What Is the Fab Charter and What Do Fab Labs Agree To?
The Fab Charter is a short document from MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms that states what a fab lab is and what labs and their users agree to. It is the reason "fab lab" means something more specific than "room with machines in it": a lab that calls itself a fab lab is claiming to meet the charter's terms on access, education, responsibility, and sharing. You can read the whole thing in a couple of minutes at the Fab Charter.
Why a charter exists at all
The fab lab came out of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms as an outreach project attached to a class on digital fabrication, and it spread faster than anyone planned. Neil Gershenfeld's essay How to Make Almost Anything describes how a teaching experiment turned into an international network of labs. Once labs existed in places with no connection to MIT and no connection to each other, the name needed a definition that was not "we bought the same machines." The charter is that definition: a statement of obligations rather than a specification of equipment, maintained alongside the program's own documentation at the MIT CBA fab lab site.
What the charter actually covers
The document is organized as a handful of short headings. In plain terms:
- Mission. Fab labs are described as a global network of local labs that enable invention by giving individuals access to tools for digital fabrication. The two halves matter equally — local access, global network.
- Access. You can use a fab lab to make almost anything, as long as it does not hurt anyone. But you are expected to learn to do it yourself, and to share the lab with other users and other uses. That last clause is why fab labs rarely let one project monopolize a machine.
- Education. Training is project-based and peer-to-peer: you learn by making things and by passing on what you learned. Users are expected to contribute to documentation and instruction, not just consume it.
- Responsibility. Three kinds — safety (knowing how to work without hurting people or machines), operations (cleaning up, maintaining, and helping the lab function), and knowledge (contributing to documentation).
- Secrecy. Designs and processes made in a lab can be protected and sold however the inventor chooses, but they should remain available for individuals to use and learn from.
- Business. Commercial activity can be incubated in a fab lab, but it must not conflict with open access, and it is expected to grow beyond the lab rather than inside it. The lab is a launchpad, not a factory floor.
What the charter does not do
It does not list machines. There is a conventional fab lab inventory — the Fab Foundation's getting-started guidance is where that lives, along with planning and budgeting advice — but the inventory is a recommendation for interoperability, so that a file made in one lab can be cut in another. The charter is about conduct.
It also does not create a legal franchise. There is no licensing fee in the document and no central ownership of the term. In practice, labs signal participation by listing in the network directory at fablabs.io, which is the registry to check if you want to confirm a lab is part of the network rather than simply using the name. How to find an official fab lab near you walks through that lookup.
Why it matters when comparing spaces
If you are deciding what to call your own space, or trying to work out whether the facility down the road is a fab lab, the charter is the test. A membership woodshop with a laser cutter is a makerspace; it becomes a fab lab when it accepts the open-access, shared-use, document-and-teach obligations and connects to the network. That is the real line between the two labels, and it is the subject of the difference between a fab lab and a makerspace.
The charter's education clause also explains the network's teaching program, where instruction is distributed across labs rather than delivered from one campus — see what Fab Academy is and how the program works.