Prior research emphasizes the benefits of university makerspaces, but overall, quantitative metrics to measure how a makerspace is doing have not been available. Drawing on an analogy to metrics used for the health of industrial ecosystems, this article evaluates changes during and after COVID-19 for two makerspaces. The COVID-19 pandemic disturbed normal life worldwide and campuses were closed. When students returned, campus life looked different, and COVID-19-related restrictions changed frequently. This study uses online surveys distributed to two university makerspaces with different restrictions. Building from the analysis of industrial ecosystems, the data were used to create bipartite network models with students and tools as the two interacting actor groups. Modularity, nestedness and connectance metrics, which are frequently used in ecology for mutualistic ecosystems, quantified the changing usage patterns. This unique approach provides quantitative benchmarks to measure and compare makerspaces. The two makerspaces were found to have responded very differently to the disruption, though both saw a decline in overall usage and impact on students and the space’s health and had different recoveries. Network analysis is shown to be a valuable method to evaluate the functionality of makerspaces and identify if and how much they change, potentially serving as indicators of unseen issues.

Since emerging around 2010, maker culture and the maker movement have drawn little attention from digital labour research. This article fills the gap by exploring sociocultural dynamics that have emerged in maker culture, such as how makers in China mobilise their agency to struggle for a path forward to achieve decent work and a better society. The article first reviews research on the Chinese maker community as well as digital labour, in particular the dualism of exploitation and workplace resistance in current digital labour research. It argues that makers, in the case studied, mobilise certain agency initiating from sociocultural dynamics beyond the framework of exploitation. The article then explicates the argument with cases collected from our fieldwork in Shenzhen’s maker community in July–August 2017. It shows makers’ practices originating from the open-source ethos, such as an awareness of sharing and mutual support in moulding a ‘micro-innovation’ model, and in creating products that aim to benefit vulnerable communities and build up a sustainable ecosystem. The article thus turns the current economic discussion on maker culture in a new direction: the sociocultural impact of the maker movement. Furthermore, it suggests that this research on the sociocultural impact fills the gap between existing digital labour research and maker studies.