Wikifactory

A social platform for collaborative product development.

by Christina Rebel

The image of a global community sharing their ideas with little more than an internet connection, increasingly describes manufacturing. Just like with video or music, new digital tools for design and production are making it easier to turn product ideas into reality. From our perspective, the greatest learning of content going online is found in the lines of code contributed by the software community.

Any budding developer is humbled by the sheer amount of knowledge and information that has been openly shared by the software developer community. We rely immensely on open source software for pretty much every single app and online that we use. Developers build on the 'shoulder of giants', realising an incredible scale of contribution brought about by a highly skilled community of software developers.

What underpins that collaboration in the first place? How do distributed online communities and teams develop software together? These are the core questions that Wikifactory asked as a team when we came together in 2016.

Around us in London and China, we were experiencing an open source and maker movement emerge that inspired us to ask these questions in the first place. Within this context and as technologists, we looked to github, gitlab or bitbucket and how these online platforms have served to organise the efforts of the software development community through a key set of collaboration tools.

Namely, these are online repositories with version control capabilities, a markdown editor for documentation, and an Issue Tracker to manage the iterative cycle of improvements and bug resolutions. Alongside with the permission systems to enable a distributed team to work together and better yet, the ability to 'fork' a repository and enable a global community to freely build on the work whilst offering a way to 'merge' these changes if needed.

‌Whilst Wikifactory would turn to these best practices of open source software development as a starting point we knew that we’d have to guide our development through incremental and iterative feedback from the community that inspired us too. In engaging product developers, it was clear that they were already sharing their content online, albeit that they would rely on many services put together into a kind of online project management system: mixing a file-sharing tool from one service, a documentation editor from another, and a task management tool with a handful of others in the toolbox.

Indeed, there are plenty of online listing sites where product developers can share their Yoda heads and fidget spinners as .STL files, but nothing like a solid equivalent to Gitlab or Github for designers to host their projects and engage a community online. When the rest of our workflows are going social, it's as if product development hadn’t had its 'online' nor 'collaborative' moment.

In that process of validating our value proposition with the community, it became clear to us that we had to build Wikifactory for the needs of product and hardware development from the ground up. We’d do so in providing, for example, a version controlled drive that not only could host but view over 30 CAD formats without needing plug-ins. We believed it would be key to make sure it was viewable on the go on mobile too. Or a markdown documentation editor with a user experience closer to that of a blog for those unfamiliar with the .md syntax.

We also assessed our collaboration tools in relation to the professional PLM and PDM tools that underpin product innovation processes at large companies. At least for the budding product or industrial designer, we found that these expensive licenses of more professional product development tools are out of reach. Not that these tools are designed for online collaboration in the first place, as they are usually desktop software and their implicitly offline systems that leads to information loss at organisational boundaries.

Wikifactory therefore saw the opportunity to become an online infrastructure that can serve as an alternative: providing a collaboration infrastructure for free for open source projects and at an affordable subscription for private project collaboration. We aim to strengthen existing communities and projects with our collaboration tools where possible. For this reason, we built our social collaboration platform on top of an extendible web infrastructure that can be part of a platform ecosystem.

We do believe that developing software is in an important aspect, inherently different to developing hardware or products. Whilst products exist in the physical space, the process of design to production to market is increasingly entirely digital. It's an exciting time for digital fabrication as it is already possible to distribute digital designs through a network of near on-demand fabrication services. We want to help bring that end-to-end process of design to production increasingly online, and this book captures the incredible learnings of what it takes to make that distribution possible.

Wikifactory shares with the authors of this book the importance of looking at what is necessary to make it possible to distribute design and bring about more local, circular models of design to production. We hope our contribution can draw attention to the need to be able to share not only 3D designs online, but the data from design to production. We hope to make it possible for creators and collaborators of distributed design projects to share not only 3D designs and documentation, but, increasingly, the design to production data to streamline the replication of their designs elsewhere.

This brings about a great deal of potential further research and development on what it takes to have a ‘minimum viable process’ of distributing design so that it can be replicatable across locations. At Wikifactory, we seek to identify and respond to the gaps in the online digital toolchain that are needed for a fully seamless online process from 3D design to physical product. In doing so, we hope to continue providing initiatives like those highlighted in this book with the advanced collaboration tools that can support their incredible efforts to distribute designs of (almost) anything to (almost) anywhere.