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Hi, I found this site through the links for Monday 30th's episode of "NewsReal".

My name's Peter, but everyone calls me Sci these days. I'm a long-time space enthusiast and something of a "futurist" I suppose. I'm a self-employed inventor/maker from East London, England.

I have composite engineering skills and a functional workshop. Relevant to this arena, I'm developing my own variation on the Mendel RepRap; the Bonsai Repstrap. I also have several items of vacuum equipment, beyond simple degassing chambers.

I have a sturdy stainless ex-production chamber with many ports that would be well suited to detailed vacuum testing of small items. I also own an 18" diameter steel bell jar from an old vacuum coater. Both require some work to get operational, and are both on my "to-do" list, for testing some of my own space-travel related ideas. I also have a functional turbomolecular vacuum pump system, so should be able to achieve a vacuum pressure of 5x10^-5 IIRC.

Rapid prototyping in vacuum is of particular interest to me.

On a personal note, I have seen a lot of space-promoting web forums come and go. It seems enthusiasm is often lost rapidly when the magnitude of the task at hand is confronted.

However I can see there are differences in this group that may prove crucial in preventing this.

The open-source approach promotes openness to outside ideas. I have already seen a thread proposing "adopting" the apparently stalled CubeSat project. I find this a very refreshing idea that I can get behind. Too many groups wish to doggedly do things their own way from scratch, in an apparent need to prove themselves over actually achieving the goals. And again, operating alone, this seems to promote rapid collapse of those groups due to overload.

I fear the biggest challenge to overcome is the one of the people involved. Motivation, organisation, cooperation, conquering personal egos, etc..

There also seems to be the issue of too much theory, too little application. People planning things out and never actually making the physical objects required.

Again this project seems very resistant to this in it's stance of keeping things simple and using off-the-shelf parts.

So, if I may offer my initial suggestions;

• Consolidate what is already here – Make the forum welcoming and social, get standard introductory documents in place. Expand moderator team as required. Likewise, team leaders for individual projects may well help spread the load.
• Expand by looking for other small similarly-minded groups and either offer to absorb, combine, ally or otherwise join forces so the overall manpower available comes closer to critical mass. The low-traffic near-dead groups would seem prime targets. A "press pack" would seem to be a useful tool for this.
• Expand material and machining power base. Possibly by allying with hacker-spaces and local maker groups, but also promote grass-roots engineering skills and for people to create their own workshops for practical application and testing of the ideas. This would also help in pushing people to RL meetings and further deepening the sense of community, as well as critical communication redundancy.
• A dependency study would be useful for working out what key items need to be resolved for projects to progress.

I hope they don't come across as arrogant, but I've had some time to consider the flaws of many web projects, and it does sound like this one could both avoid them and benefit from them.

Thankyou for the welcome Luke! I wouldn't say my manufacturing capabilities are currently signifigant, but they are expanding slowly. Once I have my mill renovated, I would like to get it set for CNC work. It should then be able to produce moulds for my small injection-moulding machine, and open up a new revenue stream for my small business.

(I probably should set up a workshop listing somewhere to reference people to.)

Regarding the hackerspaces, since we already have a google map with member locations marked, perhaps someone could create a map or overlay showing the hackerspaces too, so people are readily aware of their closest ones? http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/L…..ker_Spaces