Few months ago, Platoniq commissioned me a report about business models for Open Hardware, DIY Craft and Fab Labs, for their crowdfunding project Goteo. It is now available here in English, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License; it will be soon available in Spanish from Platoniq’s YouCoop website. Just note that the two versions may slightly differ (it happens when you work on two different versions of the same document); the idea is to transform it in a collaborative book in the future, here on openp2pdesign.org.
After the part about Open Hardware, here’s now the second part, about business models for Fab Labs.

Fab Labs and other places for designing and making collaboratively

As we have seen in the previous post, Open Hardware and similar Open projects can grow as communities inside specific places like hackerspaces. Such places are interesting because they are, at the same time, enablers of open and collaborative projects, and business models for them. In this post I will cover Fab Labs, as the most evolved and potentially big places (they could in fact also host hackerspaces) for collaborative projects, and their business models.
Lead by Neil Gershenfeld, the Fab Lab program is part of the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) and it broadly explores how the content of information relates to its physical representation and can be embodied in or abstracted from: the intersection between information theory and industrial design. A Fab Lab (digital fabrication (fabbing laboratory) is a small-scale workshop with an array of computer controlled tools that cover several different length scales and various materials, democratizing manufacturing technologies previously available only for expensive mass production.
So far Fab Labs have been opened in rural India, northern Norway, various European countries, Afghanistan, Ghana, Boston and Costa Rica. Fab Lab outreach projects are being explored with a growing group of institutional partners and countries including Panama, Trinidad, South Africa, the National Academies, the Indian Department of Science and Technology, and the Africa-America Institute. The official list of FabLabs is hosted here, while other lists can be found here:

View Fab Labs on Earth in a larger map

There is no formal procedure on how to become a Fab Lab and the process is monitored by the MIT. All the labs around the world are in contact with each other through a common video conferencing system hosted at the MIT which is used for ad-hoc meetings, scheduled conferences and the delivery of the Fab Academy training programme.

Funding a Fab Lab: how much does it cost?

CNN reported that the Center for Bits and Atoms was funded with $14 million by the National Science Foundation in 2001. Anyway, starting a Fab Lab should be much cheaper: Fab Lab Afghanistan (in its wiki) and allbusiness.com reported that a full Fab Lab currently costs about $50,000-$55,000 in equipment and materials without MIT’s involvement. Other sources like ideasexist.com and aps.org reported that a Fab Lab should costs only about $20,000.
In 2009, the Center for a Stateless Society proposed to organize a Fab Lab using open-source tools such as the Fab@Home 3D printer, with resulting costs between $2,000 and $5,000 total. Bart Bakker of Utrecht, Netherlands built one for under € 3000. Another initiative called Replab.org proposed the construction of an open source Fab Lab that costs $12,500.
Tools lists are available on the Center for Bits and Atoms website here and here; there is even a task list for managing a Fab Lab as well.

Running a Fab Lab: Business Models

Even the official Fab Lab Charter (drafted in 2007) recognize that Fab Labs could adopt a business model for commercial activities and roughly defines some guidelines for such models:

Business: commercial activities can be incubated in fab labs but they must not conflict with open access, they should grow beyond rather than within the lab, and they are expected to benefit the inventors, labs, and networks that contribute to their success.

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After the post about code_swarm, here’s another post about the visualization of Open Source communities, and this time I’m going to introduce you the other important software for this task: Gource. code_swarm and Gource are the most complete softwares rigth now for visualizing activities in a repository (and both are open source); there are of course other scripts or strategies, but less important, so I will cover them in the future.

But while with code_swarm it’s easier to see how the community grows and change shape, with Gource we can have a better look at what the users are actually working on. Instead of focusing on the form of the community (be it a social network or another visual metaphor), Gource focuses on the form of the software being developed, analysing it as network of interacting pieces of code. We can then see where the users actually work and we can also see them in a better way than with code_swarm (Gource supports the use of Gravatars for visualizing the users).
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Here’s a good video interview to Karsten Schmidt (aka toxi), a computational designer merging code, design, art & craft skills. He is famous for his toxiclibs project, an open source library collection for computational design tasks with Processing.
In this interesting interview Karsten Schmidt talks about the current state of design (graphic design and computational design) and its relationship with open source tools: software and coding are increasingly becoming important tools for designers (and they are changing the design discipline at the same time).

Computational Design from Mark Webster on Vimeo.

via | open architecture open design

Here’s a nice and well designed and documented infographic poster about User-Centred Design by Pascal Raabe. And since he published it under a CC BY-NC-SA license, I’m redistributing here it as a pdf file.

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When you start a FabLab, is more important to know its role within a city than to know exactly how to operate machines.

A Shift: a documentary on FabLab in The Netherlands. from Elmine Wijnia on Vimeo.

Visitors and managers of the FabLabs in The Netherlands tell the story of FabLab.
Please take your time watching it. It is not YouTube bite sized ;)

Nederlandse versie: http://vimeo.com/11275970

via | FabLab.nl

code_swarm. An experiment in organic software visualization is an application created by Michael Ogawa with Processing, that gathers data about the history of an open source / free software community and visualizes it in a video. Here’s the video for the Python programming language:

code_swarm – Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

I’ve been studying software projects for a while now. Not the programming, but the people — the way they interact with each other through collaboration and communication.

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