Back in June, I wrote about the Creative Space project we had started.

Well, we’ve been working on it for four months now, and this is where we are:

There is a core group of around 15 who are putting in serious effort, plus another 20 – 30 who are involved, though not as actively.  Beyond this, we estimate there are another 100 or so (based upon interest at the presentations we did in March and April), although this figure is somewhat speculative.  We have a website, with a mailing list, forum and wiki.  We have meetings generally every week.  We are a very broad range of people; this list gives an idea of the interests being brought to the group:

• Music performance and recording
• Engineering
• Painting
• Running a radio station
• Robotics
• Computer programming
• Bee-keeping
• Bronze-casting
• Sustainable energy
• Electric cars
• T-shirt printing
• Electronics
• Community gardens
• Model railways
• Cycle maintenance
• Clothesmaking/repair
• Car maintenance
• Collaborative writing
• Metal sculpting
• Community cooking
• Beer brewing

We are still promoting at every opportunity – there was interest from various people at Software Freedom Day on September 18th, plus people hear about us through the hackerspaces wiki, search engines and the Facebook group.

The group has decided the type of organisation we will become, an incorporated society, and we are in the process of applying for this.  Once we have that approved, we can get a bank account (at Kiwibank, of course), and rent a building – building owners are rather twitchy about renting their space to loosely-organised collectives, so we need to be some sort of legal entity.

In the meantime, we are checking out buildings and visiting other similar organisations, to see what we can learn.

The project is progressing well – people are enthusiastic, motivated and keen to work together.  More later