What we’ve learned about our makerspace thanks to agent based modeling.
After 2 years of experience running a makerspace in Paris, here are some thoughts about what it takes to leverage a makerspace up to a makers-platform.
Celebrating the second birthday of WoMa, as a co-founder I have to acknowledge that running such a hybrid space, based on “working + making”, leads to regularly rethink our business model in order to understand limits and opportunities.
As a matter of fact, when WoMa was first launched in january 2014, it was a place for coworkers to work next to a place for makers to make. Thus came the name, Wo + Ma, WoMa.
Since January 2014, we have built up the space from scratch. There was nothing. And that was awesome, because we could try out several planning ideas, in order to find the one that would best fit the way users intereacted with the space. None of the co-founders had ever runned a coworking nor a fablab, so we had to test and learn.
1. From Wo + Ma to Wo & Ma
After the 6 first months, monitoring the activities that took place inside and outside WoMa’s walls, we first had to acknowledge from the crowd our space had first gathered, that the interesting part of WoMa was to a place to work & make, Wo & Ma.
It is to say that the users came to make something and also needed a space to temporary work, and the one who came to work also needed ponctually to produce or prototype something. All of them were womakers.
In other words, people looking for bright, clean and quiet classic coworking space, WoMa was too factory like, too busy. And for the one looking for a makerspace, WoMa had to carry out more than only machines and digital tools, it had to be a community of know-hows and a pool of skills diversity.
2. From “space” to “platform”
After the 6 first months, we had secondly to acknowledge that WoMa could not limit itself to be a “space” to work and make, but had to be a ressource for entrepreneurs to move along with their project.
To achieve that, WoMa had to become a “platform” for individuals to work and make their project. A platform meant that we had to add to our first mix some teachings about how to design for digital manufacturing and some initiations about how to foster the skills a community bring along and are often not harvested.
In other words, it meant that our business model wasn’t primarely about filling up desks’ and machines’ schedules, but rather about giving access to working and making intelligence, i.e. being an interface with the process of making things happen.
3. From users to contributors
During our second year of development (2015), WoMa project has reached a new stage, when people who were first users started to enroll themselves as “contributors”.
In WoMa’s world, the “contributor” status meant that users who first showed up for their own project started, after evolving within the community, to open up and contribute on others’ project. In a way, WoMa’s work force increased without having to employ.
For WoMa business model, it means that WoMa is able to offer better support for project holders coming for the first time, and also that WoMa is able, a bit like a consulting firm, to reply positively to corporations and brands requests.
4. From contributors to … ?
More recently, during the end of last year, we had to acknowledge that the contributor status wasn’t enough, and could even be kind of a worm in the fruit.
During this year, we have collected more feedbacks from users and contributors themselves and also asked a UX designer to observe the way space and machines were used, in order to try and find the correct balance.
What we have learned is to better map the interactions between agents (team members, coworkers, makers, companies and contributors) and the platform itself (space and machine cost, number of project done and notoriety or nuisance). For instance, while the making business brings more cash flow per day than the coworking business, it also create some noise pollution for long term workers and is thus detrimental to the long term business activity.
We used NetLogo to model WoMa activity :
Playing with the different input parameters (nb of team member, contributors, space and machine availability, prices/costs, etc), the models most often highlighted that more contributors — i.e. more non-contracted available workforce — was not helping the platform to develop.
At first, it sounds strange, isn’t it? How come that having ‘available free workforce’ doesn’t help to develop the activity? What happened is that , as contributors settle, they change first their status of makers generating projects to workers helping others, bringing few collective projects themselves. If at first, contributors use and serve the platform as makers themselves, they don’t feed it nor expand it as contributor workers (according to the tasks that were given to them then, tasks that did not embed promotion of WoMa nor new project development).
Second, contributors bring along more heterogenity in the way the space is managed. From the user point of view, a space like WoMa makes sense as a whole, a space to work, make, network, learn, experiement, while contributors are only responsible for one aspect of the space. Their free contribution ends up increasing the level of chaos in the overall space, chaos being an annoyance for other activities.
The agent based model had revealed that the contributors’ actions as they were envisionned (and thus coded in the agent based model) are missing a key feature : contributors are jsut a workforce, and do not serve the values endusers sees in the collective WoMa project. As a matter of fact, as a contributor gains notoriety and skills among the community, he develops a parallel economy aside the “collective platform” in such a way that he may end up by-passing the platform itself.
But without this platform, no more sharing among users, loss of collective intelligence, no more costs sharing, less durability of the business model, etc. With only free contributors, the collaborative platform turns into an opportunistic association of entrepreneurs, none of whom will feel accountable or in charge for the collective ressources (spaces, machines and know-hows). This is what we learned by doing.
5. From contributors to contractors, or to shareholders
In order to improve this contributor status, what we are aiming at is to turn contributors acountable for the platform’s business model.
To do so, we could write a contract to bind them ; you can position yourself on WoMa’s incoming projects, if you pay something to this platform. Similarly to what happens on marketplaces, either the platform keeps a fee for giving access to jobs, either you pay a yearly fee to access the marketplace, either you bring yourlself X collective projects/year, etc.
Or we could make them shareholders of the collective platform ; for you to feel accountable of the collective platform and aim at keeping it open and heterogenous, we agree that you ought to have a decision power where the platform is heading at.
As 2016 starts, we will try out both of these models and make the platform evolve accordingly. Stay tuned.
Do you see any other ways to move along ? If yes, feel free to share, we’d be happy to test out your ideas.
