The MAKE-IT project also produces several visualisations that explain its activities, impacts and the role of CAPS in enabling the Maker movement, which can be accessed from this section.
The Fab City Dashboard
The Fab City Dashboard is a rough prototype that aims at exploring how to visualise the impact of Maker initiative over city resilience. The concept of such a dashboard that focuses on the Maker perspective of cities has been under consideration at IAAC for a while, and the participation of part of the IAAC team at the Visualizar’16 workshop at Medialab Prado in Madrid (26/09/2016-05/10/2016) provided the context for exploring this topic, for discussing it with stakeholders and promoting MAKE-IT and for developing the first version. Furthermore, this experience has provided the context for exploring the topic of impact of Maker initiatives with a research-through-design approach (Basballe and Halskov, 2012; Stappers et al., 2015; Zimmerman et al., 2007), with scientific publications under development. Furthermore, this experience provided the context also for working and planning other more structure softwares part of this list. This platform is based on the Python programming language thanks to its rich ecosystem in data analysis, and it usse the Flask microframework. The source code is open / free software and can be accessed on GitHub. See also the Software page.
Open the Fab City Dashboard here
The MakerSpacesRadar
As a twin of the TechRadar developed in WP5, this project is a simple dashboard that shows some analytics about the makerspaces: where they are distributed and the different kinds of labs. This is a rather simple project because most of the complexity is part of DataVisPlanner (a simple platform that packages several different open source applications and add few features that enable the planning, scheduling and managing of data analyses tasks and related visualisations, which can then be embedded anywhere), and could be extended in the future with platform_analysis (a Python module for analysing social interactions over time on digital platforms, with a specifc focus for platforms adopted by makers) and other modules as well. This dashboard is completely data-driven, and it is an example application of the makerlabs library (a Python module for retrieving data from several Maker CAPS); it could be interested for any stakeholder interested in having an overview of the makerspaces without the need for developing software or research. The source code is open / free software and can be accessed on GitHub. See also the Software page.