A couple of weeks ago I was invited to Academia Sinica in Taipei to address an audience of the Culturemondo forum on Smart Cultures, held alongside TELDAP and convened by Ilya Li. Ilya had asked me to prepare some remarks about open hardware culture, particularly as it relates to recent developments in Taiwan and China.

The Fabricatorz are often asked about "free and open" hardware. Jon shared his views on open hardware manufacturing during a talk he gave in Miami last December. It is not an idle topic for us, as we believe that investing in our own hardware platforms is just as important to the future of our business as is the software we create.

Can Hardware be Free?

The term 'open' hardware is used by way of analogy to free and open source software. The freedoms of 'free' software comprise the right to use, study, duplicate and improve that software. These freedoms as they relate to hardware apply not to the physical device itself, but rather to its design; for it is only the hardware design that can be truly studied, duplicated, and, most important, improved.

However, a process which begins with a free hardware design and ends with a finished product requires a non-trivial provision of capital, resources, skill, and time. This plain fact leads the founder of the free software movment, Richard Stallman, to conclude that "freedom to copy hardware is not as important, because copying hardware is hard to do."

I think the logic of that assessment is backward. The difficulty that hardware presents to our freedoms makes the issue more important, not less. It is the reason that we at Fabricatorz are investing time, money and talent to find solutions to the hardware dilemma. Recall the famous words of Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

Is Richard Stallman serious about software? I know we are.

Credits (images remixed by me on an M1):
Richard_Matthew_Stallman_working_on_his_Lemote_Machine
Alan_Kay_and_the_prototype_of_the_Dynabook

Released today is the monthly Qi Hardware's news where you'll see a veritable explosion of developments.

Beyond the fun news of the homebrew CMOS project making the world's smallest Nyan Cat, Fabricatorz Christopher Adams provided some design tweaks to the upcoming Milkymist One product launch:

The changes are included in the upcoming Milkymist One RC3 hardware with the new logo laser etched onto the top of the case, seen below.

And then you can also see it propagated to the box design:

You can also see on the latest news the full spread of the slides I developed for FISL12 in Brazil:

This just scratches the surface of the last month of news from the Qi Hardware Project. Please read about the other developments and join the copyleft hardware revolution!

Amazing German Building is SLOWFI compared to Chinese Building Projects.

Fabricatorz are cranking along with some old and new colleagues in Berlin on the Open Web Book Sprint as part of transmediale 11, #tm11. We have a great crew of people assembled here including Christopher Adams, Michelle Thorne, Bassel Safadi hacking remotely, Barry Threw popping in and out, Alejandra Perez, Mick Fuzz, and of course flossmanuals pal, sprint organizer, Adam Hyde keeping us all in line at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin in Berlin, across the street from Angela Merkel's residence, holla! Our challenge is to write a book about the Open Web by 6 PM on Friday, CET.

Rejon working well in Christopher's room with a view.

We've held off on inviting you to come to process because the structure and general flow has been in flux. Well, no more! We need your help! Please jump in and help us complete this book on the open web.

Brrrlin snowing outside my room's window.

And, not to stopping this Friday at 6 PM, Christopher, Barry and myself are in Berlin until February 8, 2.0.11. While we hack on 2.0.11 projects, Fab affiliates Recombinant Media Labs, powered by Fabricator Barry Threw, is putting together a slew of events for Club Transmediale Feb 2-6. Barry posted about RML Cinechamber on his blog:

In just a few short weeks at the Club Transmediale festival in Berlin, we will see the world premiere of the fully armed and operational Recombinant Media Labs’ Cinechamber. In three long years since the closing of the San Francisco incarnation of RML was abruptly slaughtered we have only grown stronger; specifying systems, coding, organizing, and developing new content for our unique surround cinema environment. After our long incubation period at the University of California San Diego, we are finally able to unveil our brand new nomadic immersive media apparatus.

Watch out as well for a Sharism Presents event to be announced soon, as part of Transmediale. Until 6 PM however, please crank with us on the Open Web Book Sprint. We will get you credit for helping out! Cheers!

transmediale.11 RESPONSE:ABILITY from transmediale on Vimeo.

What a year we've had with Sharism Forum Shanghai in October, then with the creation of our small salon-type event, Sharism Presents in Hong Kong and then Sharism Presents Singapore. 2010 has seen an increase in sharing between people in the world.

Continuing with Sharism Presents, tomorrow night on December 21, 2010 starting at 6:30 PM in Montreal, Fabricatorz Affiliate, CelineCelines, Community Lead for Creative Commons Canada, has put together the first Creative Commons Salon Montreal, a Sharism Presents Event. The event has a superb line-up of artists, scholars and our very own Christopher Adams, speaking about the Sharism project, Fabricatorz and the Freesouls.cc project. CelineCelines is the MC and will also be doing videomixing live. If you are in Montreal (aka, YUL), then this is the place to be tomorrow night. All you LGM'rs, hackers, artists, wefunkers, developers and college students, Sala Rossa tomorow night at 6:30. Please eat some poutine for me at 4 AM ;)

At FablabSF and around the globe, the fabteam has been doing a lot of planning for what we are calling 2.0.11 — its like last year, but better and with bug fixes. A major part of last year is Sharism as I have explained on my personal website, Sharism is very basic about getting more people to share with each other. I developed this concept to further connect the various Free and Open Source movements into the Freedom Stack which I want to rename the Sharism Stack. And, last weekend, I took time to pay homage to my sister and the state of rapid fire development in the post "Charism, 7 Years in the Making" by defining that the more people you help, the more people who will help you.

And, on that note, we have publicly launched the public bug and feature tracker for the global Sharism movement on launchpad: Found Bugs? Want Features? If you want to do a Sharism Presents in your city, submit a blueprint for it. If you found a bug on the site please submit it. If you want to help us make the Aiki-based website better, the code is available. We will liberally hand out accounts to the sharism.org site so others can help us make it great.

Sharism Logo is Unicode: Eight Spoked Asterisk is U+2733 ✳

Join us at at Sharism Launchpad and SHARISM.ORG. We need your input to make events, media, and software better and to be used by more people! We have to work on our cultural software together.

The Fabricatorz will be in China the third week of October coordinating the first Sharism Forum at Get It Louder 2010 in Shanghai on 22 October, 2010. The Forum brings together thinkers, practitioners and activists whose work concerns and shapes the global movement of a new sharing culture. We have invited open-source entrepreneurs, community leaders, academics, artists and critics to actively advance the agenda of Sharism. We hope you can attend the forum!

This is a major milestone event for the Sharism project connecting together the larger picture of the global sharing culture between Creative Commons, Wikipedia, Free Network Services like Status.Net, Copyleft Hardware, and the sharing activities that happen on commercial sites like Flickr. Since Fabricatorz is a global company operating in both San Francisco and China, this project is close to our hearts in connecting many of the greatest people we know working in Internet, Business, and Culture in the region.

Get It Louder is China's most influential and closely-watched exhibition of emerging, young talent across creative disciplines. Get It Louder 2010 debuted in Beijing with great fanfare and press. It opens in Shanghai on 22 October until 7 November, 2010. The theme for this year's event is Sharism! Get It Louder Shanghai kicks off with the Sharism Forum that will segue into the opening of the exhibits at 8 PM.

We've been working on this massively over the last few months and hope you will join us to spread the word about this event globally, online and offline. We will do more Sharism events in the future, but right now need your support to make the project expand by using the tags #SHARISM and #SHARISM2010 online. You can learn more about sharism now: sharism.org

About the Sharism Forum

• http://www.getitlouder.com/EnChair.aspx?ID=16 (English)


• http://www.getitlouder.com/CnChair.aspx?ID=16 (Chinese)

Details

Time: October 22, 2010
Location: 800 SHOW Creative Park, Shanghai, China

Guest Speakers

Christopher ADAMS, Edmon CHUNG, Li GONG, HU Yong, Brianna LAUGHER, Mike LINKSVAYER, LIU Yan, Isaac MAO, OU Ning, Jon PHILLIPS, Nate PRODROMOU,Jack QIU, Philip TINARI, Gino YU, Zafka ZHANG

Website

http://www.getitlouder.com

Forum Coordinator
Fabricatorz

Sponsorship

Additional sponsorship for the Sharism Forum provided by Google Inc., the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Drumbeat.