Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab

Q: What does it take in terms of IT equipment and internet bandwidth to establish a free standing Fab Lab?

A: We currently employ the following IT solutions:

• Website: The website where you found us (http://cucfablab.org), which is a commodity Drupal site hosted by a local ISP. We also operate a YouTube channel, Flickr page and Facebook account.
• E-Mail Lists: Listservs for announcements, volunteers, and leadership.  Our listservs are provided for free by our host university.  Yahoo Groups or Google Groups would both be good alternatives for a Fab Lab that is not associated with a university. We also connect to other Fab Labs with the video conferencing tool provided by the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms.
• Computer: We pull equipment from University surplus and use software licenses available through University agreements. As of December 2013 this accounts for over 30 lab and tool machines at 2 sites, including a mixture of laptops, macs, linux machines, dual display workstations and servers. Our IT changes constantly in accordance with our needs. As a result it is absolutely critical that our IT be run in-house and with minimal externally-imposed restrictions. When something is not working during a workshop or for a project we can't wait a week to put in a request ticket to have an unfamiliar tech support person come in and (partially) fix the problem - we fix it ourselves, right there, with our own criteria. At least 50% of our volunteers are able to help troubleshoot and upkeep machines.

As for bandwidth, it's hard to make a recommendation, we make use of the outstanding land-line University of Illinois network. We also rely on their wireless system.

-Originally written by Luke in 2010, updated by Jeff in December 2013