Hackerspaces: A prelude to the Maker Movement and today’s Maker culture

So, what exactly is the Maker Movement? Do you remember that ever so distant yet memorable quote by Michelangelo? “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” 

Now, to further set this, [white fuzz] the channel just switched, we are tuned. Things will change right? They have changed. We have the Internet; we will have one layer more, eventually the arrow of technology will continue. There is one congruent dataset, which manifests all things to a new exponent. It’s the pulses and signals resulting from the exterior world meshed with the existing datasets of infrastructure, enterprise, and the consumer. Let’s speak of this layer. It will be filled with sensors, microcontrollers, and code. Already, we learned this from the app revolution and we are not going to remain in just this stage right? The code will be leaner and smarter. Coupled by the signal readings from millions of device upon device, node to nodes, nodes to node, the true power of distribution and networks will again marry now with other application recorded data in a mosaic of diversified integrations resulting from the intersection of data easily bridged from the cloud apps. Yes, the ones we are already familiar today touching from screen to screen to anticipate the next arriving notification.

The arrival of this integration of data will help filter and augment the world before us. Let’s reset to the modern era, thread modern computing to this notion, [for technology’s sake] we have also seen the Gartner quote by Jim Tully stating, “By 2018, 50% of the Internet of Things solutions will be provided by startups which are less than 3 years old”.

The Digital Renaissance and the Maker Movement

Together with the accessibility and progress of open source and availability of community and embedded development boards [specifically wider use of Arduino Maker class boards], the times have certainly changed. A great deal of the complexities of these development boards are relaxed with onboard abstraction layers to loosen the programmatic rigidness of “hardware,” combined with the collective tuning of the community toward its development software.

Arduino IDE is now quite anchored into well-received feedback/contribution loops supported by the open source model — crowdsource progress and joint development roadmaps. Let’s not forget all the risky and obviously passionate Makers out there doing and bringing ideas to the forefront. The timing is right — found in the appetite to feed the market, the maturing cloud, the developed community, parity in prototyping, and the global production.

Globalization of Hackerspaces and the Maker Movement | Photo Credit: Mitch Altman

As a whole, and to its sum of its parts, all community members are participants in the evolution of the ecosystem and community effort of “Making” with ease. At all aspects of the innovation engine cycle, the open source community couples quite well with hackerspaces, where one can congregate to surface ideas and mature them to fruition.

Open Source Community and Hackerspaces | Photo Credit: Mitch Altman

This is especially true where it applies to the mere process of creating a product. In fact, it’s now true to building things that 10 years ago you needed to be in a big company to make innovating things, but now it truly possible from an individual. Made possible to said horizon, there are the hackerspaces. It’s a place that shows signs of innovation and development, infusing wider spread of technology and community across all economic classes or cultures. In these facilities, these are technical and creative social clubs facilitating activities that include tinkering, machine tooling, 3-D printing, coding, open source, collaboration, and sharing. Some hackerspaces market themselves under the more benign-sounding label of “maker space”. More bluntly, this is really drawing attention as private incubators such as hardware accelerators fueling entrepreneurship and startups [an emulation of an innovation success formula taken from the original hackerspaces.

There is something about hackerspaces that brings people together that are made of some pretty awesome stuff. Call it “Voltron” if you will, why not? With drones rising and Maker Faires (or similar) blooming all around us, it all seems like the perfect unison of having people interlock together. As the notion of building robots continued to unwind, one fellow by the name of Chris Anderson saw that it would be much easier to have robots fly first than walk bipedal. More simply, it just felt and saw it to be much easier. Perhaps, something even more achievable and widespread adopted as the next step to bring about the age of drones.

But still, wait, there’s even more to how this started. We also owe the spawning of drones to a unique origin where a group of people, hive together pursuing one ultimate quest.

Call it social science and synergy if you will. Something happens when a group gets “too large” and suddenly it all transforms from a conversation into a cacophony and a team into a mob then something incorporated too soon begins may wield the ugly cues of politics. Yet, going it alone is usually impossible if the task at hand is at all sometimes complicated [maybe the next best thing for technology]. Assembling IKEA furniture is probably best done as an individual, but things like raising a family, having a stand-up meeting, or shipping a meaningful product is definitely a team sport…

For hackerspaces, one of these unique values is in having opportunities to meet different people from all sorts of backgrounds. Combined in a common pursuit of sharing and making, there is a common thread of being willing to be giving their time and talents to others. Note, it was in what’s said as “giving” as the common notion in hackerspaces are the more you give, the more you get back, helping to change the course of things to come [individual pairing of ideas to the intellectual hackerspace benefit of networking ingenuity]. It’s all about the community. This is the hallmark of the Internet. The Internet started as a community in its deeper past with ARPANET. We are all reaping those originally rooted benefits today [first operational packet switching networks implementing TCP/IP] creating layer upon layer new industries, service models, and ecosystems (ie Apps, Cloud, M2M, IoT, etc). Now what we are seeing today sprout from city to city are hackerspaces. In fact, we may begin to see every community in a city drawing upon good reason to incubate and nest new hackerspaces. Perhaps, it’s a progenitor to something more in the next trend of innovation.

The digital life now is a result of the collision of software and hardware. Technology is fashion. Fashion is Technology. Both are now intertwined together in the speed and making of culture. Have you ever tried leaving your home without the mobile touch screen device or everyone has out grown to wearing the old flip analog/cdma phones of the past. Digital influence upon culture and self move along prevalently—the desire for hackerspaces are becoming more acquainted in many metropolitans.

There’s a secret sauce to the structure of the hackerspaces. Unravel this structure. From within, it reveals a true community based packed with peer-to-peer involvements. People with skills converge in distinct trades upon others with other skills. Combined, they make this union, transforming their once ideate policy of making, broadening their abilities coupled by a giving and sharing of others to expand the design envelope of possibilities.

Surely, one may see it as a digital and hardware renaissance, comparatively from the distant spark of the past. The foundries of artistry in Florence and Rome once prevailed, urging communities of artist to congregate and make creative expression toward emulating realism via sculpture, oil and canvas. Well, now it’s about achieving a more meaningful product. The canvas has changed, coalescing digital and hardware. Giving rise to an idea where the ideas mature into a minimal valuable product that is mapped to some form of developed connectivity. This some form of developed connectivity is what we call the Internet of Things or many of the products sprouting from emergent crowdfunding rooted by makerspaces or hackerspaces.

A common construct. Make Ideas, Make Genuis, and Make Things | Photo Credit: Mitch Altman

Now, let us imagine a place where people get together without a common construct or preconceived established code, they then converse, and collaborate. It is filled to the brim with entrepreneurs and inventors of all types working on projects that they hope will change the world or at least convinced to usher an adoption to things making what we usually do more easier or enhanced.

Many of them are on laptops or standalone computers frantically typing business plans or hacking out code; others are making phone calls while trying to set up connections wherever they can.

Hackerspaces have an environmental core that keep ideas flowing | Photo Credit: Mitch Altman

As all the chaos goes about, one can see that in this space is an environmental core that keeps the magic flowing around innovation. It is the center foundation of what the area will turn into. While the outer linings are being fine-tuned and polished, the inner workings remain relatively unchanged. The concrete has been laid; the electrical wires have been strung throughout the wooden frames and the insulation and drywall is mostly there, all while a wireless network is hangs throughout the air. Projects can begin even if the air conditioning isn’t hooked up yet.

As long as there is a good foundation, people can get stuff done. The rest of the work on the outer edges will always be changing. Paint will cover the walls in different shades and dust will always need to be cleaned up. However as time goes on and unless a major change happens, all the people running the space will need to do is adjust the dials of the environment (when needed) and continue progressing the community. Once the foundation is done first, the rest will fall into place.

Next up, read the 1:1 interview with Mitch Altman, co-founder of Noisebridge San Francisco as we dive deeper into hackerspaces, the Maker Movement and more…

 

 

Gartner: 50% of IoT solutions will originate from startups less than 3 years old

While exploring future business and technology trends at the 2014 Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, the research firm revealed that by 2017, over half of the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions on the market will originate from startups that are less than three years old.

Makers and startups, not tech providers, consumer goods companies or enterprises, will drive acceptance, use and growth in the IoT through the creation of a multitude of niche applications, according to Gartner.

Gartner defines “Makers” as inventors, tinkerers and entrepreneurs who create and manufacture products using traditional tools and new digital design and rapid prototyping and manufacturing technologies; while, “startups” refer to businesses that are often tech-focused and have the potential for high growth.

“Conventional wisdom is that the growth of the Internet of Things is driven by large enterprises. As is always the case, there is an element of truth in conventional wisdom and major consumer goods companies, utilities, manufacturers and other large enterprises are, indeed, developing IoT product offerings,” said Gartner Research Vice President Pete Basiliere. “However, Gartner’s Maverick research finds that it is the Makers and the startups who are the ones shaping the IoT. Individuals and small companies that span the globe are developing IoT solutions to real-world, often niche problems. They are taking advantage of low-cost electronics, traditional manufacturing and 3D printing tools, and open- and closed-source hardware and software to create IoT devices that improve processes and lives.”

With a goal of making technology simple, accessible and easy to use, Atmel has been an ardent supporter of the Maker Movement from its onset and shares the passion for tomorrow’s innovators, visionaries and startups. From powering 3D printers to Arduino boards, Atmel’s 8- and 32-bit microcontrollers enable these Makers to create an extensive range of projects, including Internet of Things solutions. Most recently, the tandem of Atmel and Arduino announced the launch of the Arduino Wi-Fi Shield 101, a shield that enables rapid prototyping of IoT applications on the highly-popular open-source platform.

“The Maker Movement is the next great revolution of industry,” explained Sander Arts, Atmel Vice President of Marketing. “There is a reason Atmel’s MCUs and MPUs are the silicon of choice for both Makers and industry heavyweights. Simply put, our low power sipping portfolio, which includes Wi-Fi capability and extensive touch integration options, is optimized for a wide variety of devices, ranging from IoT wearables to more stationary industrial platforms with connected capabilities.”

Gartner’s Maverick research is designed to spark new, unconventional insights. Maverick research is unconstrained by Gartner’s typical broad consensus-formation process to deliver breakthrough, innovative and disruptive ideas from the company’s research incubator to help organizations get ahead of the mainstream and take advantage of trends and insights that could impact IT strategy and the wider organization.

“Managers often assume the IoT is about business-to-business and business-to-consumer opportunities, relying on technologists within their enterprises to develop the necessary systems and connected items. However, these firms are slow-moving elephants that cannot react quickly to what is happening underneath their feet,” stated Basiliere. “Product development processes within most large enterprises are too ponderous and ROI-driven to produce anything but high-volume, lowest-common-denominator IoT objects. The result is the development of a low number of IoT uses that garner high amounts of revenue, while Makers, startups and crowdsourcing efforts result in high numbers of low-revenue niche IoT applications.”

For this reason, senior management and emerging technology strategists within large enterprises must transform their product discovery processes. Whether at consumer goods companies or in the healthcare, utilities, wireless, manufacturing or other vertical markets, managers must encourage Makers within their organizations to develop IoT concepts. They must closely examine the output from these Makers and check the feasibility of transferring the underlying ideas into their own organizations.

“Innovation is necessary for an organization to sustain value over time and create competitive advantage. Yet in many organizations, the corporate culture and processes stagnate and harden, discouraging innovation as a result,” Basiliere adds.

In the meantime, Makers and startups worldwide are charging ahead with identifying numerous, often niche problems and innovating solutions using IoT concepts and 8- and 32-bit MCUs. Additionally, Atmel’s SmartConnect family combines ultra-low power MCUs with wireless solutions and complementary software into a single package, allowing designers and other startups to easily add wireless connectivity to any embedded system.

“They will drive not only consumer and enterprise acceptance of the IoT, but also the creative solutions that enterprises could not possibly discern, resulting in an ‘Internet of Very Different Things,'” Gartner research shares.

Basiliere cited the example of entrepreneurs and individuals who are leveraging the low-cost Arduino open-source electronics platform, entry-level 3D printers, and traditional woodworking and machine tools to build their own IoT devices. Gartner has found that these grassroots projects focus on managing and controlling devices in the home and are more focused on providing convenience (such as turning on the heat before you arrive home) than cost savings (the focus of enterprise-sector and public-sector IoT).

Similar to other technology advances historically, the growth promise associated with the early stages of IoT will lead to the creation and funding of a large number of startup organizations that will maneuver to capture what they perceive to be early opportunities or overlooked product niches. This will lead to creative solutions and a wide range of products, many of which will fail in the market. Nevertheless, the process will lead to growth as the successful solutions are often consolidated by larger suppliers, and the overall market expands. As a result, Makers enable people in underserved and niche markets worldwide — people who would not otherwise encounter the IoT offerings of large enterprises — to experience and benefit from connected device.

“It won’t all be smooth sailing. Certainly there is no small number of factors working against Makers and startups, whether they have an IoT offering or a more traditional product or service,” Basiliere concluded. “Most small businesses fail within five years, and many of the ‘successful’ ones will be lifestyle companies that barely generate enough revenue to support an individual or family.”

You can read the entire press release from Gartner here.