a space for experiments in

DIY democracy

description:

CivicLab is a community space devoted to supporting DIY democracy. We do this by building a community of practice through affordable coworking, meeting, and event space; holding educational master classes and workshops at the intersection of civics and DIY culture; and developing original tools and research. DIY Democracy is merging two ideas: First, that the tools of the Internet age (open source software, hardware, and knowledge) empower average citizens to collaborate and create their own solutions to today's most pressing problems.  And second, that in concert with the tools and methods of community organizing, citizens are enabled to implement these solutions through collective action.

contributions:

I co-founded CivicLab with my (now) friend and long time Chicago community organizer, Tom Tresser. In concert with the help of an architect as well as a master carpenter, I literally designed and built the lab from scratch. We built every desk, dry erase board, and table in the space. If you can't sit on it, we built it. We've had nearly a dozen different organzations co-working in the space, held well over a hundred workshops and classes, and numerous public events.

I'm going to have to defer on some of the other successes for now. I'm still too close to it to think about those things that have gone well and how I contributed to it having gone that way. I'm not unnecessarily down on myself or anything. It just tends to be the case that I process the challenges for a while before I understand the successes.

Some favorite highlights include:

Aside from the first and last in the group, I played only a supporting role in these events. However, insofar as CivicLab may be evaluated as a canvas, these are some of my favorite paintings that were created on it.

challenges and lessons:

At the heart of CivicLab is a question about how two different cultures of "makers" can inform one another. On the one hand, community organizers who see their world as politically malleable, and on the other, makers who see their world as physically malleable.

The question necessitates a community to answer it, and this proved to be an endeavor for which I was entirely unprepared. For all of my teachings about the importance of understanding the community you're designing for, I hardly knew anything about Chicago, and had no network here. I had no trust with the organizing community of Chicago for whom that was an important value. I didn't understand their motives which are vastly different than those of a "maker". On the other hand, for all of my time spent in and around the maker communities of Boston, I didn't understand the unique motivations of makers in Chicago.

It was difficult for people to understand what we were doing, and therefore while we did gain a large amount of word of mouth, I'm not sure people spoke with the same word. Were we a co-working space? Were we a community center? An organization that has their own projects?

This challenge was exacerbated by the sheer size of Chicago. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. It was important to our initial co-workers to be located centrally, which is why we choose to be in the West Loop. The negative spin is that we're equally inconvenient for everyone. With public transportation on average taking 45 minutes to anywhere outside the Loop, this raised the bar even higher to convince someone to come.

future directions:

We chose a maker model that was unsustainable for two people to maintain. A project like CivicLab needs to be owned in a more co-operative fashion. This would help it in a few key ways: 1) it will infuse it with a more diverse and larger network, that has a person at CivicLab that they trust. 2) In others' taking ownership, our workshops and events will be put on with greater passion and that's infectious. 3) The maintenance tasks can be better distributed relieving the need for two people to handle all the business aspects.