Scaling Out (not up)
How initiatives, makerspaces, Fab Labs, and Fab Cities can distribute power and value by scaling out
What's the difference between scaling up and scaling out?
Scaling up is the traditional model in our capitalist market system. When an initiative scales up, it works to become bigger, for example when a store becomes a multinational company or a tech start-up grows its operations and begins to ship globally. When scaling up, making, knowledge, value, and power are consolidated.
Scaling out, on the other hand, means adding nodes and spreading out the work horizontally. When scaling out, making knowledge, value, and power can be distributed. When scaling out, it is not the initial founder who does the work but the local people who implement it, often through horizontal training with the founder. As opposed to the original initiative entering the territory and having ownership over the idea, ownership is governed by local practitioners.
Here you can learn more about the differences between scaling out, scaling up, and scaling deep.
The power of scaling out: innovator practices
How can innovators scale out? Principally by openly sharing their software, hardware, implementation, and usability of their work. While publishing their work open source is useful, we advocate for innovators to actively share their work, seeking out potential collaborators and communities of practice that might benefit from, or be interested in, their technology.
Horizontal and open source knowledge transfer enables other actors to replicate and adapt designs to their local contexts and make changes and improvements. As we learned with AbonoKM0 (in Facilitating Collaboration: A Conversation with AbonoKM0), sharing information and collaborating among localized nodes strengthens, enriches and builds capacity in all parts of the network.
Additionally, distributing making and knowledge contributes to distributing value and power among actors, as opposed to concentrating it among few
The power of scaling out: Makerspaces, Fab Labs, and Fab Cities
How can makerspaces and Fab Labs participate as areas to scale out? Similar to our process with the FoodSHIFT2030 Enabler Labs, makerspaces and Fab Labs can identify other spaces where they might reciprocally transfer knowledge or collaborate to build capacity between them.
Additionally, makerspaces and Fab Labs using their space to prototype tech can scale out by building a social hub on top of the collective of innovators prototyping. This could look like offering workshops to community members, hosting knowledge transfer sessions between community members, or offering train-the-trainer sessions for professionals.
For their part, Fab Cities can forment policies that encourage innovators and industries to scale out as opposed to scale up. Fab Cities can also create productive community hubs like Fab City Hubs.
Similarly to the work with initiatives, scaling out can help to distribute making, knowledge, value, and power to many as opposed to few.
Call to action: how can you start scaling out?
Consider sharing parts, or all, of your initiative open source and disseminating it actively to new and existing communities. Share with others how you are doing this process as well!
Participate in mapping makerspace and Fab Lab food initiatives so we can better identify who is in the community and how we can support one another
Join the #food Discord channel (hosted by the Distributed Design Platform) to support one another and exchange best practices at a global level
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