List or enrich your facility
Available now
Adding a workshop, or improving a record that's already there.
Before anything else, an honest statement of the deal. Describing your workshop properly takes your time, and the benefit to you is not immediate. There is no order flow yet. What you get in the near term is being findable by people looking for what you can do, and being part of a network that exists before it's urgently needed. It is our job to make that worth your time, not yours to do us a favour.
Why detail is the whole thing
Matching runs on capability detail. A record saying a space is interested in "digital fabrication" places a pin on a map. A record saying it has a laser cutter that takes 3 mm acrylic can answer an actual question.
Right now most records in OHM are the first kind. That's why a design needing soldering currently matches almost nothing — not because the workshops can't solder, but because nothing in their records says they can.
So enrichment isn't polish. It's the difference between OHM working and not.
Adding or editing
Go to Facilities → New facility, or open an existing record and choose Edit. The form covers:
- Identity — name, and how to get in touch
- Location — address, access, practical details like a loading dock
- Equipment — machines, by make and model
- Processes — what the space can actually do, chosen from a standard list so it means the same thing to everyone
- Operations — hours, capacity
You do not have to complete it in one go, and a partial record is genuinely better than none. If you only do one thing, do processes — that is what matching reads.
Pick processes carefully
The process list is a shared vocabulary, which is what lets a design's requirements line up with a workshop's capabilities across thousands of records.
Two things worth getting right:
Claim what you can actually do, not what your equipment could theoretically support. A match that wastes somebody's afternoon is worse for you than no match.
Do claim the unglamorous ones. Soldering, assembly, drilling, finishing. These are exactly the capabilities missing across the network today, and they are frequently the ones that decide whether a design can be built at all.
If your space is already on Maps of Making
Your record there is published by you, on your own site, and read from there. Editing it in OHM does not change it, and does not take anything away from you.
You don't have to choose which one to maintain. OHM can serve your facility as a document Maps of Making reads, so you describe the workshop once here — including the process detail a map has no field for — and give the map an address to poll. It re-reads it every ten minutes, so later improvements travel on their own.
See publish to Maps of Making. Nothing is served until you mark the record public.
Then choose who sees it
A new record is private by default: it stays on this instance and is not shared with anyone. Nothing is exported until you decide otherwise, and you can share some parts while keeping others back.
See who can see your data — worth reading before you enter an address.