Digital platforms for the Maker movement: MAKE-IT, OpenCare & OpenMaker, Maker Faire Rome 2017

by Massimo Menichinelli
Posted on July 9, 2018
Category: MAKE-IT, Maker Events, Other CAPS projects, Platform
Tags: CAPS, Event, Italy, Maker Faire Rome, Maker Platforms, OpenCare, OpenMaker, platform
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Digital platforms have been very successful in leveraging long-tail of markets and in building ecosystems, partnerships and communities. Some platforms have focused specifically on supporting democratic practices that are environmentally aware, participatory and based on sharing and collaboration. These platforms, called Collective Awareness Platforms (CAPS), are an example of new models to create awareness of emerging sustainability challenges and of the role that each and every one of us can play to ease them through collective action. A specific program of Horizon 2020 European projects has focused on CAPS, and some of these projects have worked with the Maker movement, addressing it with different perspectives and methods.

In MAKE-IT we focused on how CAPS enable the growth and governance of the Maker movement using and creating social innovations and achieving sustainability, especially for understanding how Maker communities are organised and governed; what makers do and how they behave; the various ways this impacts on and adds value to society. Two other CAPS projects in this direction are OpenCare and OpenMaker. OpenCare empowers care receivers to design and prototype bottom-up solutions to specific care problems. The European network of makerspaces, Fab Labs, etc. makes these solutions distributed, as every prototype devised can be reproduced, tested and deployed anywhere in the world. OpenMaker aims to create a transformational and collaborative ecosystem that fosters collective innovations within the European manufacturing sector by connecting makers and established companies and drives it towards more sustainable business models, production processes, products, and governance systems by bringing together manufacturers and makers. OpenMaker is seeking strong and innovative applications from Maker-Manufacturer teams who aim to have a social impact on their surrounding communities: 20 projects will be accelerated by hubs in Slovakia (Bratislava), Italy (Firenze/Torino), Spain (Bilbao) and United Kingdom (Wolverhampton/Birmingham/Liverpool/Salford). The goal is to foster collaboration between makers and manufacturers, prototype innovations including products, production processes, supply or value chains, distribution or ownership, and encourage partnerships that are sustainable and deliver social impact.

These three projects met in December 2017 and we discussed together our activities and results in a panel at Maker Faire Rome 2017, which was preceded by a discussion (in Italian) with several makers at Roma Makers the day before. Hare’s the video registration of the (English) panel at Maker Faire Rome 2017!

How can we understand collaborative behaviours in Maker projects on platforms?

by Massimo Menichinelli
Posted on September 21, 2017
Category: Research
Tags: Data, Data Science, Design, Design for Next, Git, GitHub, Journal, Open Source, Paper, platform, Python, Reflective practitioner, Research, Scientific Conference, Scientific Publication, SNA, Social Network Analysis, Software
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Makers very often work in collaboration with other people, and several times they share their work online as open source (software, hardware, design, …). I’ve been researching how people work collaboratively especially in Open Design projects for several years, and now a bit also in MAKE-IT as well, especially in how these collaborative behaviours could be understood in connections with platforms and especially Collective Awareness Platforms (CAPS).

Makers (and designers and engineers and …) could engage in Open Design in several ways: designing projects, discussing projects, discussing Open Design itself, building platforms that host Open Design projects (like Fablabs.io, the open source platform of the global Fab Lab network)… and so on. These are among the many activities that could be done in the Open Design world and that have an influence on it, and platforms have an increasingly strong impact on these collaborative behaviours. Understanding collaborative processes by makers on such platforms is also an important steps towards understanding platforms in general. For these reasons I wrote a paper for the Design for Next conference (and published in The Design Journal) and a software library that tries to answer to this research question: how could the analysis of social interactions over time on such platforms improve the understanding of design-related collaborative processes?

Understanding this would enable us to advance our understanding of how platforms connects and influence makers and designers in their collaborative work on Open Design, and to provide support to the activity of Maker and Design researchers and of reflective practitioners as well. In this case I focused on analysing projects managed with the Git software and GitHub platform, which are very popular among software developers especially but also among makers. These tool and platform have been investigated with several approaches, papers and softwares, but not with makers, designers and Open Design as the main focus. Furthermore, it’s hard to find reusable software from these researches so that it would be easier to replicate them, especially for reflective practitioners (you would need to have some programming and data science skills, but several makers already have them!). For this reason I developed a software library in the Python language, since it is arguably the most popular language for data science, and therefore anybody can use the library for extracting data about collaborative behaviours on Git and GitHub; the analysis is up to you, with the tools that you prefer. This is therefore not only research, but also innovation as in disseminating research results and tools to make them available to everybody.

I called this library platform_analysis since its aim is to analyse interactions over time in several platforms; for the moment it works with Git and GitHub, but it will be soon extended to other platforms. The library extracts the data from projects and returns a graph of time-stamped interactions that can be then analysed with social network analysis: interactions can be then analysed for the project as a whole or as they happen through time, and we can see therefore how participants collaborated in a project, in which kind of interactions and when. This would enable researchers and practitioners to understand what is happening in such projects and platforms.

This is one of the software applications or libraries we are releasing from MAKE-IT (we will publish more of them soon!), available for discussion and development in a GitHub repository and for the installation as a Python module. This is based on a couple of previous experimentations and tests, now finally fully integrated and structured in a complete software library that is then much more structured, complete and easier to use for all the researchers and reflective practitioners (designers and makers) for analysing their projects!
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Can Platform Cooperativism help the Maker Movement to become more sustainable? MAKE-IT on the Open 2017: Platform Cooperatives conference in London

by Janosch Sbeih
Posted on March 3, 2017
Category: MAKE-IT
Tags: CAPS, community, cooperativism, open, platform
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What if so-called sharing economy and gig work platforms like Uber and AirBnB, or even social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter were owned by their employees and users who maintain the platform, deliver the services and create the content that leads to the astounding valuations of the platform economy? The result would be the orientation of emerging technologies toward community-wealth and participatory, democratic control – a vision which the cooperative movement pursues already for centuries, and which is now being picked up in its 21st century version by the Platform Cooperativism movement.

From 16th to 17th of February 2017, scientists, politicians, programmers, activists and representatives from business and civil society met in the halls of Goldsmiths, University of London, to bring together developers of the digital world with practitioners of cooperative business models. The container for this get-together was the two-day conference on the collaborative economy Open 2017: Platform Cooperatives.

I had the opportunity to discuss MAKE-IT with the participants of the conference with the particular focus on sustainability scenarios for the Maker movement. To connect the principles of open source design – on which the Maker movement is built upon – with platform cooperatives – which can be understood as a business form of Collective Awareness Platforms – appears to be a promising approach for a sustainable development of the Maker movement. Platform cooperatives can ease the Maker movement’s dilemma to aspire to the free sharing of open source designs on the one hand, while at the same time wanting to meet financial needs through Maker activities. The development of a platform cooperative where makers can offer their products for sale and free sharing depending on the use of their products could, for example, be modeled on the platform cooperative Stocksy United, which offers royalty-free stock photography and videos. This way, Makers would have the option to offer the same product with different licenses (i.e. open source and commercial licenses) to the respective audiences while parts of their revenues are automatically reinvested into the Maker movement through the platform cooperative.