed enough to make happen. And we try not to expand into things that the community could make a living from – we exist to support it, not absorb it.

So we don’t run training courses. That would require trainers, and marketing, and…

It’s much better that members of the community provide that – they can build it as part of their business and then pay for the facilities at DoES to deliver them.

It also lets members of the community experiment with new ways of arranging their work.

For example, a number of the members have young children, and so they’re going to toddler-proof the meeting room so they can run “baby and toddler work day” to let them more easily balance parenthood and freelancing.

And it lets DoES’ specialisms evolve organically. Because I’ve been working with the Internet of Things for years now, there’s a tendency within DoES to connect anything and everything to the Internet, to see if it’s useful.

We joke that if something is left stationary in DoES for too long, it’ll end up connected to the Internet. The doors, the laser-cutters and – naturally – the aforementioned coffee machine.

One of the big things we don’t do is funding. Especially for day-to-day running costs.

We’re funded by the community, for the community, and have been since day one.

Funding begets Outputs, and Outputs beget Criteria. Before you know it you’ll have to exclude most of the people you’d like to help, because they don’t look like the picture you painted in order to get your funding.

We have a completely different filter: Is what you’re doing interesting?

Or if not, are you interested in what others are up to?

And we don’t care if you’re a business or an individual, or how old or young you are.

What’s important is that you Do Epic Sh**.

Starting a business is just a tool to achieve certain outcomes. It could be as useful for you to open source your work and help it spread. Or use the workshop to 3d print yourself a new hand to make your life easier elsewhere.

That said, plenty of people are looking to build businesses around their ideas. You can build one of almost anything with our facilities, and probably 10s or maybe even 100s of something. Once you get beyond that, you tend to want to get someone else to help.

The DoES community is a great distributed knowledge base of suppliers to use and things to watch out for. One person will tell you who they used for PCB assembly, and another will let you know about the place that die-cuts boxes on the dock road. As more people do more projects, so the knowledge grows, but it would be good to speed that process up.

To try to do that, we’ve been doing some work with the Local Enterprise Partnership.

The LEP, and other institutions in the city like the Council, can be tricky to engage with. Especially when you’re harder to work with, like we are. So much of their set up is around funding bids and inward investment that when someone turns up who doesn’t want any of those things, they’re not sure what to do with us.

That’s if they recognise us at all. Because we don’t look like the stuff they’ve been told is “advanced manufacturing”, there’s a tendency to dismiss us as irrelevant. And some times there’s what I call a “mutual lack of respect”, where they think we should court them because they’re the council and important, and I think they should be courting us because we’re actually making a difference and getting on with it regardless of their involvement.

As time goes on, we’re getting harder to ignore, and some of the people working there do get it. One of those is Simon Reid at the LEP.

He’s in charge of the manufacturing sector at the LEP – that’s another problem, we don’t fit neatly into their sectors, as we’re equally manufacturing and digital-and-creative. His challenges for the sector are around skills shortages and keeping the local businesses abreast of emerging technology and possibilities.

So there’s a good match – he knows all the local supply chains and manufacturers, and we’re providing a way to enthuse more people about making and are experimenting with lots of the new technologies.

We’re planning an event to inform local manufacturers about the possibilities that the Internet of Things brings, and have started mapping out what capabilities are around the region. The Future Makespaces levels of study has helped out with that, as it’s provided a good way to frame things.

It’s early days, but hopefully it will be a fruitful relationship.

There is more to running a makerspace than the tools you buy or the space that you put them in. If you get the culture right the rest will take care of itself.

And if we engage with the dark matter in the wider context, we have an opportunity to nudge our culture away from consumerism, away from the bankers, and towards a more productive future.

Thank You