History of Xinchejian
Contents
Founding of Xinchejian
Xinchejian was originally conceived and started in April of 2010 by David Li. Xinchejian began at Xindanwei. Soon after, Min Lin Hsieh and Ricky Ng-Adam joined David as co-founders to create the first Chinese hackerspace with a permanent physical space.
The co-founders signed the lease for a 100 m2 space on 76 Anhua Road in Changning district on Sunday, March 13th 2011. The grand opening of Xinchejian to the public was March 26th 2011, which is now the official Xinchejian birthday.
Xinchejian 1.0
Xinchejian began to grow and gain a following. Some of great events and projects that came out of that time were RoboRacing, Insectbot, spaghetti bridge, soldering station, telepresence robot (Ricky and Qichen), Interactive Tree with Clemence, rockets, and of course Arduino classes.
Xinchejian also raised money from Stakeholders to help support it financially. Xinchejian also had a group of Staff members that joined Xinchejian and volunteered their time, like Edward Jiang, Michael Liao, Paul Adams, Lio Lunesu, Lutz Michaelis, Spencer Featherstone, and Valentin Gauffre.
Xinchejian was located at the Anhua Road location for a year. Unfortunately, in May 2012 the Anhua Lu location was set to be torn down. Xinchejian set out to find a new location. It turned out that the advertising firm W+K had a floor they were opening to companies. Xinchejian worked with Trans.ist and Good2china to share space with them on W+K's second floor.
Xinchejian 2.0
Xinchejian moved into the 1035 Changle Road location on May 2012. Xinchejian established a machine room with great donations from Michael Liao.
Xinchejian continue to expand with cool projects and events including, Urban Farming with Roger Mu, Ricky's Lophilo project, Nelson Zhang's [Wearhaus], Swarm Robots, Solar charger, Arcade Machines. We also got into welding.
Ricky and Min Lin tirelessly devoted time to holding great events at the space. Xinchejian membership grew. However, Ricky and Minlin also found that could not spend as much time at the space, and retired from active staff.
Xinchejian Staff also gained some new staff members, including Kevin Chen and Lucio Pentagna. In addition, staff decided that it would be worth having a Space Manager. During a Techyizu Hackyizu event in November 2013, Amanda Ma started spending more time at Xinchejian. We began an experiment to have a near full-time member to help manage the space.
Harvey also joined the hackerspace.
Xinchejian 3.0
In May 2014, W+K was thinking of reclaiming the space, and raised the rent. We began a search for a new space, and decided on locating at People Squared (also called P2). The new P2 space was located at 28 East Yuyuan Road, right at Jing'an Temple. Unfortunately, the new "Hero Center" was not ready at the time of the move. However, the location and the support from P2, helped sway the staff to take the space.
We moved in to the P2 Hero Center in May 2014, which is where we are today! After being in the back, we had an official opening late in July 2014.
Our membership has also grown to over 100 members. Lots of visits by politicians. Some cool things we've done since include Sofa Car, shelving system, 3D Printing, Laser Cutting. Lucio also started his own fab lab called Xinfab, which is now attached to Xinchejian.
Xinchejian became registered as a private Chinese company (non-profits are notoriously hard to do in mainland China). Xinchejian has also started taking on corporate sponsorship to help the staff focus on hacking (as opposed to managing). (If you're interested in sponsoring Xinchejian, please contact us!)
Overall, we're excited to see what we'll do in 2015.
See also
External Links
- http://xinchejian.com/contact-us/ - Check out our main public site
