MakerNet

The Maker Movement is a confluence of creativity, cutting-edge tech, education, and entrepreneurship. MakerNet will provide a free, open-source, blockchain enabled platform to network Makerspaces globally, tracking and analyzing skills acquisition. This platform will create an ecosystem capable of sustaining organizations and individuals offering education and employment to marginalized communities.

In much of the world, access to training, tools, and a place to practice project-based learning are hard to come by. As traditional classroom education becomes increasingly out of reach financially, and disconnected from the realities of life in marginalized communities and the ever changing job market, makerspaces are coming to the fore as an ideal combination of training, tools, and space. In places struck by natural disaster and conflict, people are 3d printing prosthetics and building their own mobility solutions, or patching their infrastructure themselves rather than waiting on international aid. In rural areas with high poverty rates and little access to relevant education, high unemployment and little social mobility, makerspaces are acting as community centers, classrooms, workshops, and business incubators. Makerspaces are at the forefront of emerging technologies, where you can learn how to build drones and IoT devices, 3d print a hand or lasercut your own furniture, start a business or create art. For all this, makerspaces are atomized, each an island unto itself, like personal computers circa 1985. It’s possible to learn a huge variety and depth of skills at a makerspace, but there is no way to carry those trainings with you to another, or to validate their rigor to a potential employer. MakerNet aims to be the shared database for the Maker Movement, the standard protocol for searching tools, skills, and workspace, and the repository of every Makers’ training record, portfolio, and certifications. In doing this, and through partnerships with relevant job sectors and work associations, we will be able to profile the skills that are in demand, connect people with the means to gain those skills, and connect them with the jobs that demand them. MakerNet will support the daily function of makerspaces on the ground, and support the global maker ecosystem. 

Makerspaces are the heart of an emerging system of education that is accessible, sustainable, community-driven, and responsive to the rapidly changing technological landscape. However what they lack is a way to make that training persistent in a widely recognized and trusted format, and to connect makers with paying work based on those skills. This stifles much of the potential of makerspaces in much the same way as the costs of college education relative to earning potential after graduation have a chilling effect on education and curiosity.

In the summit report from the 2016 conference, Envisioning the Future of the Maker Movement, the first recommendation to increase growth and sustainability was for more Maker networks, echoing the report on Impact of the Maker Movement in 2013. The second was an increase in Maker-specific career and professional development opportunities. Organizations like Maker Ed and Nation of Makers are already implementing amazing programs to support disadvantaged youth in accessing makerspaces. But without a shared skills-based ecosystem, without a network for tracking and verifying training and skills, it will remain an uphill battle to connect people with Maker-specific career opportunities.

MakerNet has partnered with makerspaces and NGOs in many developing and hardship stricken regions. Our goal is to help makerspaces and their communities in areas affected by poverty, limited access to education, natural disaster and human conflict. As long as there is functioning local internet access and a makerspace, we can deploy MakerNet.

The makerspaces and numerous partnered non-profits and community organizations are already working with at risk youth in their areas to train and employ. We will support these efforts by making each a part of a global ecosystem where skills persist as part of your identity.

Show number of active users in the database, location and demographic data on makerspaces. - Sign up at least 20 makerspaces, with ~2000 makers, in underdeveloped, high risk, poorly resourced areas

Track all attendees of all trainings in pilot program. MakerNet is designed around a database that will be populated by using it to schedule and manage trainings and tool usage. - Catalog all trainings offered by each space, generate pilot dataset of skills gained by sample population

Combination of MakerNet data analytics, periodic user surveys, community events at participating makerspaces and interviews. - Track outcomes for users in terms of changes in employment status, skills learned and taught, earning potential, projects participated in, and other life changes.

There is no solution that we're aware of currently in this space, which is why we were inspired to start developing it in the first place. Most makerspaces are run on some mix of google calendar and a clipboard. There are some tools for sharing designs, but they focus on tech instead of people. There are no systems currently that manage makerspaces, network them together into a cohesive ecosystem, and leverage this connectivity for the benefit of their community members. 

The Maker movement is partially a digital phenomenon, and many of the services made for makers now focus on making the most out of the machines that people use, or managing design files, and so on. It seems to us that these solutions are machine-centered, rather than human-centered.

MakerNet at its heart is about empowering people with the skills and agency to create the solutions to their own problems. It is about helping those who want to teach and those who want to learn, and making it a more sustainable endeavor to do both.

MakerNet will be accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and we are working on offline versions for spaces to run that would still provide much of the day to day functionality for remote or poorly resourced makerspaces. We are committed to keeping MakerNet free to makers and makerspaces, without ads or data mining as revenue streams, in perpetuity.

Our partnerships with Nation of Makers and Global Innovation Gathering, Gearbox Foundation, Field Ready, and Communitere give us access to makerspaces around the world, and assistance in onboarding makerspaces, training makers, and outreach to the local community.

Our team has been sustaining ourselves for the past year of development by managing makerspaces, IT consulting, software development, and production work. As we scale up and move into working full time, our team will still be entirely remote and our overhead is extremely low. Our team has several grant applications pending, and some partnership agreements being worked out over the remainder of this year. All of which, supplemented by our side jobs and consulting work will keep us going until such time as MakerNet becomes self-sufficient.

Main limiting factors are adoption by users, and the friction in moving from an existing system to a new one. As there is nothing currently on the market that does what MakerNet does, we are not facing any serious competition in terms of adoption.

Overcoming this is a matter of logistics and outreach, so to that end we are collaborating with our partners to use their personnel to manually onboard makerspaces, and using their public outreach networks to push out invitations to MakerNet. We are negotiating partnership with Maker Media, which would expand our reach globally.

I've been committed to this project with head, heart and hands for the last 18 months. I believe MakerNet will strengthen an existing global movement built on the premise of empowering and educating everyone equally.

In Solve, I see people who recognize the same problems that keep me up nights, who seem to be serious about supporting the very urgently needed solutions to these problems. I see people like me who look to the future and see great challenges ahead, challenges we cannot back away from, because the only way out is through, and the only way through is together.

Nation of Makers

Gearbox Foundation

Global Innovation Gathering

Ananse Group

Field Ready

Make Nashville

Made Barcelona

Colorado Maker Hub

There is no competition in this precise field that we are aware of.