Community
What is running, what is free, what someone figured out. The Maker Lab community hangs on machines, materials and your own work, not on topic boards.
The community area is open to people who have been inducted in the lab. That is a deliberate decision: contributions here describe unfinished prototypes.
Six places, each with one clear job.
The bar above leads into every area you are cleared for. What follows explains what each is meant for.
- My area. Your inductions, bookings, usage and posts on one page. Visible to you alone.
- Exchange. Questions, offers and requests. A machine or material may be named, but it does not have to be.
- Workshop knowledge. The memory of the workshop: what has proved itself, with a history and a name against every change.
- Machine logbook. Per machine, the experience of the people who have used it.
- Material cards. The same thing sorted by material: settings, preparation, typical failure modes.
- Calendar. When each machine is taken. Booking still happens on the printer booking page.
Two further areas are deliberately open: the lab’s announcements and the page workshop right now, which shows how many machines are running, without names and without projects.
Knowledge stays at the machine.
A note about a print profile is most useful at the printer where it was written, not in a sub-forum called “3D printing, general”. So every machine has its own page here, with bookings, live status, notes and questions, and every material has a card with the prints made from it, notes and questions. Bookings and live status exist only on machines: a material is not booked. Whoever books a machine sees what others have already worked out on it.
There are deliberately few areas. No direct messages, no file uploads, no points and no rankings: each of those costs supervision that a single workshop cannot sustain.
The WhatsApp group
For the quick conversation on the side, the lab has a WhatsApp group. You are added at the induction, by a person on site; there is deliberately no public join link. The division of labour is simple: talk happens in the group, the record lives here. Whatever should still be true in three months belongs here. Every so often the team carries a helpful answer from the group over into the exchange, with a source line, and with your name only if you agree.
Real names, no pseudonyms
Whoever writes here does so under their own name. It is the most effective way to keep the load low in a small community: conflict is rarer and questions get more concrete. Access follows the induction. The induction is also the trust check, and it does not happen twice.
What is open and what is not
This page explains the community and names the way in; it is therefore open to anyone, but it is not indexed by search engines. The six working areas themselves are closed: without a login and without an induction you see nothing there. What stays public are the community rules, the accessibility statement, the announcements, the page workshop right now and the reporting route report content. Reporting is split precisely: anyone can read the procedure, the form itself needs an account, because it concerns posts you cannot see without one. If you want to report something from outside, write to maker@startup-incubator.berlin; that address is the contact point under Art. 11 and 12 DSA.
What stays confidential
People write about unfinished prototypes here. What you read in the community does not go outside, not into a talk and not into a post elsewhere. The reason is not politeness but money: a description that has become public can destroy the patentability of a venture under section 3 of the German Patent Act. The binding wording is in the community rules.