The Maui Makers

Makerspace Hawaii, or the Maui Makers, is an interesting DIY community in development. Situated on Maui, they started out in a shipping container and have recently moved into an empty school building. The project is initiated and driven by Jerry Isdale, a fantastic maker of high caliber. Jerry was originally planning on starting a FabLab, especially since he jokingly refers to Hawaii having third world like conditions. But because of the high start costs and sponsorship required of a FabLab, Jerry decided to start a makerspace instead. He also had a hard time finding an open community supporting FabLab. And he became a bit disappointed by US FabLab meeting in Tulsa, where he found that knowledge sharing was practised a lot less than it was talked about, and that most of the US FabLab members seemed to be mainly focused on providing workshop facilities for their students atvarious schools.

The Maui Makers are mainly collaborating with various other makerspaces and one of their very interesting projects is their participation in the Global Alliance of Makers Building Interstellar Technologies, or SpaceGAMBIT. It is going to very interesting to see what kind of space technology the global maker community will continue developing in the coming years. Another promising part of this mega grant project is the development of a platform for global collaboration and documentation. Something we are very hungry for in the global FabLab community as well.