Community research kit: makers, workspaces, and livelihoods

Use calendar year 2025 for activity and finances so every respondent answers about the same complete year. Ask separately about current conditions as of September 2026. If fieldwork begins later, record its actual dates and retain 2025 as the reference year for this version. Label businesses that opened later as outside the 2025 financial sample while retaining their current-conditions responses.

A maker creates, fabricates, materially transforms, or creatively repairs physical objects. Include art, craft, textiles, furniture, ceramics, jewelry, printing, instruments, and hardware prototypes. Participation may be paid or unpaid. Record food, beverages, general digital work, and large-scale production separately as adjacent activities.

All financial and demographic questions are optional. Every numeric question permits exact value / estimate / don't know / prefer not to answer. Zero is an explicit answer, never the interpretation of a blank. Respondents may answer on paper, by accessible digital form, or through a facilitated interview. Do not promise translations until available; record language/access needs and arrange a facilitator before enrolling people who need one.

Opening consent text

Portland Civic Lab is studying what people make in Portland, how making supports livelihoods, and what information is missing. Participation is voluntary. You may skip questions or stop. We will report combined findings and will not publish your individual financial answers or home address. Named stories and quotations require a separate, explicit agreement. Your answers will not determine eligibility for services or funding. Please tell us if you want a copy of the findings or wish to withdraw before the analysis closes.

Before launch, the project lead sets and displays a calendar closing date and a staffed project contact. No invitations should imply the pilot is already underway. Obtain an affirmative consent answer; otherwise end the questionnaire and retain no substantive responses.

Respondent: a person familiar with the facility's records. One form per operating location; use a parent-organization identifier for multiple sites. Ask for completion from records where possible. Target pilot burden: about 15 minutes, excluding an optional financial follow-up.

Operator revenue/expense bands (USD): 0; 1–9,999; 10,000–49,999; 50,000–99,999; 100,000–249,999; 250,000–499,999; 500,000–999,999; 1 million or more; unknown; prefer not to answer. Keep exact values when voluntarily supplied; never impute the midpoint of an open-ended band.

Respondent: an adult who performed making activity in 2025, or an adult new entrant answering current-condition questions. Youth-program participation is collected as operator aggregates in this initial phase, so person-level results must be labeled adult-only. One person form per respondent, with a linked optional business section. Target pilot burden: about 10 minutes.

Maker receipts and expense bands (USD/year): 0; 1–999; 1,000–4,999; 5,000–9,999; 10,000–24,999; 25,000–49,999; 50,000–99,999; 100,000–249,999; 250,000 or more; unknown; prefer not to answer.

Net profit/loss bands: loss over 10,000; loss of 1–10,000; zero; profit of 1–4,999; 5,000–9,999; 10,000–24,999; 25,000–49,999; 50,000–99,999; 100,000 or more; unknown; prefer not to answer. Define profit before personal income taxes; allow “not applicable” for employee-only participants. Do not require respondents to calculate an accounting measure they do not maintain.

Schedule approximately 30–45 minutes. Choose a completed project in the reference year; if another year is necessary, record that year and keep it outside 2025 totals.

1. Describe the finished object, repair, commission, or teaching service. Who wanted it, and how did the relationship begin?
2. Reconstruct the stages: design, materials, tooling, prototype, fabrication, finishing, marketing, delivery. What happened in Portland and elsewhere?
3. Identify everyone paid for the work by role, not by private contact details. Distinguish employee pay, subcontracting, unpaid collaboration, and the owner's time.
4. Where were materials and services purchased? Which local vendor relationships can be documented? Avoid treating a local retailer's entire sale as locally manufactured value.
5. What did the customer pay, what did delivery and production cost, and what remained for the producer? Permit ranges, partial disclosure, or no financial disclosure. Do not reproduce invoices containing private information.
6. Which shared spaces, equipment, teachers, or referrals mattered? What feasible alternative existed? Did lack of access ever prevent or delay a comparable project?
7. Was the project typical? Ask about failed projects, unsold inventory, downtime, and canceled orders to avoid selecting only successes.
8. What would allow the maker to remain or grow in Portland? What change has already caused relocation or closure?
9. Review factual notes and distinguish record-supported statements from recollection. Request separate permission for each named quotation or image.

Pilot: three operators and five makers

Recruit operator perspectives from a multidisciplinary space, a specialized workshop, and a small or informal facility. Recruit makers spanning home-based work, full-time business ownership, side income, unpaid participation, and closure/relocation. Some roles may overlap, but preserve distinct respondents.

The pilot checks comprehension, recall burden, financial sensitivity, geography, duplicate affiliations, and whether revenue questions accidentally mix personal and business accounts. Observe completion times, ask respondents to explain difficult questions in their own words, and revise before launch. Pilot answers are not combined with a revised survey unless wording and definitions remain comparable and renewed consent permits it.

Main recruitment frame

Create a private contact and eligibility frame using public directories, operator invitations, guilds, markets, suppliers, community cultural organizations, repair networks, and referrals. Record discovery channel so a prominent space cannot silently dominate the sample.

Review coverage across:

• physical disciplines, commercial and unpaid activity;
• home, independent, shared, and employer facilities;
• North, Northeast, Southeast, Northwest/Southwest, and East Portland work locations;
• new, established, relocated, and closed businesses;
• language/access needs and communities underrepresented in public directories.

These are coverage targets, not statistical quotas or a claim of representativeness. Identify missing groups explicitly. Space and market directories are starting points, not the target population itself. Invite former participants through opt-in networks and publicly available closure information; do not seek private rosters.

• Generate random private person_id, business_id, site_id, and response_id values. Store contacts/consent separately from answers. Named affiliations remain private unless explicitly approved for public use.
• Keep identifiable material in access-controlled storage outside the public repository. Maintain a recruitment log with invitation, eligibility, participation, channel, and reminder status. Set the actual analysis close date before invitations.
• Remove identifiers from analysis extracts. Suppress public subgroup cells below five respondents and complementary cells that would reveal them. Review rare combinations even above that threshold. Report ranges rather than identifying a small studio through finances.
• Resolve potential duplicate responses privately and with consent; retain the latest confirmed response. Never deduplicate merely because two people share a household or studio. A person and their business are linked, not interchangeable.
• Calculate participation from person records, business receipts from unique business records, and site finances from site/operator records. Do not add operator-managed commission receipts to member receipts when the latter are payments within the same commission chain.
• Report denominator, response count, missing answers, eligibility, and recruitment source for each result. Describe open-survey distributions as respondent findings. No standard margin of error for a self-selected sample.
• Weight to a population only after a qualified methods review establishes a defensible frame, inclusion/response model, and external benchmarks. Do not extrapolate a makerspace mean to unaffiliated makers.
• Follow up after twelve months only with opt-in participants. Classify exits, closures, moves, and nonresponse separately. Do not interpret loss to follow-up as business failure.
• Delete the contact linkage within twelve months of final publication unless participants separately opt into future research. Retain only deidentified aggregates and approved quotations publicly.

To an operator

Portland Civic Lab is researching what local makers produce, how this work supports livelihoods, and what existing statistics miss. We are preparing a small pilot of a workspace questionnaire. It asks about a common reference year, 2025, and distinguishes memberships, active users, businesses, and sales. Financial questions are optional; individual financial answers will not be published. Would a person familiar with your records be willing to help us test the questionnaire? We would also welcome advice on reaching makers outside the best-known shared spaces.

To a maker

Portland Civic Lab is studying physical making in Portland, including home-based work, independent studios, shared workshops, paid businesses, and making without sales. We are preparing a short questionnaire about activity in 2025 and current working conditions. You may skip any question, and we will not publish individual financial answers or home addresses. We are especially interested in perspectives that public business and membership lists miss. Would you be interested in helping test the questions or sharing the invitation with an opt-in community?