Makersfor Global Good Report
1 like500 views
The Makers for Global Good Summit 2017 brought together 57 participants from 49 organizations focused on innovative projects addressing social issues like environmental conservation and health. The report outlines the summit's discussions on collaboration, challenges, and future opportunities for makers and organizations to work together. Key themes included the importance of accessibility to tools, the role of local innovation, and the necessity of ongoing conversations among participants to enhance impact and scale of solutions.
Makersfor Global Good Report
- 3. SUMMIT OVERVIEW The first Makers for Global Summit took place at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA on May 19, 2017. The event brought together Makers working on high impact projects in areas ranging from environmental conservation and health to education and the refugee crisis with organizations that could benefit from and support the innovations being developed by these individuals. These organizations included foundations, companies, NGOs, universities and community groups. The day after the summit, all participants were invited to attend Maker Faire Bay Area and participate in a special Missions for Makers breakfast with Dale Dougherty, Founder of Maker Faire and CEO of Maker Media. A number of summit participants also gave talks and exhibited their projects during the Faire. This report provides a summary of the presentations and discussions that took place during the event. A detailed agenda for the summit and list of participating organizations can be found at the end of this document. SOME STATS: ● 57 participants ● 49 organizations including Field Ready, Tikkun Olam Makers, World Bank, Institute for Transformative Technologies, Lemelson Foundation, USAID, Benetech, Intel and Airbnb ● Supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation & Engineering for Change Collaboration diagram indicating existing relationships between organizations (solid lines) and desired connections (dashed lines). 3
- 4. As the Maker Movement evolves and the Maker community continues to grow, we are seeing that individuals are developing innovative approaches to solving pressing problems and challenges in communities around the world. But in order for the promising prototypes and solutions to reach the people that really need them, Makers need to work together with organizations that have the capacity, capabilities, and resources to help them test, iterate and scale what they’re doing. The goal of the summit was to: ● Provide these groups with the opportunity to share their work with one another. ● Discuss existing challenges to progress. ● Identify potential opportunities to work together. LOOKING AHEAD: ACTIONABLE NEXT STEPS The event provided a unique opportunity to meet and connect with potential collaborators, but the impact will be dependant on what comes next. Below are specific ideas around the way we can continue to build on the ideas discussed at the summit as well as additional issues that could be covered in future convenings. ● Opportunities to continue conversation. Create a listserv or online group via social media so that participants can stay in touch, provide updates on their work and ask for help. To that end, we’ve created a Makers for Global Good Facebook group, which will also be open to others who are working at the intersection of making and social impact. ● Future convenings. Given that this gathering was productive, we are considering opportunities to gather like minded individuals that could dovetail with other major convenings such as the UN General Assembly and World Maker Faire in New York in September 2017. There is also considerable interest in collaborating with the social entrepreneurship community. ● Research. This convening revealed that there is still much work to be done in mapping the complex ecosystem of makers and innovators tackling a wide range of social impact areas, identifying best practices and gaps and how approaches to measurement and evaluation are being developed. More formal, well-supported research in these and related areas is needed. ● Future topics. Important issues that we did not have the opportunity to dive into deeply, but that we agree would be good to focus on moving forward: 4
- 5. ○ Making tools, technologies and spaces for design, building and fabrication more accessible to individuals with disabilities. ○ The intersection between making and social justice- making as an opportunity for civic engagement. ○ Data protection, governance and risk mitigation when innovating in high stakes, high risk contexts. ○ Increasing access to Maker technologies and lowering barriers to scale. SESSION I: IMPACT INVENTING AND OPEN COLLABORATION This session focused on examining the ways we can think about the impact of the solutions that are being developed and the role that open source and open sharing can play in the development, dissemination and distribution of solutions across communities. We heard from three different organizations on this topic. Lemelson Foundation Lemelson Foundation has been supporting the development of invention based enterprises (IBE) as an approach to solving some of the toughest challenges facing society in areas such as medical diagnostics & treatment, energy and agriculture. The foundation works in a variety of ways to spur invention including supporting organizations who provide inventors with the support and guidance needed to ensure products go to market and have a societal impact. The Lemelson Foundation believes the most important products invented in the next 20 years will be those that address critical social and environmental issues, and reach and serve communities with the greatest needs. For this reason, the foundation focuses on what it calls the impact inventing framework: 1) Environmental Responsibility: Thinking about the end-of-life of a new technology to better understand its life cycle and potential environmental impact. 2) Financial Self Sustainability: Free products are good, but lasting impact can be achieved if there is a market need for it that can help sustain growth. 3) Positive social impact: Positive pro-social orientation to address the pressing issues of our day. 5
- 12. What can a technologist do about climate change? Hosted by Tito Jankowski, Impossible Labs ([email protected]) 1. Empower youth to see climate change as an opportunity for their own success 2. Technology innovation as an opportunity for climate change mitigation 3. Climate change as an educational and civic engagement opportunity How Might We? ● How might we put climate change right in front of you? Local > Global ● How might we turn the Fremont Library into a EPA-grade air quality testing lab? Fremont Library also has a seed lab. ● How might we get citizen scientists to check out air quality sensors at the Oakland Tool Lending Library? ● Possible social innovation workshop at the Tech Museum of Innovation ● How might we use that experience in a pop-up fashion and take it to the streets? Next Steps ● Think small, 3 week project ○ What is the smallest thing we could do to test a potential partnership? ○ How can we use data that The Tech already has to share it and ask people if they want to be involved? ○ Connect with Galvanize or other learning groups in SF? ○ Schedule a site visit up to Manylabs for The Tech team ○ Interested in discussing further? Email Tito [email protected] How can we help K-12 youth become a new generation of problem solvers to address critical local and global issues? Hosted by Trey Lathe & Jakki Spicer, Maker Ed and David Coronado, Lemelson Foundation ● Open-ended problem solving can be chaotic. One question is how we reconcile that with more structured teaching approaches. ● On the other hand, open-ended problem solving may not be as unstructured as one might think, particularly when you talk about the ways in which engineering and design thinking have distinctive processes. ● Engaging teachers in pivoting their teaching styles and mindsets to embrace more open-ended problem solving can take several years and is a more gradual process. ● Traditional learning for indigenous peoples is ‘making’ centered, but the words and language are often different. Acknowledging that the maker-focused approach to learning isn’t completely new and that there are older approaches to teaching that 12
- 13. can inform ‘maker education’ today can help to create a broader understanding of how maker education builds on earlier approaches to learning and education. How can we effectively include makerspaces and Fab Labs as part of the broader approach to develop regional workforce skills in Africa? Hosted by Saori Imaizumi, World Bank ● What is the impact of a makerspace and how can we measure impact in a way that doesn’t kill the value of making in an educational context by forcing it to be evaluated by traditional metrics that aren’t a good fit? ● How can we all collaborate, share lessons learned, push each other’s work forward? ● Capacity building on its own doesn’t work if there aren’t needs for those capacities -the key is to properly identify needs and problems. ● People may not think of themselves as “engineers” but are incredibly technical and creative. ● Local facilitators need to be outliers who have the right mindset. ● In discussing “development,” one should note that you can develop technologically, but degrade culturally at the same time- this is something important to keep in mind. ● Think about ways to engage subject matter experts in a non-traditional fashion. ● Need for documenting activities and impact of Maker community as well as thinking about the mechanism to share this knowledge widely for potentially scaling up. Need for a central repository place. The factory of the future builds its own workforce. Hosted by Dave Rauchwerk & Ari Turrentine, Next Thing Co. ● Many people would build and sell products if they could, but they hit roadblocks to get from prototype to small batch production. ● You now have countless people who want to build & create things, but can’t because of barriers to entry. That is changing with more open source hardware & software. Key Questions: ● After someone identifies a key idea, how do we get the first thousand units out so that they can begin to scale? ● How do we build a factory in Oakland (and not lose money)? ● How do we retool the workforce to work in the factories? 13
- 14. Thoughts: ● Right skills now is a U.S. program that partners with local community colleges to educate/train students for the skills needed by industry (eg. computer science, robotics maintenance, etc.). ● Consider novel ways of financing the training that looks like equity. ● Need to have a test facility for makers- the goal would be to leverage the test facility for not only their products, but also the other companies that are building products off of theirs. ● How do you get, $10M for example, to start scaling such an operation. It would take about 1 year to get the factory going within the U.S. ● We could approach the people who would benefit from having a local manufacturing capability. Sell them a voucher that would essentially give them right to the service. Essentially, you work to crowdfund the opportunity. ● Frame the investment in the Theory of Change - how can you build the case beyond net present value and make the argument that X number of jobs, businesses, etc will be created. Emphasize the social impact of the facility beyond just a monetary return. ● Hybrid value chain needed: Need to find other sources of capital including foundations. In the age of open source and customization, how does manufacturing adapt? Hosted by Michal Kabatznik, Tikkun Olam Makers (TOM) ● TOMglobal currently has 200 prototypes, but what happens next? How can we bring these solutions to market? How do we bring the world of making together with manufacturing? ● Consumers desire more niche, customized products. ● Individuals don’t necessarily know that they can go to a local makerspace to have a solution made. ● In Shenzhen there are tons of skill sets that are currently underutilized. X.factory is providing a space where these skills can be utilized and they’re building a technical community that can be connected with those who have specific needs. X.factory is in the process of figuring out the economics behind this and plans to hold a conference on open manufacturing later this year. ● When it comes to an open source solution or device, can one still make a profit? The answer is probably yes. Not everyone wants to make their own products. Some would rather pay someone to produce the item for them. 14
- 15. ● Open-source and profit are not an either or. People can differentiate and tweak the open-source product and build a business model around it. The other parts of the business model (like customer service, service delivery) are also important. ● Copyright (copyleft) protections are very hard to protect across-borders- there are critical questions around enforceability. ● When it comes to manufacturing, TOM is going to be facing questions around whether solutions meet industry standards. One major challenge will be how to address the fact that real functional standards are different across countries or groups of people. What goes into the humanitarian fab kit? Hosted by David Ott, Global Humanitarian Lab ● A FabKit is a minimum resource kit of tools, digital resources, personnel resources (such as a trainer/manager) that can be shipped as the base for which affected communities can a) begin rebuilding/fixing after a crisis (or just in general), b) direct it towards a specific need, and c) start their own makerspaces. ● A FabKit would be the minimum needed in order to evaluate and then jumpstart. Each FabKit would grow into an individualized maker space that directly responds to what that community has identified it needs out of it. ● Needs to be replicable in any community regardless of infrastructure; resources that become unreliable in a crisis or are unavailable in the first place. ● Shipping containers would be an ideal physical space for these FabKits, but may not be available physically or are logistically difficult/expensive to transport. Something light, that can be broken down and built back up (pop-up) ● Want to keep these under $10K for the software, tools, and structure; but transport and other logistics, maintenance and safety, management personnel, etc. add to costs. ● Each makerspace will be part of a larger eco-system; each eco-system then should have access to the broader network of maker spaces around the world. The challenge is solidifying the network itself, and then making the network accessible to everyone. ● Measuring impact and evaluation- post-FabKit evaluation of need, evaluation of impact, and monitoring of sustainability and effectiveness. ● FabKit being the bare minimum, subsequent challenge = acquisition of what the community needs for it be impactful and scalable. What do they need, how will it be part of the larger network, how will they use it? Each community will create its own “custom” FabKit out of the minimum resource center. This is where human-centered design and social innovation comes in. Contains 3 core elements - virtual, physical and network. ● Volunteer engagement- you can’t focus entirely only on volunteers. They may be available, but you need to find the right people for the job. 15
- 17. Makers for Global Good Summit Agenda- May 19, 2017 #makeforglobalgood http://bit.ly/makersforggnotes 9:00-9:30 Check-in and networking 9:30-9:35 Overview of the day- Steph Santoso & Kate Gage 9:35-9:40 Welcome- Leslie Zane, Director, The Tech for Global Good 9:40-9:45 Shashi Buluswar, CEO, Institute for Transformative Technologies Discussion Sessions- 5 minute lightning talks and conversation 9:45-10:15 IMPACT INVENTING & OPEN COLLABORATION ■ David Coronado, Program Officer, Lemelson Foundation ■ Michal Kabatznik, Acting Director, TOM Global ■ Natalie Relich, Executive Director, OHorizons Moderator: Steph Santoso 10:15-10:45 CO-DESIGN ■ Dara Dotz, Co-Founder, Field Ready ■ Alex Dehgan, Founder, Conservation X Labs ■ Rajiv Mongia, Director of Experience and Outreach in the Modular Innovation Group and Director of Maker Outreach in the Corporate Affairs Group, Intel Moderator: Sam Bloch 10:45-11:00 BREAK 11:00-11:30 LOCAL INNOVATION ■ Kamau Gachigi, Executive Director, Gearbox ■ Dave Rauchwerk, Founder, NextThing ■ Emily Pilloton, Founder, Project H/ Girls’ Garage Moderator: Kate Gage 11:30-12:30 LUNCH 12:30-1:30 Unconference sessions 1:30-1:40 Group discussion 1:40-1:45 Missions for Makers 1:45-1:55 Closing remarks 1:55-2:00 Wrap-up and next steps 17