Hello everyone,
I was at a board meeting recently and the question was asked: “what is the typical member count of a makerspace”. I sought out to find that answer, and while looking for it I found some other things that I thought were interesting.
My process this: I found a site (https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/) that functions as a wiki for hacker/makerspaces around the world. I wrote a webcrawler that pulled all of the data from the US sites (including their webpages if it was available), and then tried to automatically grab information like location, how many members, what types of machines they had, membership fees, etc. I filtered out anything that hadn’t been updated in the last 5 years. As you can imagine, I had to sift through a lot of the data by eye and sort things.
I thought maybe you’d find this interesting, too, so here it is: much more than you were probably wondering about the state of makerspaces in the US.
Here is a link to view it online: makerspaces
And here are some screenshots.
Here was a fun one: which spaces had which tools/machines. Note: only about 120 of the spaces had a tool/machine list, but of those that did, here’s which tools they had listed.
See you around the space