Our network is represented at events and conferences throughout the year – from MakerFaires to tech conferences to global entrepreneurship events – with re:publica being our main annual event. With 60-80 members being part of the GIG@re:publica activities, we can host workshops and meetings at our large, centrally located GIG makerspace, as well as give panels and talks as part of the GIG conference track, the second-largest in 2016. We traditionally have our annual network meeting for three days following re:publica, because it is when most members are gathered at the same place, and it is where our network was born.
Various projects have emerged from the network or are carried out by GIG, including:
Bottom-up digital social innovations are on the rise, including in healthcare. Access to the Internet, open source information and digital tools empower citizens, including patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals, to improve the self-management of their disease or to develop aids that support them in coping with daily hindrances of physical limitations. Many grassroots solutions saw the light of day: open-source hand prosthetics, 3D-printed writing tools to help kids with physical limitations, add-ons for wheelchairs, and everything in between. However, these initiatives are still scattered.
The CoAct project aims to position and demonstrate citizen social science’s scientific relevance and social impact, which connotes a radically participatory approach where citizens are considered in-the-field experts and co-researchers. The other Research and Innovation (R&I) actions developed within the project will engage citizens, and local civil society groups sharing a social concern as co-researchers and place them at the centre of an open, inclusive and transparent Research and Innovation (R&I) cycle.
In Critical Making, we add scientific insights into the maker movement’s potential for critical, socially responsible making. We also show how these communities can offer new opportunities for young makers of all genders to contribute to an open society via open innovation. Thus, we study grassroots innovation processes in maker spaces, hackerspaces, fab labs and online spaces to relate them to RRI practices. More specifically, we search for and analyse existing innovation and co-design processes in these open spaces to discover how far they reflect or contradict RRI principles.
mAkE aims at developing decentralised production systems between African and European makerspaces, allowing a collaborative ecosystem with and for European and African hubs.
The #Labmobile is an itinerant space for learning, hacking, making, knowledge sharing and community building. It is a vehicle that connects people who would otherwise never have met.
In March 2019, Mozilla started its Reimagine Open project to revisit how Mozilla practices open to imagine better futures for our digital lives. Over 20,000 people from around 160 countries answered Mozilla’s survey, and four focus groups were hosted in Europe and North America. Several GIG members supported Mozilla‘s Reimagine Open project by hosting Focus Groups in their hubs in 2019.