Hi, We have noticed that some Labs were accepted in Mexico that does not full fills the requirements.
This labs are HackerGarage, Parque de innovación tecnológica UAS (It is even duplicated) and the Hub Lab. They do not even have the machinery. The case of Hub Lab is a Fab Lab Mérida proyect that is starting.
On the other hand there is an initiative, Fab Lab DF, that has been working with our network for a while now and was not accepted. Our recommendation is to accept them as part of the network. They even are going to take the 2017 Fab Academy in Puebla.
Another case to consider is Fab Lab Chihuahua. After years, they are not operating as a Fab Lab, they are a manufacturing facility, they do not have all the machines, they are not open to the public neither have any project with the comunity or the Mexico Network. We belive they use the name for comercial purposes. You can check that in their site.
It is important to fix this asap since the mexican government relies in the fablabs.io site to validate labs for a new program, that we have promoted, to built prototypes subsidized by the government.
We have the same problem in Brazil. We don’t have the government that validate the Lab, but the institution they are inside normally gives them found after they are on the list. And normally when they are accepted they think they are a FabLab no matter what they do.
Though most of russian maker spaces called Fab Labs are trying hard to provide people with all the Fab Lab staff (machines, courses, community, projects, etc), there are places which not even try to play like they care about any aspect of Fab Lab ideology.
This is a topic that has some time running in the network.
In my personal opinion, I think that the idea is not to alienate those fab labs that don´t follow “the rules” but to reward those that do. We should be more focus on the people that are really committed to the network and gather them all together so that other can understand how this works and sign in.
Maybe some of you can help me add up indicators that define a true and running fab lab (rather than categories), that could be demonstrated in the platform to be measure? @kenzoabiko@Dmitry