The Next Steps: Towards the #newknowable.

This post is a special one. It marks the beginning of the next major step of building knowable, that we are very excited about: This week we kicked off the coding of ‘the new knowable’.

The past months have been very important for us as we had the chance to learn some valuable lessons, to meet and discuss our vision with some very inspiring and clever people, and to find friends, supporters and partners that decided to join us on the way. And first of all: We received your feedback, your ideas, your questions and your critique. And we’re now applying it.

The knowable beta as you knew it was our very first prototype that we launched in fall 2012. It was a first take on the big and ambitious idea of building a global network of amazing hardware ideas, and of bringing people together to work on them. And this prototype did a good job: we learned what worked, and what did not. We had a good basis to discuss and try out various concepts and features. And also, it showed the limits of the mode that we went for to achieve our goals, by it step-by-step guides or file formats.

After running this beta version for a couple of months, we have now decided to take the next step. To apply the learnings we got and push forward in this direction. And we have decided to take down our current platform, from today on. We did this because this is not just a new release for us.

First things first: Of course the content, the projects, the ideas that you’ve contributed of the past months will all be safely be migrated to the new release. And if in the meantime you would like to contribute and engage with knowable, please make sure to reach out to us.

The ‘new knowable’ marks a significant leap towards a vision that is more precise and more aware of solving some quite specific challenges than what we had in mind when we started building our prototype. And it will go way beyond what you have seen before on the beta. There are a couple of core principles that we want to realize with this new release:

Inspiration

With knowable, we want to make amazing ideas for hardware products visible and accessible. That means providing a way for Makers to showcase their projects and their work in a simple, convenient and dynamic way with easy and seamless sharing, and a nifty tie-in into other resources, networks and communities. Also, this means providing a place to browse and explore others’ ideas and projects as well as work in progress and little inspirational approaches. We have taken this feedback very seriously and will to realize this in the upcoming release.

Collaboration

We envision knowable not only as a place to find inspiring ideas, but also as a tool to build upon them, and improve them, and to discuss different versions and techniques. We learned that the mode of these discussions varies with its topic: Collaboration on a circuit-board design looks very different from iterating a CAD-File. Thus, we will provide a space that is just as open and flexible to document and collaborate on hardware, as it’s content, that has a modular structure, and that allows for a transparent overview on the current project state, previous iterations and files.

Teaming up

Thirdly, knowable is a social network for makers. We will expand ways for social interaction, and for sharing and collaborating offline. This also explicitly includes building a tool for professional teams and organizations to manage their design and production process internally (yep, also proprietary and privately) as well as a tool for finding potential co-workers and team members, that bring a required skill or expertise to the table - be it online or offline - based on their location, their engagement in on related projects, organizations, hubs, or local communities.

We are incredibly excited to take these next steps together with you! Of course will keep you posted on how things develop and this very place - and as always we’d love to hear you thoughts and feedback on this new developments. We also invite you to discuss and share these next steps we’re taking on twitter, facebook, etc. with the hashtag #NewKnowable. Anything specific, you’d also like to see in the new release? Let us know! Also, if you’re not already on the list, make sure to leave your email to get updated, once we launch the new knowable.

See you all soon!

Nodes and Tools for collaboration: re:publica13

We just came back from an amazing first day at the annual re:publica conference in Berlin. This year’s edition is a special one as it hosts the ‘Global Innovation Lounge’, a gathering of 20+ TechHubs from all over the world, that is mostly from Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines and mainly Africa: Being a world-premiere, this is the first physical get-together of the AfriLabs network, linking 19 TechHubs from all over Africa. It was actually made possible by the support of the GIZ. 

The past days have been packed with incredibly insightful working sessions already, and today’s first public day followed that path. For us at knowable, this year’s re:public is somewhat special as well. We had the chance to once again discuss with and listen to Hubs, facilitators and co-working spaces ‘on the ground’ who openly shared their experiences, challenges, and ideas on Tech, Makers, innovation and collaboration - including activspaces from Cameroon, the iLab from Liberia, a Hackerbus from Brazil and - most prominently perhaps - the iHub from Kenya, whose co-founder Eric Hersman is joining the GIL as well. As you know, Eric and his initiatives like AfriGadget, Ushahidi, etc. sparked the very first ideas to start knowable, so it was a great and special pleasure to finally meet him in person and have the chance to discuss some of our ideas with him.

In addition to all the mingling and talking, we actually had some work to do as well: We held a workshop on ‘Nodes and Tools for collaboration: Documenting the Maker Movement’. With 20+ hubs that deal with the challenges of collaboration everyday, we had the perfect participantes to join us. Even though time was scarce we managed to follow up on some discussion we’ve had before, dealing with the question of how Hubs and facilitators can promote documentation as the basis and prerequisite for collaboration in the field of hardware and practical innovations. We of course linked this back to our findings from the Open Source Hardware Documentation Jam - but we also had some quite interesting and new ideas to build upon form the Hubs themselves: Al Banda from the activspaces brought up the phrase of an ‘Open Innovation Library’ showcasing successful and failed ideas and projects, and we thought about how this could actually look like. We basically focused on two questions:

1. Why should we document?
What are incentives and constraints today?

Competition: By fostering mutual competition and even offering a reward for the most innovative, successful, or interesting ideas, documentation and story telling can be promoted. We also discussed the potential of gamification in this regard - although we did not identify any best-practices where gamification led to more / better documentation of hardware products, there might be some worthwhile potential to it.

Visibility: Through narration, story telling and sharing specific examples, documentation and adaption could be incetivised. The idea of showcasing existing projects and activities, could thereby not only hold positive effects for innovators and makers themselves, but also for Hubs and facilitators in terms of publicity, PR and general attractiveness.

Constrains

Quite obviously, more work: Documentation means additional work, on top of the actual production and manufacturing itself. if there is no direct return in sight that makes this work worthwhile this is likely to lead to no documentation at all - feedback-loops or even monetary returns might bridge this.

Another very interesting thing that came up was the fear of their work not being “good enough” to be documented. Even though documentation does open the way for iteration and collaborative improvement, the perception of their own work not meeting certain standard might often lead to Makers to sharing their ideas in the first place.

2. How do we document? What are requirement for tools for documentation?

Accessibile: The mandatory need for tools, platforms, or files to be highly and openly accessible from everywhere, regardless of location and technical devices.

Shareable: Extensive functionality in embedding, sharing, importing, and exporting data cross networks and platforms

Inclusive: In addition to technical accessibility this points at the fact of inclusion in terms of language, skills, and didactic communication

And eventually fun and an appealing layout and story-telling that is exciting and parks interest and motivation.

Again, these are the condensed results of a brief discussion we had on an extensive topic. However, what was highly valuable was the voice of people on the ground who actually face these issues everyday. We really appreciated their stories and listening to their experiences and we will definitely take this very serious for the further steps of knowable itself.

Also, if you do have any comments, additions, or remarks on this, feel free to use the comment function below. This is a snapshot of an on-going discussion, we’d love to hear your voice on this.

Open Source Hardware Documentation Jam

Documenting your hardware projects is key if you want to collaborate with other makers and inspire people to start trying, tinkering and building for themselves. But how does the perfect documentation look like? What is needed to make it as accessible as possible? How can we transform the process of documentation in something fun without losing the details and accuracy? 

These were the kind of questions everybody was asking at the first ever Open Source Hardware Documentation Jam that happened this weekend in New York City and here in Berlin. And as you can imagine these are also very interesting question for us to explore and discuss time and time again – so we happily took part!

While the big event was happening in NYC, a small group of enthusiastic DIYers met at Berlin’s betahaus on Friday night in order to discuss their ideas and plans for the Jam. As everybody had some background in making and crafting the most pressing topics emerged really quickly: 

How do we make the manuals engaging and fun? Can we speed up the creation of the documentation? What set of meta-data is needed? How do we ensure accessibility/availability of the instructions? How can we make sure that we know the origins of a project – and who created it in the first place? 

During the coming days we set out to explore these questions by building little projects and figuring out the most fun, efficient and easy ways to document these. And, well, it was a blast! As an example, we developed an ad-hoc system that allows you to record all your actions via an overhead camera (in our case an iPhone) and tried to stir away from any unnecessary post-production to speed up the process. It was designed as an exercise to minimize the workload of documenting.

While that turned out quite nice, it still became very obvious that the process of recording your actions in real-time is - and probably will be for quite some time - limited. To many things happen while you tinker that are not leading towards your main goal and should not be included in an structured manual (or at least in one that aims to be somewhat understandable). In the end that means that editing still becomes a huge hurdle and takes a lot of time and effort.

This observation lead to many interesting thoughts and discussions: Since not all maker possess enough time and/or skills to produce a proper manual, will we therefore see a new “role” of the documentor emerge? A person who is responsible for documenting projects in FabLabs and Makerspaces? Is this something FabLabs should offer or even require?

And of course, how can platforms like knowable fit into that picture? How can we help to streamline the creation of manuals while still ensuring that we capture all the necessary information?

As we strive to create a place where practical knowledge is not only easily shared, but also refined, forked and pushed further, this weekend has proven as a great source of inspiration – and I’m sure you’ll find many of the lessons we learned implemented in knowable thought the coming months!

If you are interested in our findings, check out this GoogleDoc and make sure to also visit the blog of the NYC Hardware Documentation Jam!

Coming up: Hack The City Berlin!

Berlin is in for a treat: this coming monday will be all about drones, 3d printers, laser cutting, hacking and tinkering - and kids!

That’s right. We are thrilled to invite you to the first Hack The City event in Berlin, specifically tailored and made for Kids and children. On April 1st the great folks from HacKidemia are holding a series or workshops and sessions for kids to get a quite new and exciting point of view on the technology that surrounds us, hands-on that is. There will be sessions on laser cutting you own furniture, programming your own video games, tinkering with music making (yep, Makey Makey is here) - so basically a huge experimental lab for kids.

We will kick off at the betahaus at 10.30 am and move over to the all new Berlin FabLab at 2.30pm.

It’s going to be a blast - so make sure to register over here!

So, who is doing this again?

Hackidemia a wonderful community of people all over the world that explore new ways of education and teaching with and for children. And it is pretty much learning-by-doing itself: Over the past 6 months they had 45 workshops with 2000+ children in places like Zagreb, Toulouse, Timisoara, Sao Paolo - now adding Berlin to the growing list. Their Co-Founder Stefania Druga just recently moved over here and we had the chance to learn a bit about what they are doing and right away starting thinking about how we could team up. We love the idea - it perfectly aligns with what we have in mind with knowable: exploring the potential that new technologies hold for everyone.

To make this event lasting even after it actually took place, we will document whatever is going down on monday and share right over here at knowable - the idea behind this is that everyone else can learn a bit about the workshops, ideas, and techniques - and keep tweaking and tinkering around with it afterwards. Plus, for us this is a great way to kick off a series of workshops that we will hold in the coming weeks and months.

We are very looking forward to monday! Probably all your family, brothers, cousins, nephews are in Berlin anyway - so why not bring them along? See you on monday, then! :)

SXSW - a recap.

We’re back in Germany all snuggled up in blankets to fight the cold and grim weather – but when we close our eyes we still dream of Austin, imagining us at SXSW, enjoying the sun and the inspiring talks.

The last and final days in the US have been a blast: Four days of inspiration, new ideas and yes, party. I always wanted to attend the craze that is SXSW and this year I finally had the chance. 

The whole city had been turned into a single, big funfair. Thousands of people were strolling up and down the streets in search of their next official festival session, a BBQ restaurant that was not overflowing with people or the next great party location. It was just as insane and just as awesome as people always told me.

Simon and me often times attended different panels and talks just because the amount of interesting stuff going on at the same time made it impossible to see it all. As a lot of talks were about hardware, we had the chance to learn about the latest trends in 3D (and 4D) printing, drones, DARPA projects (I kid you not) and also about how big companies start to embrace the Maker movement (make sure to watch this crazy Oreo Cookie separator). 

The other talks we attended focused more on the entrepreneurial sprit. I especially liked Tina Roth Eisenberg’s keynote (you probably know her as swiss-miss). It was not only an entertaining talk, but also packed with positive and reassuring advice.

Now that we’re back in Germany we let all the impressions and ideas, all the feedback and advice sink in. Even though it probably will need some time to digest I am more then convinced that this trip to the US had a huge impact on how we do things here at knowable.

I hope you enjoyed our recaps and stick with us  for all the things that are yet to come (And, if you allow me the tease, they will be quite big).

San Francisco and the Valley - a recap.