Fablabs.io
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by Tomas Diez + Fab Foundation
culture >> distributed design >> platform infrastructure
'Distributedness'
FabLabs.io
Fab Labs are an emergent network of digital fabrication laboratories started (almost) accidentally by the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT in 2002. The first Fab Lab was established in 2002 in the South End Community Center in Boston in joint collaboration between NSF and MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. The Fab Lab network has been growing exponentially during the last 10 years. Fab Labs are doubling every 24 months, similar to the rate established in the Moore’s law for microprocessors speed and cost. Fab Labs have the potential to impact profoundly how we live, work and play. However,they need better governance, validation and value exchange tools to incentivise the impact within the network and in the places where they are located.
Fab Lab Values and mission: The main Fab Lab community values and mission are simplified in the Fab Charter: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/charter/, which has been updated in October 2012 for the last time. The following values could be attached to the Fab Charter, expanded to better understand the nature of this informal network.
Collaborative community: The Fab Lab Network has been gathering in a different country every year during the last 10 years in the Fab Conferences, and uses different tools for global collaboration: gitlab, github, fablabs.io, whatsapp, slack, etc. The network is organised in regional networks, with the most consolidated examples in Latin America, Asia and Europe. Fab Labs collaborate mainly in educational programs, such the Fab Academy, Bio Academy or Textile Academy.
Open Source philosophy: Thanks to digital fabrication technologies it is possible to move the open source movement from software to hardware, and nowadays there are many examples of its potentials. Labs exchange code, files and instructions to design and produce things anywhere in the world without needing to ship any materials. As it happens in software, open source is lacking of incentive mechanisms, in hardware will be more obvious. All the content of the Fab Lab Network, including the inventory of a Fab Lab, curriculum of the educational programs (Fab Academy, etc) and videos of lessons, designs of projects, and source code of platforms and online tools, are publicly available online.
Circular economy and open innovation: The ultimate goals of Fab Labs is to build the vision of the Fab City project. Under this vision, data and not things are shipped globally, while everything is made locally. The true circular economy will not be based in the management of materials, but in the creation of value from waste, and its ability to be reinserted in the supply chain at the local scale. This ambitious goal requires open innovation to be at its core, which is a fundamental value of the Fab Lab Network.
Social impact: Digital fabrication has the potential to co-produceprovide solutions for specific needs anywhere in the world, impacting communities with lack of access to water, energy or communications (i.e. Vigyam Ashram Fab Lab in rural India). Digital empowerment takes another dimension when bits and atoms are connected, and when people and communities are able to satisfy their local needs through the access to new means of production. However, Fab Labs are challenged today to abandon the comfort zone of the empowered and self-satisfied geek, and to put their knowledge to the service of their local community and improve the measurement and documentation of their impact. Fab Labs are physical spaces which hold the potential for social inclusion, to empower like-minded people (individual and collective agency), and to enable their capabilities. Gershenfeld (2005) claims the network “intention was to encourage hands-on activities and invention by bringing 'science and technology' to peripheral and marginalized communities”.
Access to digital fabrication tools: It is at its core objective of the Fab Lab Network to democratise the access to digital fabrication tools through the development of educational programs and facilities for communities around the world. This access is not limited to people to have the right to use machines, but to acquire the knowledge and the tools to expand the potential of the network around the world. There are a growing number of Fab Labs being promoted by public and private sectors that provide free access to spaces and machines for their use.
Development of educational programs: Individual Fab Labs, regional networks and the global Fab Lab community has been developing and implementing new educational programs around the world, including our own certified programs such as the Fab Academy or Bio Academy, as well as STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) programs implemented in schools. These new educational programs are developing the next generation skill-sets needed for the digital economy, and are now being requested by large companies, startups and innovation organisations when hiring new personnel. Our educational programs stimulate entrepreneurship, by having a large number of Fab Labs being started by alumni as new business, as well as the development and creation of new products.
Development of new economic model based on new urban industries: Fab Labs support the construction of the Fab City vision, which aims to transform the urban dynamics and space with the industrialization of cities, based on clean technologies, on demand production, circular economy and citizen innovation. Fab Labs have the potential to become the articulators of a transition towards a new productive model in cities, being able to provide the access to tools, build a new set of skills and deliver a new type of services and products that will challenge the 150 year old industrial model.
Catalyses of a new model for distributed production: Fab Labs won't replace industry, but will accelerate the transition to a new productive model, where multiscalar and complementary manufacturing within cities and regions, supply and provide the services and products needed in cities without compromising the planet resources and without having to rely on social exploitation of workers. We imagine Fab Labs being the places where ideas are turned into reality, prototypes are designed and tested with users and business models are developed, while connected with larger manufacturing ecosystems at the city and region scales. For example, the Make Works approach is complementary with the Fab Lab Network worldwide, since it registers the manufacturers and suppliers at industrial scale in cities and regions.
The distributed nature of the Fab Lab Network needed a tool to recognize and list all fab labs in the world. Fablabs.io is the online social network of the international Fab Lab community. It started as a spin-off project in Fab Lab Barcelona by Tomas Diez and John Rees, and is the current official list of Fab Labs that share same principles, tools, and philosophy around the future of technology and its role in society. Fablabs.io is an exchange platform for people, labs, projects, machines, events and groups that operate around the Fab Lab Network, which collaboration and communication tools in order to align interests and to expand the global scale of this community.
Around 2000 Fab Labs around the world are currently using this platform to share developments and collaborate online. The Fablabs.io platform also fosters interactions between designers, makers and users, and aims to engage discussions about matters of concerns of the wider public in which Fab Labs are embedded, in cities and remote areas of the world.
Fablabs.io is not intended to replace existing platforms such as Facebook or GitHub, which are widely used by makers, hackers and technologists to document and share open source developments. In fact, when adding a project to the Fablabs.io repository, it is possible to include links to Github repositories. More recently, Fablabs.io and Wikifactory have partnered in order to integrate some of the key features of each platform in the other.
By adding new features and integrating existing platforms, Fablabs.io facilitates distributed collaborations across participants in different Fab Labs and it embeds their creations in the more specific ecosystem of the maker community.
Integration of wikifactory projects
- Improved search, including people, projects, capabilities
- New fablabs approval process based on issue trackers
- Badge system for users, labs and organisation
- Personal user homepage, including updates from the labs in the network
Notes from the call with Norella:
http://discuss.fablabs.io/t/fab-foundation-forum/8691
Verify the outputs from the workshop in Fab 15 next week focus on people rather than labs
a profile of individuals that can be moved around labs
centralised knowledge and context based, and build content around these people
60,000 people in the platform
Current at the community there are 20 champions, organic leaderships, regional leaders, referees;
Maybe collect testimonials from Kenzo Brazil, Cesar and Francisco Sanchez in Spain, and Ted in Taiwan
Fab Foundation wants to empower the community to help with the approval process, decentralise the approval process
