MAKE-IT panel at Maker Faire Rome 2016

The MAKE-IT project will be presented at Maker Faire Rome 2016 with this panel:

MAKE-IT: a project for understanding and experimenting online platforms for the governance of Maker communities

ICT software and hardware are completely changing the way we make tangible and intangible goods. Nowadays, intangible goods or virtual bits can be shared globally and then turned into physical objects or atoms locally. This transformation from bits to atoms has been democratised especially by theMaker movement: Makers that gather in online communities and platforms and in local Fab Labs, Makerspaces, Hackerspaces. The community dimension of the Maker movement is highly important, but how does it work? How Maker communities are organised and governed? What Makers do and how they behave? Which are the various ways in which the Maker movement impacts on and adds value to society? Online platforms are already adopted by Maker communities, and they can be further researched and improved in order to foster the impact of Maker communities. The overall objective of the MAKE-IT project is to understand the role of such platforms (Collective Awareness Platforms – CAPS) in enabling the growth and governance of the Maker movement, particularly in relation to using and creating social innovations and achieving sustainability. The results of this research will help to understand the uses and impacts of CAPS in different contexts, as well as of the Maker movement itself. This project addresses CAPS for Maker communities by not only interviewing Makers but also by engaging them in action-research initiatives, where experimentation regarding such platforms will see the participation of Makers themselves beside the researchers. To understand how the role and impact of CAPS approaches the Maker movement, MAKE-IT will undertake multidisciplinary research in different fields including: behavioural studies, social psychology, sociology, management information systems, economics, environmental science, technological impact and governance issues. This project is developed by the Netherlands Organisation for applied scientific research – TNO (Netherlands), Danish Technological Institute – DTI (Denmark), Centre for Social Innovation – ZSI (Austria), TU Dortmund University –TUDO (Germany), IAAC | Fab Lab Barcelona (Spain), Fab Lab Zagreb (Croatia), Happylab (Austria), AHHAA (Estonia), Create it REAL (Denmark). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688241. This project started in January 2016 and will end in December 2017. This talk will be shared by several partners of the MAKE-IT project who will present the project, its plan, the planned outcomes and processes and who will discuss with the audience how to better understand and help Makers in the governance of their communities with online platforms.