Hey Lab, Ryan here.
Before I get into this, I want to say that these are just my personal thoughts and the way that I interpret our mission. Everything here could be appended with “to me”.
Recently, I got into a debate with another member about what Heatsync Labs is, what our mission is, and what memberships are. I think about this a lot, and I thought it would be good to have a discussion about it. The way I look at this stuff might be different than the way everybody else does, and since we’re a cooperative community, I think it’s important that we all talk about what we’re cooperating on.
So first:
What Heatsync Labs is:
Heatsync Labs is a hackerspace, but stopping there isn’t a full explanation. To some people, a hackerspace could be a loft with a bunch of networking gear in it, or a garage, or a basement, or an old moldy warehouse. A hackerspace could also be a multi-million dollar purpose-built facility with a for-profit business model that trades money for access to tools and educational resources. Most recently, I’ve seen hackerspaces as rooms inside of libraries that have some arduinos and a 3D printer in them.
At the highest level, Heatsync Labs is a building with tools in it. If you get a little bit closer, Heatsync Labs is an educational non-profit with the mission of providing access to those tools to anybody who wants to use them, and is capable of doing so responsibly. If you get closer than that, Heatsync Labs is a community of people who believe that making those tools available to the public (including themselves) is a desirable thing to do. Heatsync Labs is a community of people who spend their time enacting that mission.
I see us as the 21st century’s version of a library, except instead of books, we have tools, and we are 100 percent privately funded. In this comparison, the people donating membership dues are the people who are funding the library, making all of these books (tools) available to the world.
What Heatsync Labs is not:
Heatsync Labs is nobody’s personal shop. Heatsync Labs does not sell anything. Heatsync Labs is not a place that you can hire to build anything for you (we would rather teach you how to build it yourself). Because we believe that sharing these resources with people is a good thing to do, Heatsync Labs is not “pay to play”. While we certainly could not exist without generous member donations, and money is an important tool that we use to enact our goal, generating a profit is explicitly not our mission.
What a membership means:
Membership is a recognition by the member that the mission of Heatsync Labs is something that they want to help support. That is to say: they think that the world gets better when more people have access to the means to educate themselves on how to make things. There are several tangible benefits to membership, all of which align with these goals. For instance: at $25/mo, you get to vote on tool purchases. This means that you get to help dictate what educational resources are being made available to people. At $50/mo, you also get a place to keep some of your things and eligibility to use the resources whenever you want, with the implicit understanding that some of those times will overlap with our open hours.
While it is not required, it is extremely important when community members who support Heatsync Labs as an idea do so monetarily. Without them we wouldn’t have a building, tools, or any of the resources we use to enact our mission.
In conclusion:
This model has worked amazingly well. There are countless people who have come into our public space, and learned a skill that they probably would have never had the opportunity to learn otherwise. We have been able to make this life-changing set of resources available to the general public, free of charge, and all through the monetary support of our members. Via public-outreach events like Coffee and Code, which I consider one of our biggest successes, I’ve seen many people use our lab as a resource when starting tech companies, or when trying to transition out of a job they don’t like.
We are a group of people who want to share the things we know, and the means to learn those things, with anybody who wants to participate, all while being aggressively not-for-profit. If you’re looking for something else, Heatsync Labs is the wrong place to look.
Love, Blhack