This week we’re sending a team from TOG Hackerspace to Cuenca, Spain, for the VULCA Seminar, running from 9 to 13 November. It’s the first time the seminar has been held in Spain, and this year we’ll be getting together with makers from across Europe at the Museo de las Ciencias de Castilla-La Mancha, with the support of FabLab Cuenca. There’ll be workshops, time to work on joint projects, and a public Repair Café to round off the week.
How TOG got involved
We applied to join VULCA in December 2025 and became a makerspace member in January. We already knew some of the people in the network from visiting their spaces and running workshops together. Joining gave us a way to build on those friendships and open up more opportunities for TOG members to visit other spaces, share what we do in Dublin and bring a few ideas home to Kylemore Road.
What a maker exchange looks like
We’ve been sending TOG members on maker mobility trips. In practice, that can mean spending a few days in another makerspace, running a workshop with the local team and seeing how they do things. In Zagreb, Jeffrey ran an Arduino Cloud workshop at Radiona on a trip made possible through VULCA. This May, an invitation from FabLab Chemnitz led to a workshop where people built their own polarised-light viewers, followed by visits to makerspaces in Dresden. One of the ideas Jeffrey brought back was how public libraries can give people access to tools and space for hands-on learning.
Cuenca is a familiar name for us through repair, too. FabLab Cuenca was one of the partners in the WeRepair project that brought Jeffrey to Buinho in Portugal in 2022, where the residency finished with the first Repair Café in the village of Messejana. We’re looking forward to seeing how the Cuenca team runs theirs.
Our own Jeffrey Roe has two sessions on the programme. One looks at how makerspaces can use mesh networks for sensors, community messaging and backup communications. The other, Designing Workshops People Can Actually Finish, is about the practical side of running a workshop, from making do when there aren’t enough tools to giving people room to work at their own pace.
We’re looking forward to catching up with people we’ve worked with before, meeting a few more and seeing what we might make, fix or teach together next.