A Family Hackerspace at Parts and Crafts!?

**What: Brainstorm a family hackerspace!

When: Thursday July 24, 5:30-7 pm

Where: 577 Somerville Ave, Somerville MA 02143

Who: You and your family!**

**Kids are welcome. Pizza will be provided

What is Parts and Crafts?

We're a community workshop in Somerville MA that runs a bunch of programs for kids -- summer camp, afterschool, weekend workshops, and school alternative programs for kids ages 7-13. Our goal is to cross the resources of a hackerspace with the ethos of a free school -- to create educational spaces where kids have access to tools, resources, and a community of interested and caring adults, and where they can use those resources to basically do whatever they want. We give them water bottle rockets, craft materials, and ways to make video games. They take care of the rest.

What we hope to accomplish

Starting in Fall 2014, we are hoping to shift our afterschool programs pay-per-class to a voluntary membership model -- sort of like NPR or PBS, with sustaining memberships to help fundraise and keep the space going. Our hope is offer more and wider variability in terms of classes, figure out a way to offer more stuff for free (or very close to free). The membership side of it is neither here nor there for PLOTS -- we already run PLOTS stuff for free and will continue to do so. That said, we'd like to think about how to use the increased bandwidth to think about how to grow in collaboration with Public Lab -- through workshops and events, but also through other initiatives (like, say, hosting an open hardware tool library, which is a point of interest for many folks within this community as well). Also how to bring more Public Lab projects to kids in Somerville.

What we need from you!

We have lots of ideas and lots of questions! What workshops do people want to see? What pieces are we missing? What can we do that we're not already doing? (and how to we figure out how to do it without totally burning out staff and volunteers?) How do we make it great?! To try to answer these questions, we are reaching out to local parents, educators and community-minded folks (i.e YOU!) to do some collaborative brainstorming with staff (i.e. US!) to hash out how it would actually work.

If these things interest you, you should stop by and join the conversation!