Willow Brugh, aka willowbl00, is the co-founder of the Seattle hackerspace Jigsaw Renaissance, as well as GameSave. She is the director of Geeks Without Bounds, and co-director of Space Federation. She’s also spoken at a number of Maker Faires on hacker/makerspace organizing and public learning. We’re thrilled to welcome her as a contributor to makezine.com. -Gareth

SpaceCamps have been happening at Maker Faire Bay Area, Detroit, and New York. The point of SpaceCamp is to propagate the robustness and awareness of hacker- and makerspaces. Attending spaces are curated into a shared area so that space facilitators get to know each other and Faire attendees are exposed to the wide variety of spaces’ interests, personalities, and geographies.

SpaceCamps are a part of Space Federation. Space Federation’s mission is to provide financial and organizational support to open communities in shared physical spaces who use innovative methods and technology in hands-on education. This means we help space facilitators and founders get to know each other, and provide fiscal sponsorship (act as a 501c3 without all of the overhead) to groups who operate as not-for-profit.

We do this because we want hacker- and makerspaces to become the schools of the future (see our panel from Faire, sorry about the audio). For that to happen, we need to be able to focus on making awesome, not figuring out if our zoning designation will fit with our insurance type. In the same way we share a laser cutter, we can share accountants and lawyers. Better yet, we can share what we’ve learned about things like membership documents, bylaws, and epoxies.