Vulca European Program

descrição da organização

Organisation presentation:
Vulca (https://vulca.eu) is a non-profit organisation / association established in February 2017 with the aim of creating a mobility programme for members (makers) of creative hubs (fablabs, maker/hackerspaces, biolabs, creative hubs, open farms) with the open access policy to their communities. Even before the official establishment of our NGO, we have started traveling and documenting the makers activities in Europe by closely interacting with makers, hackers, researchers, and policy-makers.
The map of places we have visited, you can find following the link:
https://thomas-vulca.carto.com/builder/eefc97a7-d91b-4c59-93e6-7478aa0d61a9/embed

Aims and Target groups:
Vulca aims at building a future European society which fosters innovation and cooperation at the citizen level. Vulca relies on the makers, a community gathered around different creative spaces, namely fablabs, maker and hackerspaces, biolabs and open farms, on their know-how and craftsmanship as a creative outlet for local and global challenges.
Makerspaces and similar spaces can have a transformative and empowering role by identifying and nurturing individual capabilities for the benefit of the entire society. By leveraging a virtual open-source cloud, the makers from all over Europe can connect and share experiences, enabling a new way to learn, make and share.
These spaces are open to all people irrespective of their social, educational or cultural background. They provide a chance to develop new skills and competences in non-formal and informal settings.

Regular activities:
The main objective of Vulca is to enable the mobility of creatives/makers, as well as to encourage and increase cross-border collaboration and transdisciplinary knowledge exchange. In order to achieve this, Vulca developed a broad network of fab labs and makerspaces. To enable more active communication between their members Vulca has developed three regular actions: (A) Vulca Tours (B) Seminars, (C) Distributed Projects.

(A) Vulca Tours - to identify communities;
Vulca has a team that has been traveling across Europe (EU and non-EU countries) for the past 4 years to explore the makers movement. The aim is to personally meet makers communities ranging from makerspaces and fablabs in capitals and urban areas to the rural areas of different countries, keeping inclusiveness and openness as key values of the Vulca network.
Between 2016 and 2020 Vulca has visited almost 350 spaces in 36 countries. Through this action Vulca (1) develops a wide network of fablabs, (2) establishes personal contact in each of the visited spaces, and (3) better understands the needs and projects of local communities.

(B) Vulca Seminars - to enable community to meet and discuss;
The action we created as a following step of Vulca Tours is enabling the community to interconnect with each other, deepening the sense of belonging to the network Vulca is developing. Every year Vulca organizes a seminar in a different place and country in Europe to keep the association and its actions decentralised. Through this action, we want to emphasize different communities in Europe. Each year, topics are adapted based on key efforts of the welcoming community (i.e. social inclusion, STEAM education, particular SDGs, and other).
Through organising seminars, the core team of Vulca has developed strong community management, organisation and communication skills. Through seminars Vulca started understanding the importance of learning opportunities for local communities present in makerspaces. Connecting communities in smaller groups around different topics made us understand better the geographical distribution of similar activities. Therefore, we become proficient in interconnecting members of different communities for peer-to-peer exchanges between spaces in different countries.

(C) Distributed projects – to bridge communities;
In 2019, Vulca started to develop a new specific action that includes intersectoral, intercultural, cross-border projects. Vulca organises distributed actions for (1) leaders (experienced creative hubs, fablabs, and makerspaces), who are holding European projects to help them to work and collaborate with the right partners in the makers’ movement and (2) researchers (mainly sociology and technology PhD students), to provide a relevant quantitative and geographical scope to collect the information from the right partners in the makers’ movement related to their research topic.