Hello, everybody. Hello. Hi. Let's all just settle in. We're ready for the next session.

And so just before we get into it, I'm going to ask you to take a deep breath, taking a deep breath. Well, some people are still moving around. So I don't know if they're doing that. And could you also just inch closer, actually, if you're at the back?

Yeah. Okay. So he says you need to have at least one person next to you as you take a deep breath. Have we organized? Okay, great. So up next is a fantastic guy. His name is Bilal Khalib from everywhere. And he's going to tell us about, he's giving us a very

thought-provoking question. What will we make when we can make everything or anything? So Bilal, over to you. Hey, thanks. So I was really serious. Please get close to somebody so that they're close to you. And if you are comfortable with holding hands with that person, that's even better. So we're going to get to that pretty soon.

So my name is Bilal. And for the last few years, I've been helping share the idea that you can make anything you can imagine. And this is one of the tools that's becoming available for more people to take things in their heads and to make them real. Who

here has experienced what people are calling the DIY or the maker movement and feel more capable to create? There's some people here. This is the attitude that I'm trying to share, especially in the Middle East. And so a couple of years ago, I went with a crew out to, sorry, this is Cairo. And I met up with these fine young gentlemen and I got donated MakerBots. Who knows what a MakerBot is? What is a MakerBot? It's

the basis of the MakerBot came out of the RepRap project, which came out of a university. But the MakerBot came out of a hackerspace, which is a community space where people are sharing resources and tools. NYC Resistor. OK, he's got the right idea. This

heckling, I encourage the heckling. And so, yeah, this thing came out of NYC Resistor using the open source platform that RepRap first created. And so they donated it to Egypt because they wanted to help inspire more people to create. And so I've been working

on this kind of stuff for a while, and it's really, really exciting to be able to look into the future and see your hand in creating it. But after working in the Middle East for a few years now, I'm beginning to realize that some of the things that we're

creating have nothing to do with the environment in which we're creating them. And I'm going to suggest something today that will hopefully get us to engage in creating things that make sense instead of just creating stuff. And to do that, I would like you to hold the wrist of the person next to you. Oh, I should probably close that. If you could

please hold the wrist of the person next to you and connect to the person's pulse. Here we go. No, I'm going to switch back and forth. And we're going to do this for 30 seconds. Is everybody got it? Does everyone know how to do this? All right.

Sorry. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That's crazy, right? That's crazy. I got you. Has everyone got it? Yeah? Nod if you found their pulse. Good? Okay. So now take a deep breath. Okay. So that's the heart, okay, that beats inside of all of

us. And this is the thing that I think can transform the creative potential that is being developed within the maker movement, within the DIY movement, within the open source movement. And let us see that we can create beautiful things

in the world to support each other. And so it's making from the heart. I know everyone has something that they love, and this is my niece. She's four. She's really cute. And this picture is simply a segue because I love my

niece. And I'm going to tell you about a couple of projects that I did that I think got a bit ahead of themselves. They weren't very grounded. I wasn't very thoughtful. And so I'm going to show you a couple of these projects, and then I'm going to show you some more projects that I think are really, really inspired. So the first project is my cousin Zaid. He is an amputee because

you know what? I'm going to close that. He's an amputee because in Iraq during the sanctions, there was a period where it was hard to get diabetes

medication. And so Zaid lost his leg, and I was really getting excited about the community space that we were developing in Baghdad called Fikr space. And so I thought to myself, like, what if we started using these tools that we have in the hackerspace to start, like, solving a problem? And I was thinking

tools first. And so I drew on Zaid's leg with some marker, and then I used an application called 123D Catch to scan his leg, and I turned it into this prosthetic positive cast. And I learned from my friend David Senge who made multi-material prosthetic sockets, which are basically

the basic premise is if you put hard stuff on soft stuff and soft stuff on hard stuff, your prosthetic becomes comfortable. So bone into squishy, muscle onto hard, and then your socket becomes something that you can stand in. And so I wanted to replicate that using some DIY technology. And here's us in Baghdad with Salih Zain, who is a wonderful kid. He's like 17. Salih, I hope

you hear this, because I just want to say that you're awesome, and I'm really proud of everything that you're doing. And so he and I were working on this with the rest of the Fikr space crew. We made this wax mold, and we slipped it onto Zaid's leg. And it was kind of cool. I mean, it really did

address some of his problems, but in the end, the thing that turned out to be the most useful wasn't making the 3D model. It wasn't making it fit exactly the contours of his leg. It was pouring it into a baking tin and then cutting the strips and putting onto his leg so that he had different durometers of silicon, different hardness on different parts of his leg.

And so, you know, maybe got a bit ahead of myself there. And if there's somebody recording, this is just because I don't like to talk about projects in a negative way in public. Can you please just like stop the recording and stop this other stuff, please? Just a little bit. Okay, and so there's another

project where people started hearing about this work that I've been doing and taking DIY technology and taking it to places of conflict and working on trying to address some issues. And this guy reaches out to me, who's somewhere in California, and he says, I want to go to somewhere in Africa to

help create prosthetics for this person. And it's a very specific individual, very well branded, very well marketed. He brought like one engineer and then four cinematographers, and so I started to feel a little strange. But the really exciting thing is like at that time I met up with this guy named Richard, and

Richard made this thing called the RoboHand. And the RoboHand is this 3D printed prosthetic hand, and Richard is awesome, okay? So Richard was a carpenter from South Africa. He chopped off a couple of fingers during an accident, and he's like, you know what? I can fix this. Because he heard about 3D printers, and he got really excited about them, and he started like

printing iteration after iteration and like model after model, and he found a really wonderful way to make a prosthetic hand. And so when I was first there, I got super excited. I was like, dude, Rich, this is awesome. I want to learn how to make this hand. I want to take this to some place in Africa and help people by like making prosthetic, like a hand prosthetic lab. And so I spent a couple of days with Rich and the team, and we developed this

process, and we used this orthopedic plastic, and we took all these DIY approaches to making these prosthetic hands, and then we called the person and the doctor at the hospital there. And you see I'm putting string in right now. And I was like, hey, we need string. Do you guys have string? And the doctor was like, no, no, no string. I was like, okay, okay, fine, fine, fine.

You must have fishing line, right? Like people must fish. And he's like, no, no, no fishing line. I was like, okay, okay, well, how about fabric? We need fabric so maybe we don't have to bring all the orthopedic plastic with us. We can use fabric and epoxy. He was like, no fabric, no epoxy. And then I started

realizing that the problems in this place that I was going to, to hopefully set up a 3D printing prosthetics lab, were like way, way beyond the couple of people that were amputated. And we were not using an important part of our body, which is this part. So I think that project did address the

first part, the heart, right? It was at least trying to pull on the heartstrings of people to motivate them to donate, to work, to act. And he definitely convinced me. And I was on board. But it took me a couple of days into it and a lot of convincing from my friend to realize that I should also be using my head. And so there's this wonderful thing. It's called a logic

model. And a logic model is a strategy for making sure that the things that you do connect to your heart, but actually address the things that you're trying to address. You know, you can get really excited. Who here has been excited about a project and just like got so absorbed in it and just like

kept thinking about it and doing it and working on it? Okay, that's a really great state to be in, but sometimes it can be dangerous because if you don't really pay attention to what you're doing, you might get ahead of yourself and start working on things that you didn't really expect to be working on. And the logic model is the cyclical thing. You can see there's an arrow going down and then all the way around and then back. So I don't know

if I put in an example, but basically you'd start with an example and then you try to model the world. And then you say like, what do I want to do to address this model? Let's say that your model is smoking, right? You're like, I want people to like stop smoking because it killed my uncle and I'm really passionate about this. Smoking killed my uncle and I'm really passionate about

this. Don't smoke. And seriously, Geraldine, don't smoke. Okay, and I want to find a way to solve it. And so you model the world, you say things like, I want to make an anti-smoking campaign. This is gonna be great. We're gonna do a Twitter thing and we're gonna make sure that people tweet about not smoking. And then you figure out what the outcomes are, like how are you

gonna monitor it? And then you figure out the effects and you keep going back in this circle to make sure that what you're doing addresses this stuff that you're working on. And so this stuff that we were doing at Fickler Space with the prosthetic socket stuff, I realized not that one, was not necessarily the the thing that we were looking to create. And I just

wanted to show this quick video. Oh yeah, really goofy music. But lower the volume. But the thing that really was happening at Fickler Space with all these projects was that these cuties, these awesome little Iraqi dudes were like getting together and setting up a community space where they were

looking beyond their differences into a future where they can be productive and creative with each other. And so this is a really nice video. And what I really love about this video is this is a visitor to Fickler Space just talking about how much he likes it. He made this little documentary tour and he's talking to some of the founders. And I don't know if you notice, but

everyone is like 16. They're sitting on like playground equipment. And the other thing that I love about this is all of the comments. This is a video that has 470 views and has like a ton of engagements and a ton of comments from people in Baghdad and around the world being like yeah go Fickler Space. And so this is one of the real positive outcomes

that I think came out of the the hackerspace. Another thing that is really trying to connect people to their best selves is my friends Mortoba did this awesome workshop called a dream workshop where we went to

Fickler Space in Baghdad and everyone said what they dreamt to do and we went in a big circle and everyone tried to give the resources that they had to help the other person accomplish their dream and then try to give them their email addresses and contacts so that they can stay in touch. Okay I guess we can start recording now. I was as vague as possible about that thing but if you'd like to record now is now it's fair again. Okay and so

this over here is Ali. This is we're gonna go now to Beirut where there's a community space called Lumba Labs and we're gonna show how people are taking this DIY stuff to feel something and then to act on it. So Ali was a homeless person in Beirut who everyone kind of knew he was a fixture he literally like

a fixture people would kind of walk over him as they walk to class or kind of pass him by and shortly after this picture was taken he died and you'll see also on this one picture there's a lot of engagement but what I

love about what these people did in Beirut is that they use the tool that you might be familiar with Ushahidi and they took this open source tool they customized it and they started making this thing called find Ali invisible no more I'm gonna try to find Ali and each of these little nodes

is actually a searchable database of people putting up little snippets about the homeless people that they see in the streets to make sure that they're not invisible no more and so one of these links shows that there's two homeless people under the coca-cola bridge one has been there for two

years the second been there has been there for a year or less every day when I'm heading to work I see a two homeless men sleeping under the coca-cola and so instead of having this thing be invisible and not talked about just by making this website they're like raising up awareness and getting people to have a conversation about these people and this is one of the really great uses of open source software that's coming out of the

Middle East I think it's a really wonderful thing okay so I used to work sort of thoughtlessly in Baghdad I was just like hey I want to bring in like 3d printers I want to make sure people are gathering together and like playing and working and one day I was in Baghdad and I really wanted to go

out to the hackerspace because we had a workshop and then there were car bombs and so people were like yeah don't worry about it you know like if you're stuck at home oh so they blew up the guards around my house and so they locked off the entire neighborhood and the figurespace people were just kind of blowing it off like it was nothing they're like you know you'll probably be open up again at 4 p.m. and we can do the workshop then

no problem I was like oh yeah no no no no what it's a problem and answer it's a real big problem and it started to affect me more and more and so I I decided to start taking some of the open tools that I had available to me to just do something I didn't really know what to do and so I started calling them

art projects and I learned from a b14 the arrow bloggers conference some data visualization stuff and I thought would be a great idea to try to let people know how bad the the problem was in Baghdad and so this is a really quick processing script when you run it it creates the square that changes

with the size of the number of people that have died and then I worked with Moratoba in Baghdad to create this video which which just takes the the audio file and then every time there's a car bomb I don't know if you can

hear it it plays a beat and then the entire city gets a little bit more glitched and so the the fast version of that sounds like this so try to imagine that each of those high hats is a day so every day that goes by in Baghdad since the Americans pulled out sounds like and then every day that

there was a car bomb we made a drum go off and the amplitude of that drum is the number of people that died so like a little a little beat means that only six people died and a really loud beat means that 60 people died so now

tell me that that's not a problem tell me that Mafi mushkila just wait in your house and then come out when you can and this is really what changed my

attitude about what we should be using our tools for you know like I like uber it's great I can pull up a phone and get a cab and go somewhere but I would prefer there to be no more violence in the countries that are where I'm from and so to encourage that I'm hoping to highlight a couple of these awesome

projects another really funny project that I'm taking on is so that's historic data right that's people in the past that have been blown up I want to make a real-time representation of that and so I'm writing some code called we aware which parses the Twitter feed and finds events that

could be car bombs and validates them with a volunteer team so people say like yes there was a car bomb today and it sucks and the idea is to make a interactive sculpture where every time a car bomb goes off sculpture that

represents the history of Iraq gets turned one turn so it gets crushed slowly over time so another project that's come out of Beirut is hey there inna this is a really great project where people are talking about like civil liberties and internet activism and sharing that online the violence in in

Lebanon sometimes is referenced as people dying in as a martyr and people started getting pissed off and so they started this social media campaign called I am NOT a martyr okay and they wanted to point out that by

calling this thing a martyr they're sort of justifying the causes that are at play in causing the violence and they they started putting up pictures and tweets and hashtags and I think that more of this kind of stuff should happen more conversation on social media more kind of artworks that talk

about the violence in the Middle East is really needed and you can find that kind of stuff hey there inna one of the other really great projects that came out of Beirut is oops is this thing called the Lebanese Elections Data this is really awesome you have to play with this tool okay so Mark

Maya and some people at the the Lebanese hackerspace started this project and they yes let's see and so you go into this website and which one do you want to see let's see voter trends by confessions voter trends by

confessions is awesome green means that there are more registered voters and people voting in this country from this sect and red means that that sect has pulled out from that district and there are less voters and so this kind of invisible thing that is happening in Lebanon is now made visible through this d3 representation so you'll see that here there was a an

exodus of Sunnis it's red people have left and if you switch over to the Shia you'll see that it turns green so that one district is transitioning and you can see what happens with the Maronites you can see what happens with the Druze you can see what happens the Greek Catholics and you can also pick your years and they do all sorts of things this is a really

important one so white and invalid votes this is how Lebanese people protest their governments and still participate in the elections they go and they put in white ballot votes and this is the representation of the districts in Lebanon and how many people have been not voting basically or

voting with a white ballot so this is another great project that was worked on by some of the members in the Beidou's hackerspace and because you can't really have a talk about the internet open source culture without cats I I found this cat in Tunis there's also a turtle so turtles in my thing

cats are your things you know here's a here's a cat okay so now let's get to a place where we're a little bit more using our hearts and our minds this is a project that Ficker Space is working on this is Ali and there's Ahmad that's the Ficker Space hackerspace this is what it looks like

in Baghdad it's pretty dusty and there was this doctor in the south or sorry there's this this guy it was just a father but his son got cancer and he wanted to know why and he started doing his research and it appears that

there's like a problem with depleted uranium there's a lot of like speculation that this material that was dropped in excessive amounts during the Gulf Wars both of them like 1,400 tons like that's really heavy I don't think I could pick that up was dropped all over the country and in great

concentrations in Basra and he helped set up an organization for cancer research or cancer assistance for parents to know how to treat their children and also for getting medication for the kids to have a school to play in and when he met me I had brought with me this device

which is a safe cast Geiger counter so here's here's that thing where we realize that we have that capability to create and solve our own problems this came out of who knows what the safe cast is okay you want to explain it oh Don okay you want to explain what the safe cast is exactly so it's a device

it's a Geiger counter and this is a GPS sensor from I think Adafruit and this is a data logger from sparkfun and the Arduino is the platform as the back end and so that's an open-source microcontroller and after the tsunami

in Japan the Tokyo hackerspace Sean Bonner people internationally as a part of the open source and hackerspace movement got together and made this really quick device that they were able to distribute faster than the government was able to and they were able to give people data that can keep them safer faster than the government was able to and when I was going to

Baghdad I ran into Sean Bonner and I was like dude Sean I need also I was going to Erbil I need this device so that I can like start investigating the problem of radiation in the country and so I met up with Leith the father of that kid who got cancer he saw this device and we decided that what we really need to do is do a tour of Basra and take two surveys one survey

that maps the population where they got sick and the other survey which maps the areas that are really affected by radiation I discovered a lot of things about conspiracies and radiation mapping and some of the challenges of working with data and I can I can talk about that later if you'd

like but the project is now turning into an open data project so that everyone that has ever run a study in Iraq on depleted uranium and on radiation and on adverse health outcomes so like birth defects and cancer we're encouraging them to share their data so that we make make some clarity around the situation which is currently very unclear and so here's the

particular space I'm playing with the radiation monitor learning about how it works and we're hoping to take them down to both ads I was sorry Basra to do the monitoring well I had less time than I thought so this is Katia this is why I've been having a bit of a rough time Katia is in a refugee camp was in

a refugee camp in Syria and I was there last summer and I just want to show like a really quick video of her because she's super cute but my friends after a man went there and he he did some workshops with them we were

thinking about alternative education spaces in conflict zones and in refugee camps I had a really hard time when I was there I thought I was gonna do something and I got overrun it was a really like really big challenge but

last week Katia and her friend were killed when the Syrian government dropped a missile on her on her school and so that was really bad and there is something that I wanted to do some I wanted to do something about it

my friend and I were already working on this project it's called for the dead I was thinking about commemorating the people that were lost in Baghdad during the sectarian violence the thousands and thousands of forgotten people and so we made this website most of most of the website comes from my friend Joe oh where's for the dead that's not it I guess I have to

oh here we go so for the dead is a website where you can commemorate the people that have died with a good deed and it's down which sucks I don't it's done oh that's it that's it okay so these are some of the people that

have died this is my friend's mother who died in Afghanistan during the hotel shooting last month this is my uncle who died because he was smoking Geraldine that's my uncle he's dead he smoked a lot and this is Katia so you click on Katia and you have the ability to commemorate her with a

positive action there's this concept of sadaqah area which means continuous good deeds and so we're trying to create a website where people can do positive actions for people that have died whether or not they died in violence and I think this is a really great way if you can all like help and

commemorating Katia I don't think we're gonna be able to stop the violence in Syria as much as we like but even just being kinder to each other I think is a really good way to remember her and lastly I guess what I

really hope is for us to see what people are doing with these creative tools and like the tools that we have available to us and use the stuff that's happening in the Middle East and in Africa I have examples from

Africa too I didn't share them and share them with the rest of the world and so this is a really quick project it's called for the sorry it's called Lebanon would be better if started by Sharif and he just went around really DIY low-tech grungy spray paint on the wall and say Lebanon would

be better if dot dot dot and he encouraged people to put up their ideas and it's lubnani kun asan and what I find really amazing is that this project is now international and it's called project better and that's what I want to see I want to see the Middle East Africa and all of

these places that are having really serious challenges take all the increased capability for creativity and production that's being produced by the open source movement at large and show leadership and like wonderful things that we can do with them and I wanted to have this be more of a discussion but I guess I spoke slower than I normally do so I'm sorry and

that's all thanks