A festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness.
The third edition of Berlin Maker Faire is expecting to host over 1000 Makers at 250 booths presenting to an audience of 25,000 visitors. Discover what Berlin Maker Faire has to offer: Robots breathing fire, incredible inventions, and a colorful mixture of several hundred Makers. You’re invited to join in, touch, and learn, take part in workshops and learn how to solder, code or sew.
Read More ...The OpenTechSummit brings the exciting ideas and creators of the open-Technology community in Berlin. Subjects range from open hardware, over encyclopedias of free knowledge, software development and free networks to questions.
Read More ...A Maker Faire is a platform where Makers can present their projects to a large audience, from hobby projects to prototypes. The focus is on letting guests touch and try things out.
Maker Faire Sachsen offers many interesting activity stations, which are supplemented by fascinating presentations and workshops. Also, children and students get a creative and playful introduction to science, technology and a passion for working with materials and tools.
Read More ...Dr. Christian Voigt from Zentrum für Soziale Innovation – ZSI (Centre for Social Innovation), Vienna, will give a presentation about “Design Thinking: opportunities and risks in the innovation process” at the Kongress Innovationen für die Gesellschaft – Neue Wege und Methoden zur Entfaltung des Potenzials sozialer Innovationen – (Congress innovations for society – New approaches and methods for unleashing the potential of social innovation –).
More information at http://sfs.tu-dortmund.de/cms/innovationskongress/de/programm/sessions/design-thinking/index.html
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On 15th September in Dortmund/Germany, I introduced the MAKE-IT project at Dortmund’s “innovative citizen” festival (http://www.innovative-citizen.de/). Within my input I described the broad variety of different types of Maker spaces through Europe as identified in MAKE-IT‘s case studies and contributed to a scenario for the use of open workshops in Germany in 2030.
Dortmund’s “innovative citizen” festival (“festival for democratic use of technology”, http://www.innovative-citizen.de/) for the fourth time attracted Makers, social innovators, urban gardeners, urban gamers, activists for an insect based nutrition, civil servants and many other activists at the border of democracy, technology and sustainability. It hosts workshops, discussions, presentations, urban games, a festival cinema and room for exchange and community building.
Together with MAKE-IT case study partner Jürgen Bertling from Dortmund’s Maker space Dezentrale (https://www.facebook.com/DezentraleDortmund ) I discussed in a workshop on “potentials of open workshops and fab labs for a sustainable society”. Jürgen Bertling introduced three scenarios for the spread of open workshops and Fab Labs in Germany – projecting actual numbers and concepts of open workshops to the year 2030. I introduced recent findings from MAKEI-T’s running empirical work:
“We found a broad variety of organizational, paedagogical or technical concepts of Fab Labs in Europe […] And we think that Maker spaces could be understand by looking at their organization and governance, peer and collaborative behaviors and value creation and impact”.
I also pointed out that Maker spaces do not act in an empty space, but should position themselves to existing spaces such as libraries, open workshops, museums or cultural centres. The workshop participants agreed that spread and impact of the DIY and sustainability movement is strongly connected to their connectedness to other communities and actors.
The participants represented various stakeholders such a universities, research organisations, municipalities, libraries, for-profit and not-for-profit Fab Labs and grassroots organisations from all over Germany.
This event brought together old and new CAPS projects, discussing ideas for the next workprogramme, defining clusters of projects, and ultimately establishing a working community of innovation entities that will actively cooperate with the EC on Digital Social Innovation over the coming years.
This community meeting was open not only to the 36 CAPS projects, but also to any external participant interesting in gathering knowledge about the current developments and interacting first-hand the current CAPS activities, from peer to peer. More than half of the 100+ participants were not affiliated with any current CAPS project.
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