Britta Riley: A garden in my apartment. Marcin Jakubowski: Open-Sourced Blueprints For Civilization. In this special year-end collaboration, TED and The Huffington Post are excited to count down 18 great ideas of 2011, featuring the full TEDTalk with original blog posts that we think will shape 2012.
Do It With Others - Maker Community Manifesto. Maker Faire ® season is here.
It is all year long, actually. Thousands of people turn out for large and small events around the world that are oriented at inspiring and enabling makers, hackers, inventors, small business owners, and entrepreneurs. I was on the organizing team for the Kitsap Mini Maker Faire and these events are different than other fairs or festivals or community markets. I’m headed to Los Angeles and plan to attend the OC Mini Maker Faire in Irvine, just for fun. We started our fair when we asked a question: “How do we help area makers, creators, artisans, in a tough economy?”
Self-Repair Manifesto. Repair, don't despair! towards a better relationship with electronics. How to start a Repair Cafe. If you've ever found yourself on the phone with a customer service representative telling you it would cost more to fix your electric tea kettle than to just buy a new one, you are well acquainted with the concept of "planned obsolescence.
" The good news is that people across the world are getting wise to the intentional design flaws hoisted upon us by clever manufacturers eager to sell more products, and are coming up with new and creative ways to salvage perfectly usable things. We Need a Fixer (Not Just a Maker) Movement. Biology Hacklabs. EAVESDROPPING ON BACTERIA: Members of the Baltimore Under Ground Science Space learn to assemble a genetic circuit that will indicate when bacteria are “talking” with one another.COURTESY OF BUGSSBioinformatician Patrik D’haeseleer can expertly dissect the metagenomics of plant enzymes and map the genomes of soil bacteria, but before last year he was a novice at plating bacteria and isolating DNA.
“I always regretted not being able to do more on the wet lab side,” says D’haeseleer, who works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the US Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute in California. In 2010, D’haeseleer received an e-mail from a small group of biology enthusiasts in the San Francisco Bay Area soliciting donations to start a community-operated laboratory. The hackerspace raised $35,000 from its online fundraising campaign, surpassing the original $30,000 goal. Across the country, no two community biolabs are alike, and neither are their members. Critical mass. DIYBio Local Directory.
What is a FabLab? The Rise of the Hacker Space. 10 things to do when starting a FabLab. After the post on the business models for FabLabs, and the post about the complex nature of a FabLab, in this post I would like to use my experience on building the Aalto FabLab in Helsinki and the experience of working and visiting other labs for explaining 10 simple suggestions for who’s thinking about to build a FabLab.
As said before, there is no single book or how-to guide for starting a FabLab, for two reasons: on one side the knowledge required for starting and running a FabLab is always under development and evolution, on the other side the unique conditions of the local context require each time to develop a custom model. Check other suggestions about starting a FabLab here. 01. Start from the local conditions Always start from understanding and defining the local conditions and how they will influence your project. 02. 03. 04. 05.
Generally, developing a FabLab takes more than what you think… it always happens! 06. 07. 08. 09. Announcing: Emerging Leader Labs: A Social Incubator Running on the Gift Economy. Image found via pinterest by smallfly It’s an idea whose time has come!
Only a little over a month ago, I was sitting at a table with Art Brock & Eric Harris-Braun of the Metacurrency Project, discussing the possibility of launching a new initiative together in the spirit of the “Superhero School” concept many people are currently exploring. The premise is pretty straightforward: There are plenty of passionate, driven people who want to make cool ideas and projects happen.
Access to resources (especially, money) is often a large barrier to actualizing them. So why not create physical locations that don’t require money as a chief organizing energy source, where enthusiastic entrepreneurs, artists, designers and other creatives can come together and prototype their dreams? The Hub Seattle - A coworking and events space for inspiring people and ventures for good. Check it out: Libraries Embracing Makerspaces. Mark Fraunfelder addresses a standing room-only crowd the American Library Association’s “Maker Monday” event today in Chicago.
The American Library Association (ALA) is wrapping up its annual conference in Chicago tomorrow. Worries Over Defense Dept. Money for ‘Hackerspaces’ But the money has stirred some controversy.
The financing for the schools program is one of several recent grants that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, has made to build closer ties to hackers. Unlike the hackers who cripple Web sites and steal data, the people the government is working with are more often computer professionals who indulge their curiosity at their local hackerspace. But the financing has prompted criticism that the military’s money could co-opt these workshops just as they are starting to spread quickly. There are about 200 hackerspaces in the United States, a sharp jump from the handful that existed five years ago. TechShop: An Inventor's Paradise in San Francisco. In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits. The door of a dry-cleaner-size storefront in an industrial park in Wareham, Massachusetts, an hour south of Boston, might not look like a portal to the future of American manufacturing, but it is.
This is the headquarters of Local Motors, the first open source car company to reach production. Chris Anderson: The Makers Revolution. Chris Anderson’s book THE LONG TAIL chronicled how the Web revolutionized and democratized distribution.
His new book MAKERS shows how the same thing is happening to manufacturing, with even wider consequences, and this time the leading revolutionaries are the young of the world. Anderson himself left his job as editor of Wired magazine to join a 22-year-old from Tijuana in running a typical Makers firm, 3D Robotics, which builds do-it-yourself drones. GitHub Has Big Dreams for Open-Source Software, and More. Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub’s co-founder and chief executive Software is not merely about automating every aspect of our lives anymore. Open Technology.