We thought we were so cool.
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So, it's like that if you're looking at the above image you have no idea what it is.
I should explain.
But that means I have to talk about the past (and the future!)
In 2010 I was depressed and miserable and convinced that the whole world was broken.
A good friend of mine and I were texting for 10ish hours a day, about technology, about education, about the problems in the world.
I was bummed because I couldn't afford to go to college. I was bummed because I was convinced that college was, largely, a scam. I thought that there might be a path to fixing it.
But what we found was that everyone serious about education understood that college was a scam, and that education there were serious people with serious plans to fix education in general, and that the problem was governments and corporations.
Usually, when I tell this story, at this point I say "so we opened a record store" which is true! But I have rediscovered going through these old documents that this is an oversimplification.
When we realized college was a scam, I almost immediately started planning a makerspace.
I wrote a big doc with everything we knew how to make at the time, and all the equipment we had access to.
And then we started working on how to fund that.
And then we realized that most of the things we made fit nicely within the context of a record store (t-shirts, posters, zines, CDs, Cassettes, etc.) and that we were both very involved in local music.
And so the plan stopped being to open a makerspace, and became open a record store and makers market, and we did that.
The plan was to transform the record store into a record store and makerspace, and we worked on that for a couple of years before everything went to hell.
So what you're seeing in that photo is a concert in our tiny little record store, with all the product outside the tiny little record store because we didn't have enough room to do both at the same time.
We filmed it from three cameras, with the intent of self releasing a series of concert films and bootstrapping a television network on the internet.
Fast forward 10 years and we ... had a maker space and a makers market and a cafe and a book and record store and were filming live concerts to release on our independent television network.
@ajroach42 I appreciate you sharing this story! I've long felt like people who make community spaces happen are pulling off some kind of incomprehensible magic trick, and lately I've been wanting to comprehend the magic.
I'd like to have more third-spaces in my area, but I don't have a plan for making that happen, especially in a decent-sized city like Portland where space is expensive. I do however have experience getting help on projects from local university students who are about to graduate and need to complete a "capstone" class.
I'm thinking I'll pitch a business capstone soliciting plans for spaces that don't rely on everyone who's there spending money. The students might not produce anything useful but I am super curious what they might come up with! And in the worst case I think it would be an educational experience for them, which I'd be happy about in its own right.
So that's the context where I'm finding it especially inspiring to hear that you did a thing and, although it might have taken longer than you hoped for some of the pieces to come together, it's working out for you.
@jamey I have always prioritized moving quickly, so we worked on opening a physical space as quickly as possible.
Some road blocks and things in 2016 - 2020 really slowed us down (surprisingly, these were all personal road blocks and not global, but whatever)
There are lots of ways to 1) find cheap space. 2) Bootstrap that space into something financially sustainable.
If it would be helpful, I could walk through some of the unconventional ways you can explore that (although I don't know anything about Portland.)
But that's probably cart before horse.
Ah, yeah, with the price of real estate in Portland...
...well I don't want to be a Negative Nelly. It's daunting though. I've had a "dream" of opening a bar for a long time.
(we were)