So I'd like to introduce the first session that we're going to start with today.

I'm really, really proud that these three people are not only here today as Republican speakers, but are also part of the global innovation community. When I first discovered Anna Wollman-Brown, I was just like a fangirl of hers online because I saw all the amazing things she did and I was like, oh my goodness, I really want to meet this person one day. She works at Autodesk and the Fab Lab Foundation.

She is an MIT graduate and a Fulbright Scholar. And I highly encourage you to check out her bio because if you read all the amazing things that she's done in her life already, it's really hard to believe that she's only the young woman that she is today.

Anna also has published so many open resources and materials on the maker movement. She publishes some of the most comprehensive articles in the field. So whether it's the practical work that she does or the intellectual work that she does, highly worth checking out. I'm also equally proud to introduce Chin Mai SK. Chin Mai is the global coordinator of Random Hacks of Kindness.

She also builds open technologies, including open technology platform to fight against violence against women. She has been a very substantial person building up hacker spaces and open source communities in India, but also in other places in the world.

And the third person who's going to be in this panel is also as amazing. This is a really, really fabulous opening to the show. Bilal Gabib is one of those people, without him the world just wouldn't be as fabulous. He's one of those people who make sure that with all this dynamic in the maker movement, that we are still mindful and think about what it is that we do.

From Bilal, the fantastic quote comes, if we have the power to create anything, what is it we're going to create? Kind of like that. Bilal is also the founder of a network called GEMSI, which brings together hackerspaces, makers in different corners of the world. He's helped build up hackerspaces in Iraq and other countries in the Middle East.

And like I said, I'm really proud to have all three here today. They've worked together, especially Anna and Chin Mai, but also Bilal, on mapping the global maker movement and finding out what is it that drives this global movement of makers. Where do they live? How do they exist?

And what is it that they do? What is it that they have in common? And it is that work and that research that they're going to present to us this morning. So please give a really, really warm welcome and a big round of applause to Anna, Chin Mai and Bilal in search of makers.

Thank you for that very warm introduction. Super warm. We are here to talk about, among other things, how we found 200-something innovation spaces across India in a crazy rental car road trip, which took us from Ahmedabad all the way north to Jaipur

and then down to the southern tip of Trivandrum. So makerspaces, one of the things that I particularly admire about all of these communities is it provides a way for all of these creative people to really gather together

in a way that hasn't been possible except through universities. So I was a bit of a lonely nerd until I found MIT. Do you want to see how many people know what a makerspace or a hackerspace is? Good question. So who here has heard of a makerspace or a hackerspace?

Okay, who here hasn't? Okay, cool. So what do you think it is? Can you just describe what you're imagining one of these spaces could be like?

We define them as creative spaces that are open to collaboration, that have technology, and that are working on innovation, something new,

whether that's like knitting or handicrafts or metalworking or up to 3D printing, digital fabrication, automation, things that attach to your brain and read your brainwaves. And so they're kind of like a way for people who would generally only have access to these communities and universities

to access, as you can see, they're all over the place. So when we started this journey, we had very little idea of what we will count as community spaces. We just went in the search of how people are learning, how people are communicating,

how people are inviting communities into their spaces. And that's how we started the road trip. And we met an amazing group of people like this. This is Deepak. He's a part of Walnut Innovations. It's a small space in a city called Udaipur. And he has this amazing passion for building tech.

And he owns a 3D printer, the only 3D printer in that entire city. And the things that he does are so amazing. Like he just built an open source cooker, cooker for rotiemaker,

for communities in and around him. He built models for machinery. He actually went out to manufacturing units and started innovating with them new ways of building something. And this was so much on the contrary to what you would expect of a maker space or a fast place

where you need like a huge space or you have huge machinery. But this was just, this is all he had. Like one room and then maybe the 3D printer and you can see the electronics out here. And he was encouraging all these young makers to come learn electronics,

to do manufacturing, to build innovation. And we met one of these awesome engineers there called Ashin. She was this young 22-year-old Muslim Indian who would never get a chance to go out and learn electronics.

But there she was learning electronics, she was doing pen testing, she was building her own circuits. It was amazing how these smaller spaces were changing the world. So we were like, okay, there is one space like this and there are more spaces like this. And that's how we started our road trip.

We went for a road trip of two weeks in a rental car which broke down. And we drove the middle of the night, we couldn't stop. Except for parties. This one was at 4 in the morning right by Trivandrum in southern India.

And this was how we drew. That's Paul's car getting stuck in the bushes. We were so amazed to find around 200 spaces like this. We saw spaces as small as what Walnut was and as big as this room and bigger than that in urban spaces.

That is where we started this idea of how do we include community spaces, how do we talk about them, how do we bring that to the notice of the world. And that's where our journey started. This one's in a closet in Rajesh Nair's parents' house down in Trivandrum.

Yeah, so the next stopover we went was Finland. And in Finland we had a totally different experience. So they had maker spaces and fab labs in universities and schools. And this particular fab lab is in West Menor, it's in small island of...

Iceland? Sorry, I said Finland. Correction, Iceland. It's off the coast of Reykjavik where all of the puffins are. So you can see this is Frosty Gislason with his puffin in the window. I was thinking just for a second while you were doing that tour across India

that it's very special that they can be these small spaces. And it's just having a little bit of a different idea about ownership that really transforms a person with some tools into maybe a closet of a community hub. And I did a tour in 2009 across America, a very similar tour,

when hacker spaces were kind of taking off in the States. And I found that same sort of feeling, it's really welcoming and inclusive. You had like 200 homes across India all of a sudden. Yes, the interesting thing that we found in Iceland, or I found in Iceland, was how this hub or fab lab was changing the community.

This is actually a port, it's a shipping port. And there is all this printed material that's on the wall and there is this entire design below there, if you can see the swing and all this. All that was built in that fab lab.

And in fact the fab lab was empowering the local community to build up design. We saw places around that small island which were using fab lab to prototype and build textiles to build community spaces, to build restaurants.

So it was amazing to see how these community spaces were transforming, whether they were in a small house or in a big fab lab. And that's something that I love doing as part of this. This is a little park where you can sit down on benches

and the fab labs recorded older people around the island telling stories from 50, 60 years ago of the history of the island, of the volcano that wiped out a third of all of the houses on the island. So you can sit on these benches and press the buttons and the fab lab has wired all these things up

to be this totally interactive, immersive experience that tells the history of what's happened at Investment Hour. Ah, yes. My habibi. So this guy, Salah Zain, when I first met him, I think he was 16 years old. And who here has heard of Iraq?

It's a country in the Middle East. No, I mean for real, I like audience participation. I don't like feeling like I'm alone in a bubble. Cool. I at least want to see you guys raise your hands. Okay, cool. So everyone's heard of this country. What did you... Yay, Juliet! Juliet is here. Gangsta right over here, number one. Gangsta's paradise from last night, if you guys remember.

Okay, so all of you have heard of Iraq, but what have you heard about Iraq? You can yell out what you've heard. It's a thumbs down from the audience. Anybody else? I know you've heard of something about Iraq. What do you hear about Iraq? Yeah, 91 wars.

Anybody else heard of anything? Oil, interesting. Even children died because of not extraordinary sicknesses,

but because there was no help, nothing available. And I think that's also one of the roots for the IS, how it got so heavy and so anti-human. So that's very true, and surprisingly, you point out something that's happening in this picture right now. So most people, when they think of Iraq, they think of the bombs and they think of the violence.

And I'm from Iraq, that's where my family's from, and that's initially my impression. When I told my parents I was going back for the first time after many years, they were like, what are you doing? Don't you know what it's like there? It's terrible, you're going to kill yourself. But I found this guy, his name is Salah Zain, and what he's doing right now is we're trying to create a DIY prosthetic socket

for my cousin who had some challenges during those sanctions and lost his leg due to diabetes. Most people have an easy time controlling diabetes, but things get kind of tough when medication's hard to find and when the health system is so destroyed. And so he lost his leg due to bad circulation. And I've been seeing a part of this developing ecosystem

of community spaces all over the world. I've been doing it, I guess, even since 2006 when I started my first community space for creativity in Michigan. And initially we were just doing a music venue and an art gallery, and at some point I had this thought,

what would happen if this creative capability was brought to a place that seemed to have no possibility, right? Where people didn't have any hope for a future that was going to be something they could participate in. What if we told them that they could create their own futures? And so I thought, yes, perfect timing. The Middle East is crumbling, this is the right time.

So let's go back to home or where my parents are from. And I met this kid, Salih. And one of the first projects that we did was we tried to use smooth-on and 3D scanning. We scanned my cousin's leg, tried to make a mold that fit right up against his stump to create more comfort

so he could move his leg so he could have more comfort walking. And that's kind of the question that I've been asking, is how does all of this unlocks creativity, unlock a beautiful future? And so if you can go to the next slide, I think. This is kind of the stuff that you see at like hackerspaces and maker fairs. And don't get me wrong, I love flying ostriches.

Yeah, this is a taxidermied ostrich that has been given flight. It's amazing and hilarious and people learn a lot. It takes a lot of like technical know-how to make an ostrich fly. Ostriches' nature took thousands and millions of years to evolve an ostrich and they didn't figure out how to make it fly. But we did, with quadcopters.

And I love it. I love it. It's beautiful, it's hilarious, it makes people smile. It might inspire new thinking, but it doesn't seem appropriate when we're confronting like cataclysmic change, climate change, when bombs are going off. And so I've been looking at all this open source software,

all this open source hardware in these open communities and thinking like, man, this is like half an inch away from beautiful and tending towards maybe meaninglessness or hilarity. And so when you can take the choice between hilarious and beautiful, I think it would be cool to do something beautiful. And so we took one of these open source Geiger counters.

It's a thing that measures radiation. And one of the first projects that we were doing in Basra was to attempt to map radiation because people were claiming that they were getting sick because of the depleted uranium that was deposited through artillery fire tanks over the last 20 years of war.

And so we took these tools out to try to tell a story about what you can do with open source tools and technology. And I think it's really important, but not to be brow beating. That's the thing. This is actually something that I want to talk with everyone on stage about.

It's important to have that playfulness. I mean, that's what drew me in. You were talking about finding your friends, right? Like being a geek and being like, oh, I don't really know who to hang out with. And then suddenly finding all these beautiful people that want to help you make and feeling creative. I'm sure we've all had this experience. And we've got that just to introduce Juliette quickly, who is a wonderful former Fab Lab Nairobi

and iHub significant participant in all of those, the whole tech scene in Kenya, Silicon Savannah. You heard about that yesterday. As well as doing amazing things with local artisans. Like these Fundi workshops here.

Yeah, so as Anna mentioned, I run Fundi workshops in Kenya. And basically we've been running workshops in the larger East African market. And this has just been such a, like Bilal mentioned, such a fun experience. I think there's the one side where you're very excited to share all this information and you're like,

you really want to start a hardware movement. But I think one thing you're never ready for is just how much you'll enjoy it yourself, how much you see people enjoying being able to create different things, build different things, grow their networks and their knowledge, and just like see the evolution of their ideas.

And so we've just run a couple of series of workshops ranging from electronics into hardware into human-centered design. And the whole idea is to get young people to feel like they can be creative problem solvers or who can just expand the realm of their creativity into a more tangible environment.

What is that? Oh, so that is a bicycle blender. And I actually learned about that when I did a program in Brazil by the IDI and MIT network. And so what they do is they bring in a group of designers and engineers from all over the world.

And you spend one month immersed in the community and identifying one challenge with the community and collaboratively developing that. So one of the projects that came from there was the bicycle blender. And so when I came back to Kenya, this was really one of like the stronger, inspiring ideas that kind of gave birth to Fundi,

that the idea that you can bring people from different backgrounds and have them share a common cause and a common goal and build up on that. So one of the things we do is we run people through what we call build-its. And this is generally getting people to build a project together and I take them through the different stages.

There's the one side where you can teach people how to do electronics, but the other side is teaching them the different stages that go into building a project and making it work. And I think it's exciting seeing them both struggle through it and then make it happen and then get excited about the next thing they're going to work on.

So that's really just helped kind of grow that community. Yeah, and to Bilal's point, this struggle and this sense of creativity is something that I think I personally have seen across both taxidermied ostrich quadcopters as well as much more meaningful projects like this.

I think it's important to have a very good mix of the both. Sometimes just being playful and just doing taxidermy turkey is good enough. In a place where you haven't touched electronics, that's something that makes a lot more impact sometimes.

And sometimes meaningful projects, and with you on the meaningful projects, we need to do more. And coming from a humanitarian and gender space, I know how much we still need tech to build or bridge that gap and to make interactions more meaningful.

We have a long way to go. We just have simple interfaces to deal with any kind of issues, which I think needs more creativity, more innovation. And I hope that this fun taxidermy turkey building leads to something as meaningful as this.

Yeah, so in our time remaining, we know people in most countries, I would say, like the majority of the world's countries. So do you guys have questions for us or for each other about what all of this means and where the overall maker movement is going?

If not, we'll continue to talk amongst ourselves. Yeah, Pavel. Thank you. I wanted to ask because I've seen a lot of faces of maker movement around the world. So for example, in Germany, it's focused mostly on the hacker scene.

And I think in the US, there are several hacker innovation spaces. But in all the other places, I've seen mostly maker spaces. So do you distinguish between different kinds?

Is there any kind of useful distinction? So, yeah, Vilela and I just worked on this with the Autodesk Foundation. Maker spaces sort of came about through Maker Faire and the maker movement, as promoted specifically by Make Magazine because they felt that hack was too political.

And in fact, many hacker spaces that I've talked to are not that happy about the term maker space being applied as sort of a blanket because they are political. They're doing things like mapping radiation in Kosovo, which is inherently political. And they don't like the sort of friendly hobby implication of the maker space.

I think it's something that's really important to recognize that this is not new. And the words that you're using are fairly new, at least in the Ngram that you look on the internet. It will tell you that these just started popping up being in use recently. We've been having Jugaad for centuries.

What is Jugaad? Oh, Jugaad is a term we use in India for hacking anything. So there are people who hack vehicles to their water connections, to electric meters, to anything to get their work done.

And that's what we use as a blanket term for Jugaad. And it's important, it's so nice to see how Jugaad plays out in innovation and sustainability. I think there is a book on that which can explain a little bit more on that. Or in Kenya as well.

I think you mentioned this last year, but the Kenyan term for Jugaad would be fundi. And I think it has different implications. On one side, you think of someone who can get stuff fixed for you. And on the other side, you think of a hacker. I think the hacker word really hasn't penetrated in East Africa. But when you say fundi, it's like, oh, I know what you're saying.

That guy who just tinkers and does his own and figures things out on his own. And because that's centuries old, it's really hard to see whether the rise in makers is recent. I think it's always been part of different cultures around the world. It's in the media now. The really important difference though is that this is the community centered nature.

The kind of hacking, the person that can do it on their own, the do it yourself kind of stuff. It's very different than a lot of the spaces and the communities that we've been showing. And even those are centuries old. I mean, there's the cafe culture in Europe.

And then Benjamin Franklin in America with his leather apron club. He would get people together and be like, yo, bros, listen. Have you learned anything that's useful for basically anything? Which is like the Arab Golden Age. Yeah, yeah. Thousands of years ago. The Library of Alexandria had people dissecting things right next to scribes talking about grammar of the language.

These spaces are very old and these are just different models. And I don't mind. I'm excited to see the hackerspace model and the makerspace model and the tech shop model and the fab lab model and the ice hub model and the... The appropriate technology spaces.

All these models are beautiful and great. Whichever one fits for your community, go for it. Yeah. We might have time for one more question. Andrew. Sorry. Thank you. Really, thank you so much for all of your work. My question is about the sort of the way that these networks and makespaces, hackerspaces, fab labs, iHubs.

The way they get used by others. I'm thinking specifically companies and politicians. Is there... Certainly what I've seen in the UK is that politicians like to turn up and be photographed around the makespace

and be associated with that kind of thing. But actually don't really contribute anything to it. And many companies behave in a similar way. Have you got sort of stories on sort of both ends of the spectrum, a positive and negative experience that you've seen around the world about how these sorts of movements might be being used and abused by others?

The story, a certain large Asian country was recently opening a huge fab lab. And there's a friend of mine from MIT went over to help get the lab set up and run a workshop. And a week before her workshop, she arrived and there was actually no equipment in the lab.

And the lab manager said, we're really sorry. We've been too busy taking photos with all of these politicians to celebrate the fact that we're opening this fab lab to actually buy any of the equipment. So here's $100,000. I know you don't speak our language, but please run around and buy all of the equipment you need

in order to run your workshop in a couple days. So that's like on the one extreme of the spectrum. There's positive relationships between governments and spaces. I mean one of the important things in Basra, I wish the Basra Iraq guys were here, but there is space in a country that is terrified of makers because what people generally make, assume people are making our weapons.

And so importing is really hard, especially importing scary looking equipment. And so they're developing relationships with the governments to make that kind of process easier and they're actually making some headway. And I'm sure positive, negative across the board. Yeah, in India, the government of Kerala is actually supporting making and maker spaces.

They in fact opened two fab labs and funded them wholly. And they also funded some thousands of kits, open hardware kits for school kids and they funded the workshops. So there is good amount of support from governments and institutions looking back there.

Yeah, when they recognize it's the community much more than the actual tools and equipment and space. I think it's a bit of both. So the first thing is I think sometimes the government doesn't understand what this movement is. And so in Kenya I did see like they did come on board with the fab lab, a bit with the IHAB,

but I think there just has been a sort of inertia to just like coming on early. I think they come in when people have really like found different people to support them and I think that's kind of where the problem is that because government has such a vast reach,

it always makes me wonder why we only have like two fab labs in Kenya. So I had one in the university I went to and they could easily have just replicated that all over the country. But it's just that inertia, like they do come on board, but like not at the right time. It's all about the photo ops. Right, so they'll come in and they quack around the fab lab and like point at projects.

But I think like going beyond like building it, how do you make sure that people can build like really cool projects, spread them out, how do you make it beyond just like the face time. Yeah. I have a question for you guys, I know we've got to wrap up. But you guys are all special because you're here.

Congratulations and welcome. You're here because you're interested in global development and community and community spaces and innovation. You're curious about these kinds of things. And I would like to suggest that you're sitting next to somebody and that we are already a part of a community. Like I can see a lot of familiar faces and new faces that I'm sure will be my friends.

And one of the things that I love about these spaces, you're talking about people that can like accomplish their visions and their ideas and supporting each other. Do you have a vision or a mission and when you're walking out, when we're all done wrapping up, talk to the person next to you about it and see what they think, get some feedback.

Maybe you can get some support or encouragement or maybe even just talking about it with someone will help you refine it or take another step further. And I really encourage you to do this. So take one second to make eye contact with the person sitting next to you and then we'll carry on and wrap up. And we have an amazing next speaker talking about more humanitarian maker spaces.

So thank you everyone and we will hang around to answer further questions.