Make Works collaborate with Eastside Projects in Birmingham

This is for everyone - we should all be sharing information about local manufacturing.

Last week, we launched something called Open Make Works - a place where we are trying to make everything we do as open and transparent as possible. It's still a work in progress, but keep an eye on it.

We are doing this so that people all over the world can learn about what we have done in Scotland so far - then go ahead and set up resources that open up information to local manufacturing.

At the moment, you can read the making.makeworks blog, which shows what's going on behind the scenes as we work to make Make Works self-sustaining. We also have resources like Maker Speed dater - an event format that you can set up quickly if you are wanting to find out if people in the area are interested in networking around local manufacturing.

Local Training

We’ve also started doing 1-1 projects with organisations and groups that are interested in setting up their own platforms.

Recently, we started working with Eastside Projects in Birmingham, where the brilliant curator and maker Ruth Claxton is starting to map local manufacturers in that area. This is part of the Birmingham Production Space project.

So far we have been sharing the process of researching local manufacturers, and helping work through ideas about how it might work best in that area. This mainly involves a few meetings, monthly Skype-mentoring and sharing lots of the materials we've built up. The Birmingham team are actually headed up to Scotland to do some shadow filming with us in October, so they can take some of the process back down with them.

At the moment, it is still a work in progress as to whether we work together to have a ‘Make Works’ in Birmingham - or whether it makes more sense for the group to be building their own thing (and be posting people back and forward to each others’ networks ) - but the main thing is to get as many people tooled up to find local manufacturers, and to then share and make this information accessible to others.

If you are in Birmingham and you know of some good fabricators, give Ruth a shout. Similarly, if you are in a city around the world and would like to work with us, then don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Find out more about Open Make Works