The Maker Movement: Innovating Traditional Crafts or Colonizing Artisans?
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:18
Okay, thanks a lot for the introduction.
00:22
We will have it as not a moderated dialogue but we will talk about our different expertises and we brought some pictures from our different backgrounds and we thought about starting about introducing our work a bit and talking about our expertises. Maybe you want to start.
00:40
Sure, thank you. Hello everyone, I'm Anna and who here has heard of Fab Labs? Alright great, most everyone. For a couple of you in the back, they are like public libraries that contain all of the tools you need to make almost anything. So we have about 530 Fab Labs across more than 70 different countries internationally.
01:06
So I work with the global Fab Lab network and I've also been a researcher in the informal sector which basically means people who hang out often by the side of the road hacking
01:20
things together, putting together makeshift vehicles, building public transportation out of car parts that are sold as scrap from places like Germany to West Africa and people generally who don't have ties to traditional manufacturing industries.
01:40
So the informal sector is around 75% of people across the African continent and about two-thirds of folks in Latin America and between half and two-thirds across Asia as well. But very, very small portion of folks in Europe and in the US, practically negligent
02:01
because everyone has to have an officially registered business and if you're hacking a car together, you probably need a license and you have regular safety checks and you can't just bribe the policeman to keep your cobbled together thing on the road. So I'll be talking a bit about the interaction between these folks by the side of the road
02:23
hacking things and making scarves in India, weaving traditional textiles and everything from that to agricultural machines and public transportation. Hi everyone, my name is Juliette Wannui. As Christian mentioned, I'm from Kenya and I run Fundy which is a startup that runs
02:45
collaborative hardware and product design workshops and this was inspired by a summit I did called the International Development Design Summit and basically it brings together people from different parts of the world, different ages, different backgrounds and
03:01
they spend one month in a community and they collaboratively design a solution that targets a challenge they face and this is something that I feel is very close to home where people generally hack things and fix things and actually the name Fundy means tinkerer because the word maker isn't really something you would use in Kenya.
03:23
If you have your TVs broken, you take it to a Fundy. If your car is broken, you go to a Fundy. If your pipe is leaking, you call a Fundy. So it just made sense to call it Fundy because it's something people would relate to. But the overarching idea is to get people more comfortable with making, particularly
03:43
people who haven't had that background, who don't have access to labs and spaces that afford them the opportunity to use CNC machines but make it very localized and tap into the very diverse and wide informal sector that Ana mentioned.
04:03
And so generally if you walk or drive through most African countries, you'll find people on the side of the road selling things that they have made right there. They don't have like a factory where they make stuff and then they have a store. They make it at the side of the road as you go and so there's this culture of sharing
04:22
and generally these spaces involve hundreds of people so that if there's a new stove or there's a new technology that's selling more, then more people will make it. So raising that incentive of not just teaching design and hardware but adding that layer
04:44
of entrepreneurship that makes it all make sense and makes it scalable and sustainable over time. Great. I come from a very different background so this is what we are seeing here from the technology point of view and from a research perspective.
05:01
And for me it's very interesting how we met and where we met at a level of tools, at a level maybe of a kind of ethical code and at the level of the power of the maker movement. What you see here is maybe familiar to some of you. It's the Arduino LilyPad in open source hardware.
05:22
You weave it into a textile with conductive thread and then it uses Bluetooth to communicate with your mobile phone and this is the basic setup for many wearables that we are knitting and weaving and stitching in the design research lab at the University of the Arts. And this is a basic piece of technology that we use for exploring very different kinds
05:43
of interactive clothing examples. I have some images here for example. This is a knit alarm jacket that we were knitting together with stroke patients. Stroke patients told us they want to live on their own at home also until they reached a certain age
06:05
and they want to have a kind of supportive functionality. Currently they are having a kind of a big red alarm button that they can use in case of emergency if they need help. But you know it's really ugly. It's a big red thing and it says you know you are needy, you know you're really old,
06:21
you need this alarm thing and so they don't wear it so it doesn't make sense. It's quite useless and so we were developing this knit alarm thing and it's a jacket using this conductive thread and if you need help you just have to you know tear the sleeve for example or make this gesture here and then it uses a Bluetooth
06:42
to call for emergency, to call a relative for example and to also send your GPS localisation data via an app on the smartphone. So this is a very hands-on example that we were knitting and as you see on the pictures also it's most of our research faculty are women so we are calling them the hacker ladies.
07:09
So they are really knitting and weaving and integrating these sensors, the open source hardware to come up with solutions for everyday life problems.
07:20
And what I'm very interested in is when we're exploring these kinds of textiles, this is also kind of a narrative blanket that we were developing. This is so much inspired by the whole network of the maker movement worldwide. So it's not just invented within the university but the open source community
07:43
shares the knowledge about how to do this kind of integration of smart materials. For example, the open source hardware is one of the basic sources that we need to come up with those new ideas of how technology can be used.
08:01
And this is for us a new way of researching, not just inside the university. And I also as a professor, I don't teach them how to do this, not at all, but I just create a framework, I just invite different kinds of people, we have a nice space, a kind of fab lab space and this is where the work is done.
08:21
And so they are much more, so all of our researchers are much more connected to international networks of makers and of also people from the so-called informal sectors, so not just researchers but really tinkerers, makers, and all over the world, then to a kind of academic, real scientific community.
08:42
And this is what makes a difference for me and for our work. And we created, as you see here, also kind of an open source tablet application for the iPad where you can just drag and drop functionalities and create your own app for steering the wearable devices that we did.
09:02
So you can just create your own app to use and to add different functionalities to your wearable device. So open source and the maker movement inspires research very, very much. And my question is how can we learn from this maker community and how does the maker community relate to craftsmanship?
09:25
We were discussing before what is craftsmanship today? Is this craft or is this high-tech, is this research or what is it? So maybe, yeah, you can also share your experience with that. Yeah, definitely. So one thing that struck me about fab labs is, and a lot of maker spaces as well,
09:45
up there is investment now in Iceland. And that fab lab was supported soon after the economic crisis in 2008 to try and bring a whole bunch of new jobs to Iceland and create a whole host of creative industries,
10:02
whereas you had an entire generation that went into finance whose grandparents were more or less all fishermen and sheep farmers. And so once the finance bubble completely popped, what do you do afterwards? And then what's funny is that you get the same set of machines
10:22
because there's one, if you have a laser cutter, some circuitry, a bunch of things like Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, electronic components, you get a vinyl cutter, you get a 3D printer just over in the background there, a wood CNC routing machine for designing things on the computer
10:44
and cutting those out in wood or even in metal. And this allows you to make pretty much anything. And so you don't need the lab to look all that different between somewhere like Ahmedabad, which has traditionally in Gujarat in India, they have a whole host of traditional crafts.
11:03
And now they're also starting to look towards the startup scene and banking and how do we create the next Silicon Valley? So a couple of months ago, they invited Mark Zuckerberg and a bunch of Silicon Valley CEOs to come have a huge conference on how to support the startup scene in India.
11:21
But the fact is, most of the informal sector workshops are kind of like this. You walk in and it's a complete mess. All over the place are car parts, jerry cans, these are seat covers, those are your lights. So this is where you go instead of SparkFun in Ghana
11:43
or in India to get all of your components. So there's a fundamental cultural disconnect, I feel, between having a really neatly laid out lab where everything is designed on the computer and you keep your fingernails clean. So it appeals really to the people who are aspiring towards
12:03
nice air conditioned offices rather than the folks who are happy getting their hands dirty, hacking together car parts. And I feel like I agree with you there. If I look at the situation in Kenya, there is the industrial area where you'd find most of the factories, but just like along it
12:21
is where you find the Joakali. Joakali are open air artisans. So these are people in metal work, woodwork, and they have this expansive space where they all work together. And I'm looking at how you describe the Fab Lab. It's pretty much the same. You'd have the woodwork space, the electronic space, the metal space, the fabrication space.
12:42
And so I think it really leads on to the next question of what is a maker space? Does it have to be in an enclosed warehouse? Can it be open? Can it evolve over time? Does it have to have a specific set of materials or do they need to work on pre-determined projects
13:01
or projects that lead in a certain direction? And so I would love to hear your experience on that and yours in Swami. What I also, when we are talking about this, what is craftsmanship today? And this is a kind of rediscovery or what's the relationship between this new maker movement and craftsmanship. And in Germany and in Europe,
13:22
I have the impression that it's a kind of rediscovery of traditional techniques and reinvention of, for example, weaving, knitting, and so on. And we have a tradition of the do-it-yourself movement. And I remember also, like from the 70s and 80s,
13:41
that knitting was a very political activity and it is getting there again. So it's also a kind of gender issue, you know, when women were knitting and using it now today, also for guerilla knitting. So that kind of expression of maybe also female technique
14:01
as a form of protest statement or whatever. And now it comes into a different context of also creating their own view on technology and knitting their own view on technology. This is, I guess, a new kind of symbiosis that I very much like, because it is addressing the gender question in technology
14:24
in a very good way, because it's their own kind of view, path, and technique to create different technologies. And I also wonder what, you know, when you have this assembly woman there, what is the role of women in your examples
14:43
and from your experiences? Is it different? Is it, yeah, what do you think? I love that you put the Arduino lily pad up there earlier. So I was working in Leah Bukeley's lab, who's the inventor of, they're machine washable and sewable electronic components.
15:02
So you can sew little LEDs or that one that you had earlier, the little round thing with the loops, the holes around the edges is an Arduino board. And the inventor of this whole set of conductive electronics or wearable electronics
15:20
was looking at how do you engage more girls in circuitry and circuit design? Because traditionally you go look at what are the electronics kits? It's like, well, let's make a robot and then you can shoot people with the robot lasers, which tends to attract more boys than girls who have maybe more patience
15:42
to sit around knitting and sewing and having crafty things. And so when you got that and you have a whole, sort of internationally you have all of these women who are working in more traditional artisanal crafts, often around textiles,
16:01
who tend to work in really, really labor intensive ways. Like this here is made from recycled saris. This one's from Rajasthan and each stitch here is hand done. And I'm wondering though, because a lot of the younger generation of women don't really have the patience to sit down
16:21
and hand stitch every single detail here. And so you go to the textile museum in Ahmedabad, which I think has one of the world's largest collections of just really exquisitely done artisanal textiles. And the tour guide will stop periodically and every couple of pieces she'll say,
16:42
this technique has been forgotten or no one knows how to make saris like this anymore. Because the younger generation, you wanna get rich fast, you want to have something, have a better quality of life and even the parents are encouraging kids. You don't wanna do this traditional craft anymore.
17:01
You're gonna want to go into something like software. So I'm curious, what do you think about the disconnect there and can you bridge that gap and not lose all of these traditional handicrafts while you're bringing in the electronics and the new generation?
17:22
Well, I think it depends on how you approach it. And I think money is a big topic and I think having money is either like good thing or not having it is a distraction. So I think lately there's been more of a wave of getting people more into the maker movement. But I think the approach is very software driven
17:44
and completely ignores all these other traditional crafts that are in place. And so I think what needs to be there is a very broad approach. I think a woman like the one in the picture should be involved in setting up a space because she's like very aware of what materials
18:00
will need, what people want to make the most, what stuff needs to be repaired the most. And that's just the only way of maintaining all this culture that we have. And I think technology has a huge role to play in preserving that piece of our heritage. Maybe if you think those two components together
18:21
of these kind of forgotten craftsmen techniques and the kind of new high tech wearable fashion area, maybe this is a very interesting approach. So it has sort of rediscover craftsmanship is not a kind of archeological endeavor,
18:41
but it's more kind of reinvention and a different kind of usage and utilization of these kind of techniques. And maybe this is also an opportunity to really understand the power of those techniques and of this knowledge about craftsmanship.
19:01
And I wonder whether also the idea of open source can leverage these ideas and provide the knowledge about those kinds of forgotten techniques. And I'm sure that there are tons of projects out there in the internet to try to give access to this kind of maybe forgotten knowledge
19:21
about artesian craftsmanship, about those techniques. Maybe that's interesting. Yeah, I've found though that if you hang out in this cluster here, this is called Suome Magazine in Ghana. It's probably the world's largest collection of informal industrial artisans.
19:43
It's also called the industrial slum by some of the development folks, but they would call themselves the informal sector, meaning they make things the way they want to make them and no one really tells them otherwise. But if you look at intellectual property rights
20:03
across groups like this, there's a study done in one of these clusters in Kenya, where they found that you had one, maybe two months at most of having come up with some innovative new technology before all of your neighbors were copying you.
20:21
And in fact, the local trade union would encourage people to share ideas. Maybe you can make a little more money during that first month, but then if you don't start sharing with your neighbors how to do it, you're gonna get in trouble from this workers union. And so there's an appreciation of open source
20:41
without having any idea what it is or being part of the global open source movement. We had yesterday the discussion also whether patenting is kind of really 2000 or 90s or something, or whether there will be a future of patenting in innovation development at all, or whether open source ecology is much faster,
21:02
much more agile and the big thing for the future. I don't know. What I was also wondering before we briefly discussed about the term of developing technologies, developing countries, developing whatever. And we were just also briefly mentioning
21:24
is this idea of colonialization in this public movement also kind of present. So is this in a kind of export of the Fab Lab idea to other countries? What is the relationship there? Is there kind of a political dimension in this?
21:41
Because when we see this kind of tradition also, maybe this is very strong and very good and it shouldn't be kind of overruled to a specific framework. What do you think? Well, I actually think that there are two ways of looking at it. And the people that Anna and I wrote was strongly on the side that it's more, the approach right now
22:01
is more of a very colonialist kind of way, completely overlooking what people are doing on the ground. In Kenya, the government is trying to set up a tech city and it's called Konsa City. And so it's maybe- Silicon Savannah. Silicon Savannah. I mean, if you've been having full here, I know of the IHAB.
22:20
Show of hands. Okay, so the IHAB is within Nairobi. This tech city is like, I guess like 30 kilometers out of Nairobi. And it's on the main highway, which if you live there already, you spend like three hours on traffic. It's just very logical how it's set up. So I think things should grow organically. And it's important to understand
22:42
how they've grown organically in the past and the approach should be how to plug in rather than how to completely put that aside and start something separate. And I mean, to add on to that, I think that now when you look at that in terms of like the informal sector, the current lead employs over 75% of young people
23:03
in Africa. And if you think about it, 60% of Africa, 1 billion is under 35. Those are a lot of people. And if you really wanna have impact, you need to build technology on top of this layer of tech that's really happening.
23:22
Otherwise, you'll just build like a huge place that no one wants to go to, so yeah. Yeah, in the 1960s, I believe, soon after Ghana's independence, in the same city that hosts this amazing industrial cluster, they decided to build a premier technical institution
23:43
for West Africa called the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Tech. And this university was built maybe five or six kilometers down the road from here. And it actually takes about half an hour with current traffic to get from the university campus
24:03
to this sprawling industrial cluster that has, it's about 100,000 people working mostly on auto mechanics within the cluster, and then another 100,000 plus working outside, mostly fixing cars and hacking cars together.
24:22
And the university was built here to try and celebrate, look, this is the backbone of manufacturing, all these folks hacking vehicles and agricultural equipment right down the road, but there was no connection. And the university professors and university students
24:41
would rarely, if ever, go down to visit all of these informal artisans. And so you wander around in the informal cluster and you ask them, what do you think of the folks at KNUST? And they'll say things like, oh, they don't appreciate us. They keep talking about how unsafe all of our vehicles are
25:02
and blaming all of the accidents on us because we have no formal engineering background. But at the same time, in talking about how to formalize the sector and bring new jobs that maybe use all of the fab lab equipment, which would actually displace a number of the artisans because most of them are illiterate,
25:21
about at least half, probably 60 or 70%. But at the same time, they say the university professors are bringing their broken lab equipment to Suomé magazine because the informal cluster knows how to repair everything. And so instead of having to send back often to Germany
25:41
for repair parts that will take a couple months to arrive, they'll just take this down to the informal cluster and say, hey, I need some little bit that looks like that, make something for me. Well, that's also a question of like a bottom up and top down approach. And I was also wondering what kind of the political class
26:01
or the industry should learn from the maker movement. Because what I also observe in Germany and in Europe is that many of the new thinking and the so-called innovations come from this maker movement because they are not specifically located at universities
26:20
or just in maker space, but they are everywhere here and there. So kind of very decentralized structures and they just meet up and they are connected through the internet. The term Ubuntu is from South Africa. And that means it's like, I am who I am because of who you are. So it's a term of really cooperation and mutual identity
26:45
that doesn't particularly exist in English. I don't know about German. No, but it's a wonderful term. It describes this kind of a network. And what I have the impression here is that this new thinking, also a new approach to technology is created there in these kinds of networks.
27:02
And that the industry and also like many politicians, they don't see it. So they don't understand also the power of this movement. And I think that industry might miss out also economic opportunities when they neglect or ignore what is happening there
27:22
because these kinds of ideas are very powerful and they create a new kind of also path to technology and how we wanna interact with technology. And what I very much like is, and maybe that's also something that we can discuss, is there a kind of really common, yeah, ethical code or a kind of commonality
27:42
in this idea of this maker movement that connects us and could this be also a path for creating technology in future with maybe a more societal approach, maybe with a more inclusive approach, maybe with an approach that giving access to people
28:03
using technology, making their own technology is a kind of human right. Maybe this could be something that we share. Well, yeah, I completely agree with you there. I think that the rule the government or policymakers should be making right now is like building capacity
28:20
because I think the informal sector already has like a huge capacity in all these fields. And the only reason that there is this like tension between the two is because one is like more of higher, more sophisticated technologies and the other one is more informal. And if you can only like bridge that gap and include people who are already making
28:42
to just learn about these other technologies and leaving it open for them to decide which ones they wanna use, which ones work better for them rather than having it as a more imposing kind of approach towards pushing the MICA movement in Africa. Yeah, one of the challenges I think to this
29:02
is where the money is and what's being incentivized because the informal sector, people tend to try and avoid the taxes as much as possible. And so when tax collectors come around Suave magazine, the first workshop, the workshop manager will go hide
29:22
and send his son out to be totally clueless and tell the tax collector, I'm sorry, my dad's not around. And then in the meantime, the dad's in the back texting all of the other informal sector folks down the road. So everyone goes and hides just cause it's so difficult to track down every individual workshop
29:42
and collect tax from all of them. So you tend to see government policies pretty much ignore most of these informal sector artisans. I was hearing in Pakistan, the rate of people who pay taxes is around two or 3% of the entire population.
30:02
And it's a lot of effort to go door to door and track all of these people down or go find wherever the parents are hiding when they send their kid to the front of the shop. And then you look at the development agenda as well, which tends to be more of a government to government thing. And so it's also like,
30:22
unless you're looking at stability and job growth, there's not as much of an incentive for a government like the US, who's say going into Ghana and supporting international aid. They're gonna wanna work with the government and they're gonna have maybe their own agenda around agricultural imports
30:43
or supporting new machinery for their oil companies. And all of that is gonna be on a formal sector to formal sector level. So I haven't seen that many very successful campaigns that are incentivized to work with the informal artisans.
31:02
And is it still the case and what is your prediction, how long that the mobile phone is the technology to create and networks? And is there also kind of a policy towards giving more access to Fab Labs, a kind of Fab Labs strategy, whatever,
31:21
to get people on board, to give them access to those kinds of technologies? Or is there anything planned? Do you see? Well, I think like mobile use, like Sheila had mentioned earlier in her presentation, mobile use is very big, but most users are using feature phones.
31:41
And I mean, I think that's an expensive kind of way to disseminate information. But I think how the government should be looking at it right now is that they are currently, at least in Kenya, a lot of cyber internet cafes that were a big thing maybe in 2000 till maybe 2005,
32:02
but with the increase of smartphones, their use has really gone down over time. So this creates an opportunity for people to use infrastructure and a lot of computers are already there to disseminate information. These are things that people were already used to using and this could be great learning centers for people.
32:23
And considering the fact that cyber cafes are located very close to where people are working and living, it doesn't mean that they have to bring in a whole new shift in the technologies. They could build maybe micro labs next to a cyber cafe so that you don't have to really disrupt
32:41
what's going on there, but have them grow over time organically. My friend Mushira in the Sinai region in Egypt is doing an awesome project to bring a super low cost, do it yourself, laser cutter and engraver. It's very low power,
33:00
so it can cut fabric and paper and cardboard, and then engrave wood and metal to bring this to the informal artisans because they're all of these women who hang out meticulously cutting out pieces of fabric to make these gorgeous patchwork quilts and patchwork clothes.
33:22
And by bringing a laser cutter to folks like these, their work can be a lot faster and they can create much more intricate patterns than they can cut out by hand, and they can also start engraving things like leather, or you can even laser engrave jeans
33:40
and you get this great lighter color pattern going along your clothes. And so her challenge here has been how do you figure out how to bring, so it's essentially CAD design to folks who maybe know how to use feature phones,
34:00
but tend to not have any formal computer or literacy training. And so they're working now on an app for trying to make it for a feature phone, so you can sketch something on paper and then take a photo of that and really easily turn that into either laser cutting or laser engraving, and then somehow send that design to the laser cutter.
34:22
I'd just like to add one more thing to that. I like that you mentioned the laser cutter that's adaptable over time. I think another way of having that incremental change in the makeup movement is having, engaging people who are already building stuff, and I think things like CNC machines,
34:40
laser cutters should be built by people in the makeup movement. Because generally- Otherwise you're waiting for your parts to arrive from filming, right? Right, and so I often remind Roy, he's in the audience, but he works on building 3D printers, and I think more people should be building their own technologies, because basically if I can trust someone to repair my car,
35:03
I think I don't mind him building a printer for me. It's not that big a deal. So I mean, a car that drives me around, that could kill me. Anyway, so what I mean is that we shouldn't be looking at it as opposed as bringing in technologies and fab labs and setting them up. It should be that we can build all these machines
35:24
that we need and adapt them over time to our specific needs and environment and that the resources are available. And this is the only way where you can have sustainable capacity building. If I build the tools that I use and the machines that I use,
35:40
it means that they're important to me and I can build other businesses on top of this. If we look into the future, so what is needed or what are the challenges, I would see that learning from these examples, so kind of, well this global maker movement
36:01
should have a stronger voice and maybe also that we should maybe also promote our underlying ethical kind of code of conduct much more towards a gender setting on a political level, towards also the industry and maybe towards also to claim a right for, as you said,
36:22
building your own technology, having access to technology, sharing the knowledge how to use it, how to rebuild it and also seeing these kinds of settings that we were talking about also as a path for women to create their own living
36:41
or to make their own living using these kinds of technologies. I think that there's, it started so kind of decentralized with kind of little shops and fab labs and stuff, but now there's so many great examples that I think that through these different actors, there's really a strong movement now
37:00
that makes really, that creates change in every kind of different places and different countries but has a kind of overall framework that just was built through doing. So it was not kind of an intellectual working, but it was really created, kind of handcrafted,
37:21
this kind of code of conduct that we're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. And it's crucial for, I believe, the makers and hackers and informal sector artisans themselves to define what we want the movement to be. Because if you look at Make Magazine, which has sort of become the spokespeople for the Maker Faires internationally,
37:42
the same Leah Bukele who designed the lily pad Arduino, was, did a look at all of the Make Magazine covers and found that it was around 90% men and it was all things like drones, robots,
38:02
vehicles, 3D printed guns, and traditionally male toys and activities. And there is nothing from folks, and it was all Caucasian for Americans and Europeans as well. And so there was very little from the whole international world.
38:21
And a lot of this, I believe, is due to some of the corporate interests coming into the maker and hacker movement worldwide, who, Intel and all my lovely friends at Autodesk we want to target people who are maybe already using our software, our electronics,
38:43
our 3D printers. And so it's difficult when things are so determined from that top-down level, now that everyone's caught on to the zeitgeist, that this is what the maker movement is about, that we need to come along and say, well, actually, there are a whole bunch of other folks
39:02
who you might not consider makers in the American Maker Faire sense, but who are equally as important in terms of democratizing technologies. I really like what you say there, and I think to add on to the make magazine features, most of the things that are made there are expensive.
39:22
I mean, how many people here have actually built a drone? Have you built a drone? Okay, two people have built a drone. And when you look at the demographic of Republica, you'd think there'd be more people. But then if you're trying to look at the entire landscape of making
39:40
and narrow it down to robots and drones and cars, then you've really eliminated a lot of things that are already going on. And so I think the idea is to make the making movement less elitist and incorporate a lot of people who might be at the base of the pyramid, but having much more impact overall
40:02
than the ones you'd find on a make magazine. Shall we open it up for questions? So please engage us in discussion, debate, everything. Hi, thanks you guys. That was really, really interesting.
40:22
My name's Jessica. I'm starting a maker space in Myanmar, and I'm wondering, on the one hand, I completely agree with you that open source is the way forward, but I'd love to hear how you think open source
40:40
can be reconciled with financial sustainability and profitability, because especially for new business owners or entrepreneurs coming out of the informal sector, if they've come up with something that's really innovative and marketable, how can they turn that into a sustainable long-term business
41:04
if open source or informal open source is the standard practice? It's a very good question, and we're discussing it very often. But if we turn the question around, so would patenting help any?
41:21
Maybe it wouldn't. Maybe it's just a matter, it will be copied anyways, and maybe it's really a question of speed and of course on investment. So when you wanna do a startup, then you have to find investors that really make you or support you to grow very fast, because if not, if you try to, you know, have a good,
41:41
if you have a good idea and others just copy it and they find the right investors, then it's really, it's a bad story. But I think that there are, this open source ecology creates such a speed and such an innovation potential because so many people are working on that,
42:01
and you can build together on their knowledge. I guess that it has a big advantage, also a competitive advantage compared to others. I feel like there are two different challenges to predicting your IP, or to sharing your IP, and one of them are folks in the informal sector
42:22
who are going to copy your idea if it's not too technically advanced. And there's one of the guys, Mr. Crossman, who runs a sort of makerspace innovation institute in Suave magazine in Ghana. It was saying that he thinks the worst barrier
42:41
to innovation among the informal cluster there is the fact that everyone's just gonna copy things. So it doesn't make sense for individual inventors. In fact, I met some people who said, I have some brilliant new idea, but I'm not gonna share it with anybody because I need to wait for exactly the right moment to get it out there in a way
43:02
that my neighbors are not gonna copy it immediately. And so if that takes resources to prototype something new, it may not make financial sense. But it's going probably to be copied anyways. And then on the other hand, you've got the larger industries
43:20
and traditional corporate sector who may be poaching open source ideas, which is why something like the Creative Commons non-commercial license is very important, because then you can share your things and your ideas, and then also have some legal backing if someone from a corporate sector steals that idea
43:41
and makes billions on it. Are you also using Creative Commons? So is this an international standard also that many use? Yes, it is. I don't know legally how robust it is, which is the challenge. Because if you do have some idea out there
44:01
and someone copies it and they have a bunch of lawyers and you don't have the financial means to lawyer up in the same way as we say in the US where we love lawyers, then you might be completely screwed even if you do have your ideas licensed. Nice, nice, nice talk.
44:21
My name is Sheila. And I keep hearing disconnect, disconnect, disconnect. And actually I agree. The fact that there are fab labs, and especially in specific countries, on one side, then there's Diwakali sector on the other side. So it's like an elite thing and then the others thing.
44:44
So what are you guys in your different roles doing to make sure that this is not the case? For example, making sure that governments incorporate such things within the curriculums of schools.
45:01
Because an example in Kenya, when I was growing up, there used to be an arts and crafts lesson. There used to be home science, but these days kids don't have that. So basically there's nothing about making. The only thing they have for making for kids who are wealthy, they have Legos.
45:23
And how much time do they even spend on that as opposed to PS? And then for the kids who don't have much, they still make it, but they will not make things that are I would say most relevant now. They would make maybe football from paper or something,
45:41
or make cars from wires. What are you guys doing to make sure that, and especially for kids, this is not the case five years from, 30 years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now saying there was disconnect, but nothing was done.
46:03
I'd like to go first. So part of what we're doing at Fundy is creating access to open source technologies, which is a really good entry point into working against the disconnect, the friction between these two areas.
46:20
And what we do is we've been running workshops where they guide people on how to build stuff, but we've worked with technical institutes because they were already teaching making, but in a very traditional sense. And adding information that's really open source, I mean stuff you'd find on Instructables, a lot of our content is from the MIT D-Lab,
46:40
and these are technologies that have been tested and tried in various parts of the world that have similar conditions. So it's a good way of people seeing what other people have made, what can be made, leaving it open for them to build up on this. And currently we're working with these institutions in adapting their content so that it's less of just making,
47:01
if you're doing a carpentry course, it's less of just making chairs and tables. It's how do you work with your friends who are doing car repair and electronics, what can you all work on together? And also trying to down the road push the agenda that if the school is looking to step up their equipment, maybe they could get one CNC machine
47:21
if it's relevant in that context. But making sure that these groups of people are not left behind or are not completely ignored, that they are part of the maker movement or the fundi movement, maybe we should call it fundi movement. But yeah, that's what I feel we are doing. It's a very relevant question.
47:42
Fab Labs and the maker movement shouldn't be just for the digital elite, I very much agree. And we also have, so on a European level, the question, how do we teach kids at school how to use technology and what are digital skills that they need? And so we created on the European level the so-called code week. So there's one week where all over in Europe in October,
48:03
one week, kids get for free education workshops on digital skills. And it's also expanded to some African countries already. So it's really nice. So it's just one week, but it's a kickoff, let's say. And we also learn in Europe from different countries.
48:23
So in Germany, we're not very well equipped with a good strategy for digital skills at school. So we should push it much more. But for example, in the UK, in the Scandinavian countries in the Netherlands, they have very good approaches. For example, last year, UK launched with BBC
48:43
a campaign where all school children at the age of seven, they got a kind of an open source hardware device to use in their schools for programming and making and tinkering and sharing the knowledge about it as open educational resources. And this is a great example
49:00
because every school kid at the age of seven got one of those devices. That's really something, a good example where we should think maybe we can do this in other countries too. Great. Yeah, I'm jealous. In California, right around the corner from Silicon Valley in the city of Oakland, you have about 60% internet penetration into houses,
49:24
which is probably lower than places in Nairobi. One thing I've been working on from the maker movement end is trying to facilitate conversations between folks like Instructables who have a giant amazing collection of guides
49:42
for how to make various open source things. And there's a professor at a design university in the south of Brazil, who's been going around and studying all of the informal sector artisans, techniques and methods for building things. They call them there the Gambiaras, which is their own Gambiarra.
50:03
I'll spell it for you later, which means essentially creative people who are hacking things together using the wrong sized components and all of that, makeshift. And so we're trying to get things like this collection of informal artisanal techniques
50:21
onto Instructables, because there are a lot of really valuable things that makers can learn from folks, especially in low resources, low resourced environments, who are making do with whatever they've got and coming up with really creative and inventive ideas. We are running out of time, unfortunately,
50:42
maybe one famous last sentence from everybody. What do you wish for the future for your work for maybe the maker movement? What do you think? I hope to see more recognition of the creativity and invention at every level of society.
51:03
You just stole my line. Sorry. But I guess I would like to see more democratization of technology that it needs to be stopped being so elitist or people who are doing it in informal settings should get the same sense of prestige
51:21
as if I was doing it in a hub or a maker space. I would love to see also more discussion about inclusion giving access and having kind of the right to create own technology and to create own paths through technology. So not about the digital elite, maybe that's good.
51:43
Thank you.