To introduce you to the Fablab Lima team, we cannot list you the members and their activities. The reason is simple but very interesting: since 2013, they developed a unique model to attract talents and to ensure the involvement of their members.

Members of Fablab Lima, excepted Benito Juarez, the funder, and his associates, are freelances and volunteers. The notion of employees doesn’t exist. The freelances are paid depending on their investment in a project. The volunteers are not paid: they receive training in exchange for the participation in a project linked to their training and interests. Most of the paid members started as volunteers to develop new skills and experience. A weekly meeting is held each Friday where each member shares his weekly activities, news, business opportunities and where tasks are spread among the members depending on their skills and availabilities. The team has even developed a platform, called Fabgame, to assess the impact of each project or action made by the team. Frequently, calls for volunteers are organized to recruit new citizens, willing to be involved in impactful and innovative projects, to develop trendy skills and to meet passionate people.

This model requires transparency and good communication among the team but it enables each member to be involved in other professional activities. For instance, Michael Hurtado, one of the associate, is also a teacher in a prestigious university and manages 3 companies he created. Being part of Fablab Lima is for him a way of investigating new lines of research and meeting passionate people to work with. Henry Sanchez developed his company Digitoys in the Fablab such as Vaneza Caycho Ñuflo who created her company iFurniture. Both received international prizes for their company and work with the Fablab Lima as partners. If this model offers a great flexibility to his members while ensuring their involvement and professionalism in the projects, the biggest challenge is now to retain as freelances a higher percentage of volunteers over time. And for that, the team isn’t short of ideas: new lines of project or Fabcoins (bitcoin for maker) are already in the pipes.

Since its creation, in 2010, the Fablab Lima is a key actor of the maker movement in Central and Latin America. In association with the Fab Foundation, it helped the creation of dozen of Fablabs in the continent and trained dozen of makers. If the 5 first years, his role was to communicate about the power of digital fabrication by organizing and attending events and by offering to anyone tools and workshops in an open space.

Nowadays, due to the high demand of companies, universities and public institutions, it concentrates its effort on designing impactful programs while training volunteers who support it. To support the users’ shift from product to project and then to program, 2 methodologies have been created. The first one is the “Symbiocreation”: the team organizes collaborative challenge which results in a common proposition or project which is the sum of everyone ideas or projects, even of remote participants. The second tool developed is the “Industry Maturity Index”(IMI) which assesses the level of production (out of 4) of an industry to identify the best way of introducing digital fabrication and to produce efficient results (level 0 being the individual sell of raw material and level 4 the massive sell of personalized products). Users of this tool are either big companies such as BID (Banco Interamericano De Desarrollo) or local entrepreneurs such as Víctor Camones who produced low-cost shoes and clothes with natural materials and colors. This later, who had an IMI of 2.07, was helped by Fablab Lima to jump to 4.0 by producing designed and personalized clothes with a perfect mix between digital fabrication and his expertise in natural color and material.

In addition to the spread of the digital fabrication through services for clients, the Fablab is deeply involved in lot of social actions such as kids workshops, event organization such as Tedx Lima, the projects of the Fablab red in Latin America (FabLat) or high scale projects such as the construction of an Amazon floating fablab. The idea is to develop a floating platform that could adapt itself to the variation of the river. It will be used for research into bioremediation and to foster social inclusion by bringing education and technology to neglected and remote communities.

To launch the lab, the cooperation agency of Spain financed both the FabAcademy program of Victor Freudt and Benito Juarez at the Iaac in Barcelona and the machines of the FabLab Lima.

The UNI university initially offered them a space but two years later decided to manage the lab with its own resources. As a consequence, the FabLab Lima moved to the cultural center of Spain and then to the Metropolitano Museum for free. And today (2018), waiting for the restoration of the cultural center of Spain, it is located in the Ingenio Learning space for a fee corresponding to a percentage of the workshops given in the lab.

The lab generates revenues thanks to its consulting mission, for instance, to create new makerspaces and its workshops like Digitoys workshops and Bio STEAM workshops. The revenues are then redistributed to the author of the workshops or project and the makers who contributed to its organization.

To have a bigger impact, the lab is also helped by volunteers.