2011-April-12

12042011

Who was there

• Sherry (MIT)
• Lyndi/? - South Africa
• Beno/Karen - Lima, Peru
• Alain Craig - Illinois / National Center for Supercomputing (?)
• Luke - Illinois, USA
• Peter - South africa / NW uni
• Anu - Utrecht, Netherlands
• Tom - Kenya / Kisumu

Information gathering

Peter (NW South Africa)

• documentation mostly paper & pencil, they complete it in digitally to be worked with at the lab * >
• exchanging project information only with individual labs with whom there’s an existing relationship (by email / ?)
• website is being made and the designs will be there then
• Internet connectivity: not too bad

Shakisa(?) (South Africa)

• blog (A: which platform? )
• files stay local
• 3 months
• uploading pics = hard(slow)
• who documents?
  • special projects
  • writeup + pics

Peter

• hard to hear?

Tom Akite (Kenya)

• Aro FL - most remote & rural
• internet connection: satellite dish to connect to other labs (Polycom?)
• projects mostly done with the local community
• documenting
  • if the project was successful or not
  • local database to store the information
  • database accessible at the library, that is available to everyone locally
• usual lab visitors: local community members, school dropouts and schoolgoing kids, highschool teachers
• college students’ final year projects, with assistance
• documentation language: English (as it’s the schooling language)

Abu (Ghana)

• lost connection

Karen/Benno (Lima, Peru)

• FabAcademy (wiki?)
• FabMoments not systematically used
• internet connection is allright enough
• website exists
• fabmoments not systematically used
• documentation language: spanish predominantly. Usually a mix of more basic documentation english and richer spanish version
• fabacademy context ?

? (Nairobi, Kenya?)

• who documents:
• MIT ? pictures & text content
• bandwidth / archival space * > problem = bandwidth (x?)
• documentation language: English (works for everybody, mostly)
• web presence besides fab academy?

Tom (Kenya)

• in the process of putting up a website * URL: (to come)
• website: web presence and documentation both are goals
• finding out about other Fablabs: through websites, fab academy (email entries), fabfolk (with hesitation)

General questions

Sherry: knowledge sharing that you are not getting?

• Peter: sharing files with specifically targeted labs, p2p relationships (via email)

Sherry remarks - two major needs:

1. project sharing (ie “FabMoments”) 2. I want a fablab too, how do I get one? etc

Tom (Kenya)

• documentation in fab academy / fabfolk site.
• For instance Mantis assembly process * following buildup on the writing = difficult. Mantis kits / instructions were sent out to 6 labs but nt enough information on the site to build it up.

Luke: Matter documentation documentation quality & details rather finding the documentation Sherry: People don’t have time to respond to in enough detail * > think how much detail needs to be made available (A: allowing for feedback loops * link to other resources * ask for more complete docs * …)

Who does the documentation?

Luke: Send picture and paragraph to lab manager to get documentation up Sherry: Seems to fall on the lab guru Lima: everyone does their own documentation Kenya: ? Lindy / Shupiso: lab personnel documents Peter: documentation for the students done by personnel Anu: lab visitors, Utrecht is usually too busy to have lab managers guide people through the documentation process. The documentation station is a solution we are trying out to this end

Follow-up questions

Anu:

• which web platform are people using for web presence / documentation:

• content management system such as Drupal or Wordpress, Joomla, Mediawiki, other

• self-built website (e.g. with frameworks like Ruby on Rails (Ruby), Django (Python), Symfony (PHP), others

• some hosted solution (e.g. Ning <* used by Budapest Fablab for example, hosted Wordpress / other blog / anything else)

Other questions:

• ?