The Optical Communications and Photonics MakerSpace is a project funded by the European Space Agency and implemented by the Libre Space Foundation. It aims at bringing together a diverse community of makers. These include open-source hackers, radio amateurs, and researchers, start-up companies, crowd-funded projects, community initiatives, hackerspaces, multi-disciplinary academic labs, non-profit technology companies/foundations and others. By providing funding and resources the goal is to create a passionate community running experiments and tackling challenges related to optical communications and photonics. Thus, opening up space communications development to a wide variety of people, organizations and companies.