 I'm now going to pass the baton to David Plotz, the editor of Slate Magazine and our close partner in all things Future Tense. David? On now. On now. There we go. Adjust my belt here. Thank you, Andres. It's a great honor for Slate to be here. Our partnership with New America Foundation and Arizona State in Future Tense is truly one of the most productive and interesting and fun things that Slate does, and we're just delighted to reach so many different readers with these interesting discussions of technology and public policy and the citizen's role in those issues. So it's a great honor for me to be here to moderate our first discussion. I mean, it's going to be a much more discussion than it is a panel. It's called What's Building the Maker Movement, and let me introduce our two conversationalists. First, Dale Doherty, who is the founding editor and publisher of Make Magazine, which I hope many of you got copies of. I got one because I have kids and I'm planning to make explosive kits with him. And he's the co-founder of O'Reilly Media. He's the co-creator of Maker Faire. He was honored at the White House last year as a champion of change for helping citizens meet the challenges of the 21st century. Also I read, and I don't know whether this is actually true, that you actually coined the phrase Web 2.0, is that true? So we can hiss at you for that for a little bit. So please welcome Dale with a hiss. And then you didn't know, you had no idea, you like were one of those tinkers, you had no idea that that was what would become of your creation. Our other speaker is Tom Khalil. Tom is the deputy director for policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He worked on technology policy for President Clinton in the National Economic Council. He ran the Big Ideas at Berkeley program at UC Berkeley, where he was, until he came back to Washington, an advisor to the chancellor. So please join me in welcoming Tom and Dale. Tom here, this is Tom. Dale there. Hi there. Hey. You don't have to hiss at Tom. So are your mics all good? So I'd like to largely have a discussion just carried forth by you guys, but I would propose that we talk about four different general areas. The first is the philosophical nature of the maker movement. What is it and why? So if you could help those of us who are not makers, or at least we don't know that we're makers, understand what it is, that would be the first thing. The second thing is who? Who is the maker movement? Who is doing this and how can we get more people doing it? The third role, and Tom, I expect you'll take the lead here, is what is the government's role? How does the government harness this energy or what does it do to take this energy and produce something of value for the nation? And the fourth area if we have time is the economics of the maker movement, going to some of what Tim Wu was talking about, what is the relationship between people who are doing it themselves and the economy and where does this create economic value and how? And then we'll of course have time for lots of questions and discussion from you all. So with that introduction, I remember growing up, my mother is a professor and she often taught a wonderful book which I think many of you have read called Working by Studs Turkel, which is an interview with hundreds of different people who have all kinds of different jobs. The book came out I think in the early 70s. And I remember talking, my mother made me read part of it and I remember talking to her about this. The only thing which has stuck with me ever since is that if you read that book, the only person who is happy with his work in that book is a stonemason. The only person who goes to work and is satisfied with what he does is the person who carves things and builds them in stone. He didn't interview anyone who writes policy memos for a living. We'll get to that, all right. So we've seen obviously with shop class at SoulCraft, a lot of examination of the idea that we don't do enough things with our hands and we are alienated from the things around us. So I wonder with that preview, I wonder if you guys could talk about what is the maker movement philosophically and where does it come from? Yeah, I think makers are enthusiasts and that's when you think of even going back to, I really like Tim's presentation on that, going back to the early computer industry. It was full of enthusiasts and that was true in the 80s and early late 70s. We've lost sight of them because computers became so widespread, everybody, you didn't have to be an enthusiast to use them. But I kind of saw that in a lot of people that are in the technology area that they were playing with technology. They didn't know what goal they had, it was just interesting and they had to learn by taking it apart, putting it back together, trying this, trying that. And so I think that's kind of this fundamental thing and I partly saw people beginning to work in physical areas again, the hardware and devices became interesting again. Really connecting to this idea of what is an enthusiast, and to mention also amateur. Almost there's low stakes involved. I can just do it because I like it and I can control it. And I actually thought that was one of the bigger things in focusing make on if you put things on your own time, in your own space, you get to control them. You get to do them. A lot of times at work we don't have that control anymore and things go off wherever a group wants them to go or there's other issues driving them. And I thought that this sense of control is kind of at the core of this, of being able to do things, in a sense we talk about like artists having control of their tools, of being able to express yourself, being able to do things that are cool and interesting. I know one of my favorite quotes of Steve Wozniak is he says I would go down to the homebrew computer club and show off my computer designs. And he said I would do that for free for the rest of my life. It was just what he loved to do. And I think seeing this today is kind of at the core of this. Just rediscovering it. It's always been there. It's not makers aren't necessarily in something completely new. Make Magazine refers back to popular mechanics and those magazines of the early 20th century. But there's an attitude toward that and I think in those old popular mechanics is, hey, this is fun to do. Why not do it? And it was an invitation and I think a lot of this is today, I think we can see it in terms of it's how you participate in communities. By doing something, think about how you start a hobby. Well, you might be off on your own initially but pretty soon you find other people that are doing it because you start talking about it or you show up at an event, you find other people are into that thing. And so, I think the maker sort of I think comes about because there's I think three things. One, I think there's a distinct new group of technologies. And we'll be probably seeing some of them today. There's some of them out there. 3D printers are kind of the most heralded of them. But I think the Arduino microcontroller, even the Kinect platform, laser cutters, other kinds of things, and the software interfaces to them are all relatively new. And where I'd relate the 3D printer to the personal computer is there are 3D and there are industrial 3D printers, right? And they are in certain businesses, they cost $25,000 or more. Well, the hobbyists wanted a 3D printer and MakerBot came along and created it as a kit. And most of the people buying that 3D printer kit from MakerBot don't know what they want to do with a 3D printer. They have no particular use for it, but that's the point. They want to play with it and figure it out because there's got to be something there. So I brought some of these, the stuff that people do, this is, we may pass it around, but this is a little bracelet. 3D printing is on a patent here on the floor that's moving around, laying the dots, but you're working with plastic, which should be rigid and hard, but someone came up with this design to make it flexible, right? And it's a way of folding in on itself. But if you don't mind me throwing it to you, you can pass it around and look at it. But an 18 year old intern in my lab, he found that design online, printed it out. And so that leads to the new opportunities, that if you think of hardware and manufacturing in the past, have had certain barriers to overcome. And we've been fascinated by software because those barriers are so low. But today the barriers to making one of those things are really low. You can prototype, you can do something without having to figure out all the tooling, all the relationships, all the supply chain. You can go do that prototype and people are. That proof of concept, they can make that one thing, like an artist can make one of that one thing. They can show it to other people. So that's really kind of a new opportunity. And I think also there's this ability to sell those things and other kinds of things, but initially I think it starts in that creative side. It's hey, I can actually realize my idea. I'm not just scribbling on paper now, I actually have the thing. The third, I would say that I think is really important is the interconnected communities, and I think that's largely given by the internet. But also a little bit through events like Maker Faire, where people could just stay in the past, maybe they belong to one group. But now they could easily belong to multiple groups. And you could think of what's happening in the makespace as kind of a physical mashup. It's like people taking a little bit from this, a little bit from that, and then putting it together and coming up with something new. And I think the secret of it in many ways is that you can make new things from things that already exist, from components. Why do you think that this movement emerges now? I mean technology, someone like me who deals with computers every day, technology seems ever more forbidding and ever more difficult and ever harder to master. Why would at this very moment be the time when a movement based on mastering technology comes up? As Dale said, it really taps into core human values. So people talk about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is something that you do because you love it, as opposed to your paycheck depends upon it. So I think it taps into fundamental human values of self-expression, of discovery, of creativity, of social activities because it's not just do it yourself, it's do it with others. And the ability to make and design something that is personally meaningful to you. Humans have been messing around with tools since the Stone Axe. So I think it's one of the important things that really defines what it means to be a human being. What was the Stone Age equivalent of steampunk? We haven't invented steam yet. Right. But what relationship does, because we talk about a lot of software. There's obviously a lot of home building software in the app community. What's the difference between working in software, which is this almost intellectual exercise versus physical objects? How important is it that maker-ness be based on physical objects? Well, Dale may have a view on this. But I think the interesting thing is that those worlds are merging. So if you think about the DIY drones community, where for several hundred dollars people are developing their own unmanned aerial systems, those are really cyber-physical systems. So that's a combination of very low-cost hardware and chipsets. And people developing the embedded software. So I think a huge amount of innovation is going to come out of what the computer science community calls cyber-physical systems. That is where you've got both a physical artifact. It might have sensors, affectors, displays, memory, logic. It has a connection to the network and an IP address. And you are bringing together hardware and software. So I think there's going to be a huge amount of innovation that comes out of this. But I also think there's something very tangible and rewarding about making stuff. And I think from a policy point of view, I think people recognize that because making things and R&D and design are integrated, this whole notion that we didn't need to worry about our manufacturing base and worry about whether we made anything is really short-sighted. And many companies are recognizing that if they want to control their destiny, they've got to be involved in high-value-edit manufacturing. Yeah, I just read the Steve Jobs biography, and that was one of my takeaways. Because you often think today of Apple is obviously closed and things. But it's actually that level of integration that they have between design and software and hardware and the physical and how about the models they're building in-house. We tend to sort of look at these things as just software and not see that they're getting the screen right, getting the physical feel of that device right was also part of that mindset. But I think to your larger question was, and I think it was part of the founding of Makis, the computer itself has been this foundational tool for many of us. And we start to think about the world the way we think about our computer. Like when I get in my car, where's the preferences menu, right? Where can I change that? And that desire to make change on that kind of level, we start with my home, why can't I do this? We grow up with this mindset driven by a computer that things can be changed, they can be connected, and they shouldn't be off on their own. And I think some of the make energy is trying to bring those, almost like there's a lot of computing that doesn't happen on computers. It happens out in the world and our car is a sensor as well as just a vehicle. Is Etsy the same thing as the make movement? It's related, it's a marketplace. I think it's craft oriented. Or I guess it's craft like that. Is that the same thing or is that a different set of- No, I think it is and it isn't. I mean in a very inclusive sense, I would say all these things are. I would say that the one challenge they have is they're kind of reinventing the cottage industry and so it works as an economic opportunity for people who can sort of produce, say 15 of something a month. If they got 1500 orders for that, they can't do it with that method. So but it still fits that model of you could build a prototype, start selling. You could enter and have a connection to a market without a big investment. I think one of the things that is so cool about going to a Maker Faire is the incredible diversity of media in which people are working in. Whether it's open source electronics like Arduino or 3D printers or kind of things that look more like arts and crafts. But maybe they have a little electronics embedded in them or robotics and drones. Or fire breathing dragons. There's just an incredible diversity of people who they might have been their own kind of little micro community. But now they feel like they're kind of a broader part of a broader meta community. Right, that goes nicely to the next set of things I would like to talk about. Who makers are? I mean, let's do a quick audience poll. How many folks here would identify themselves as makers or being part of this? So that's a good, what, like 50% maybe? Yeah, and how many of you have been to a Maker Faire? All right, again, about half. So how large, I mean, I don't know if you've ever tried to calculate this, either of you, how large a community are we talking about? Is this something where there are 10,000 people across the country or a million or 30 million? Well, I mean, some of the gauges we have for numbers are the magazines at about 125,000. The event, the large Maker Faire in Bay Area last year was about 100,000 people. Which is a lot we did in Detroit and in New York. And it's hard to sort of frame, we haven't really had the research on what this size is. I go more, I'm an intuitive sense of that. I don't believe it's about just a few people or a small segment here. I think this is, it may not be mainstream, but it once was, right? It once was a common idea for an American to think of themselves as a tinker. You had a better car, you had a better home. You improved your life in various ways through those skills. Can I interrupt on that vein? Which is, has anyone here been over to the National Building? No, the Patent Office's exhibition of patent models. Have you seen this? No, I haven't seen this. So until the 1860s, you had to submit a model of your device. It had to be about one foot by one foot by one foot of the thing you were trying to patent. And all these models were exhibited in the patent building, which is this beautiful old building, and hundreds of thousands of them. And the reason they did that is that the public could come and examine this. And any person ought to be able to understand how it works by just by looking at this. And when you see that and you think, this is a completely different culture. Today, I look at a patent drawing, it might as well be in Croatian. Yeah, exactly. One of the things that I, in talking about the mate movement, I've kind of stayed away from the word inventor, because I think a lot of people don't identify with being inventors. But I think I can talk to being a maker, as cooks, we're makers. We make our own food. We do things like that. And it's sort of realizing that we are participating and doing things that matter to us. And I think it's in some ways, it is a reaction to a consumer culture of what I can buy is kind of just what's on the menu. How do you lower the barriers to entry so that more people do feel this way? And instead of 100,000 at a maker fair, you have 200,000? Well, I think that one of the reasons that the administration is so interested in this is one of President Obama's goals is to inspire more young boys and girls to excel on the so-called STEM subject, science, technology, engineering, and math. And I think that the maker phenomena could be a very powerful way of doing that. So if we had more physical spaces, both in school and out of school, where young people could go get access to some of these tools that we're talking about, and adults and their peers who could serve as mentors. I think that would be one way of making sure that every child had the opportunity to become a maker. What do you think about lowering the barriers? I think space really matters here in ways in the phenomenon of maker spaces or hacker spaces that have really started taking off mostly for adults. But I'm interested in sort of copying what's working there and trying to create low cost versions of those. How do we get them into school? What's the economics of a hacker space? Who is paying the rent? The members. The members are paying the rent. So it's for the most part. And then there's a place like Tech Shop that is a bit more of a commercial model where someone else has capital to invest in building out the shop. But it's still a membership kind of model. And how many people do you need to make one viable? Well, I think we see different models here. But they're usually on the fringe looking for low rent and they manage to make it work. But I visited one in Dallas a couple weeks ago. Dallas Makerspace is called, and they had about 80 members. And I was just impressed walking through, it's about 4,000 square feet. And the members of HackDC are out here, they're a local maker space. I think they might have like 1,500 square feet, it's relatively small. But it's a place to congregate, to share tools, share knowledge and meet other people who are doing this. I was really impressed by the Dallas thing. I saw five or six innovative things there that I haven't seen that before. Either it's a good project for the magazine, just something cool. Or someone doing an experiment in an area that you just wouldn't expect to find in that space. But I think this also has the potential to be a driver of economic development and job creation. When we hear from Jim Newton with Tech Shop, there are stories of a couple people showing up at a Tech Shop, developing a prototype, being able to create a partnership with a large company. And launch a new business, because we're dramatically expanding access to tools. So to make an analogy to the digital world again, if you think about what the lamp stack, Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl plus cloud computing did, is it dramatically lowered the cost of being able to do a new web 2.0 startup? And you had the phenomena of people talking about ramen profitability. How much would you need to earn before you could raise enough money to keep the founders and the programmers in ramen noodles? And whenever you dramatically expand access to tools and lower their cost and make them easier to use, which is what we're doing, you increase the number of experiments that we can do. Because you've lowered the cost of doing a startup from millions of dollars to something that you can fund through friends and families. That's the lesson of open source in the software world. That there were, in a sense, it really made it possible to go after really small niches, because the software, it was open, you could take it and modify it and do something for a niche that say a commercial software. And he said, that's not a market, I'm not interested in that. And I think the same way today, in a sense, that small thing often grows into a big thing. And you need ways to create those small things, not just companies looking at what the big things are. This goes to a sort of a philosophical question, which each of you may end up on a different side of because of where you work. Is this movement a movement which is valuable because it creates human fulfillment and satisfaction and gives people a chance to do things that they're enthusiastic about? Or is this movement valuable because it has an enormous potential economic benefit to the United States? I don't know why you'd have to choose. I mean, I think that individuals may be on different sides of that. But as a society, we care about both things like self-expression and creativity and freedom and autonomy, because those are things that we value in themselves. And we also care about economic growth and more people having a good job that they like. So I think what's exciting about it is that it's both the case that it's an end in itself, number one. And number two, it has the potential to help us achieve other national goals that we care about, like improving US performance and STEM, fostering innovation among small and medium-sized manufacturers, and also helping with the manufacturing workforce. Many manufacturers have jobs that they're looking for someone who knows how to do computer numerically controlled machine tools, and they can't find them. So we have this paradox of having an unemployment rate that is still too high. But many manufacturers not able to find the workers that they're looking for. And this could help address that. Well, I think it's similar, I mean, I believe they're together to actually be able to do what you love to do. And figure out a way to create an opportunity for yourself to keep doing it is important. But I think the analogy again to like a 20 year old having an idea for a website. They're able to go out there and find open source software and build that website and add their layer of value. And today finding the Arduino or finding other things allows them to come in and say that it's a community I can tap into. But what I think the kind of opportunity I'm excited by is not necessarily creating more jobs in the defense industry, but that same kid that went from Georgia Tech could have gone into the defense industry. But today he'd go into a freelance job. He could do engineering on his own and create a product and get it into the market. Not necessarily needing a big manufacturing facility or a big lab, because those tools are out and available. Make movements goal to undermine America's national defense. Yeah, don't quote me on that. So Tom, going to these questions of government. So I'm the father of young children who are in public school here in Washington. And one thing that is incredibly demoralizing as a parent that I'm sure many of you have experienced is this focus on rote testing. That you have a, and particularly when you think about mathematics and that the congressional, but no child left behind, the results are all sort of how do we do on these standardized tests. Parts for us the way in which this push for standardized testing and performance on standardized testing can be reconciled with the kind of renaissance of wonder sort of goals that the make movement aspires to. Let me jump in, it can't be reconciled. All right, don't reconcile them. Well, so I think there is attention there, there's no question. But also, I think some of it has to do with not taking the concept of accountability and throwing it out the window, but asking how can we have more sophisticated types of assessments. So one of the things that Dale has been looking at is can part of your assessment be the portfolio of stuff that you've been involved in doing that you carry with you. So that's one thing. The second thing that we're looking at together with the MacArthur Foundation is a set of badges, not unlike the sort of merit badges that we have associated with the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts that would be your demonstration that you had engaged in some particular hands-on activity or project-based learning. So I don't think we're ever gonna say, let's get away from assessment and accountability. I think that there are a lot of valid questions about how do we have richer forms of assessment that capture some of these things around project-based learning. Is there any evidence in the world of politics that politicians are gonna, because politicians, it's very easy for politicians and for school boards to look at simple numerical test scores and just go off that and say, this is the standard we're working towards, is there any political constituency that is pushing for allowing some of the things that you're aspiring to? I think so. The other thing is that there's a lot of evidence that, particularly at the undergraduate level, that the traditional lecture-based format is a very ineffective way to teach anything. So one of the people at OSTP, our associate director for science, who has a Nobel Laureate in physics, Carl Wyman, after he got his Nobel Laureate, did a huge amount of work to create a science of science instruction. And there's a huge amount of literature that shows that traditional lecture-based format with a professor and 500 kids in the audience is not an effective way to teach anything. Well, this isn't new, right? Learned by doing is John Dewey's phrase, it's over 100 years old. We've forgotten about some of that. But what's exciting, I was talking to Dean from UC Davis School of Education and so we now have the brain science to match up to some of the philosophical arguments that Dewey was making, that this actually is how we learn. Our hands are very important, are the tactile engagement. And I think that the thing that I see in schools that I would like to help overcome through introducing making is the disengagement, the boredom. The kids don't see themselves as learning through these methods because they're not, and then they characterize themselves as not a good learner. And if there is a 21st century skill we need to protect, it's that ability to see the learning to learn is core at this. I don't almost care what it is. But I think we've lost the doing part. I like to use the phrase, what can you do with what you know? That's how we ought to be framing things in school, not just what do you know? And can we test you on that? Right, right. And can you cite any, are there any examples of either school districts or schools or university that you think have done something good in this vein that we can look to and say, here at the Woodland Park Elementary School, they are, every kid builds a man killing robot? Well, Dale just told me about- For the Defense Department. Dale just told me about the invention studio at Georgia Tech and I just blogged about it. It's run by the kids. They've got a thousand square feet and hundreds of not only students, but faculty and staff are using it for engineering classes to help incubate their startups and projects that they're working on because they think they're cool, like a motorized self-balancing skateboard. So that's one example. Dale, do you know any, you can cite- The interesting thing there is the school did put up the funding for the space, but they turned it over to a student-run club, a maker's club. And one of the, you didn't have to belong to the club to use the space. It was open to the school community campus wide, which I think is really remarkable. But the students were there, club members were there to help novices and others coming in and saying, we can show you around and here's how to use some of the tools. But I think it's exactly, this is one of the schools that produces many engineers in the country as any, but they needed to create this space so that their students could make things. And they've discovered, I think a lot of, that they don't just make things for courses. They don't just come there because they have to make something. They hang out there and they do things in common. Well, this is obviously a school that's devoted to science and engineering. Are there examples, again, with kids? Because I think that you have to catch them younger, right? Sure we do. There's, I personally created one with a local school and said, I want to create a class and I called a project make and just invite high school sophomores and juniors to come in and what do you want to make? Just let them organize a maker space, use a teacher and introduce them to some of this. I think we're looking at summer camps, looking after school programs. We do fight this tension of where in the school day can this fit. Kids want it in the school day. Sometimes the systems, we'll start wherever we can, but sometimes there isn't room in the day to do this kind of thing. The hope is, I was talking to Khan Academy, and the hope is that some of that kind of instruction could reduce the amount of time that's required to spend in your seat in effect and give you a little more free time. This class that I'm working on, we kind of targeted kids that are in dumb down math classes because they're taking two years to do a one-year course. So could you, through the right motivation, get them to cover that in one year and then have that other year to do something important. Another high school principal or superintendent tells me, I could easily give up 11th grade social studies. I'm not even sure why it's there, it's like there's a lot that's in school that we haven't questioned, and I don't know how we overcome that. But I've found very little resistance from schools. I have this DARPA award to go out and get making into up to 1,000 high schools over four years, and so I'm out there talking to superintendents and others. And when they see what's going on, I don't actually get a lot of questions. There's different ways of framing it. But they know they have at least two-thirds of their population that is not really well served by the academic tracks. Science museums are another place where we're really starting to. So New York Hall of Science, Exploratorium, the museum in Pittsburgh, is one sort of natural regional hub where kids can be on the line. Yeah, one of my favorites was Jeff Sturges in Detroit, worked with a church and set up a makerspace in the basement. Kids are out there on Sunday and he gets them in to do that. And last year, before Maker Faire, we took those kids to the farmer's market in Eastern Market, and they were doing a learned to solder project with people just walking through the market. These are eight-year-old kids teaching adults how to solder. They're smart. They had a tip jar out front. They bid $100 bucks. So that's a good lesson, I think. That's a good transition to the fourth area I want to talk about, which is the economics of this, which is one of you give us an example of a project, which is sort of a homebrewed maker project, which has significant economic value, where it's becoming something that will benefit the economy and someone's going to make a bundle of money off of it. Well, Maker Bot is a good example. It really started off with Roots and an open source project to see if you could develop an open source 3D printer that could make copies of itself. And I think they just got a $10 million series A. So clearly, the venture capitalists think that there is enough of a hobbyist market to justify that type of investment. So that's one example. I think when Jim talks, he'll talk about some of the spin-offs that are coming out of tech shops that are developing really commercially viable products as well. DIY drones you mentioned earlier, it's about a $10 million company now. One of it is like an autonomous drone. I think there was actually an article in the Washington Post recently about other non-military uses of drones, like flying over farm fields and even putting a camera in there and documenting what's happening. So there are things like that. I don't think we have huge scale yet, but we have lots of things happening and I think that's interesting. And do you think that as this becomes an economic force, it becomes an economic force because big companies buy up the talent and the ideas or because these small companies germinate themselves? What's more likely to happen? I don't know. That's a good question. I mean, I think if you look at IT, you certainly eventually see the emergence of companies like Apple who have a market cap larger than most countries. So there could be some really big companies that come out of this. I had last year, I won't say the company, but someone from an R&D and a large semiconductor company went around Maker Faire and took pictures and talked to people and then he went back and gave a presentation to the company. I said, do you remember that home automation system that we spent, you know, $10 million on? Here's a 14-year-old killed building something similar to that. Do you remember, you know, and he did it in a number of categories. And I think partly it's, I think the answer is more, I think some of those companies need to look outside themselves into the maker community as sources of talent and relationships with that talent, which, you know, again, something like the toy industry uses a lot of external designers and developers or a company like Herman Miller works with them. So there could be different ways than just acquisition, but there is a good question about how some of these products begin to scale in the market and then they'll need partnerships in new ways. Or think about Microsoft and Connect. I mean, I think their initial reaction when a bunch of hackers started taking the Connect and using it for other purposes was, oh, wait a minute, are you supposed to be doing this? But I think after further reflection, they really decided to embrace it. And I think the kids issue has an article by Jose Gomez-Marquez of MIT and it's about DIY medical devices and particular kits in third world countries where the story he tells is that for the most part it's a place like Honduras or Guatemala is getting secondhand American equipment. It breaks down. They have to learn to fix it themselves and they have to modify it. So they actually have a tinkering culture in medical technology. What if we started giving them better components and they could actually not just repair things but actually create new things that they need to go there? I get one question I wonder about is that having actually worked at Microsoft for some years late was owned by them. I would worry if I were a, I were some promising young inventor and I had a great idea and Microsoft came along and wanted to buy me up that it would, that inherently large corporations that want to buy up intellectual property crush the soul of people who work for them. Not invariably, I suppose. But almost invariably. Can we quote you on that? No, apparently it's on the record. But we're now owned by the Washington Post Company, so it's okay. But I wonder, this does seem to me a distinct tension because the economic benefit obviously is what maker does not want to get their project bought up by somebody who's going to vac the overpay for it. On the other hand, how do you keep that spirit of maker-ness and innovation within a large institution? I guess that's the question. Within a large institution, can a DIY culture flourish? Or can it only flourish outside large institutions? Well, I think there are intermediate scenarios where a large company maybe creates a platform and it supports lots of entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized companies who are building on top of that. So, you think about the App Store and the whole app economy and clearly large companies like Apple played an important role in creating that. But it's also enabling lots of creativity to come from unexpected quarters. And it also means that the developer doesn't have to solve a lot of those problems to be successful. That they have a marketing channel to get apps into the user's hands. Right, although, so you're saying that, but I guess that if you're the owner of Microsoft, if you're Steve Ballmer, or if you run Intel or whatever company it is, and you want to get some of the mojo from maker culture, what are the ways to do it? One way is to offer sort of an App Store-like experience. Are there other ways to do it within your own company? Well, I tend to think that companies have makers and they have, sometimes they are looking at putting spaces in where they can do these kinds of things, bringing a capability in that they used to just say, well, we could send that overseas or do that. I think they're, and this is one of the secrets. There's some great engineering talent in America that often doesn't get really used to full potential inside of these companies. Someone was telling me at IEEE that the energy at one of their events is often in the bars at night when they're talking about what's going on in their garage, not about what's going on at work. And there's something wrong about that, right? That needs, there's many ways I think companies could engage, like, what are you really passionate about? What do you do when we're not paying you? What kind of engineering falls in that category? In Detroit, Ford is actually serving as an anchor tenant of a tech shop precisely because they want to have more of their employees have that experience and as a way of rewarding some of their top engineers. So they could, big companies could be an important driver of accelerating the rollout of these types of experiences. I believe it's clearly capability many of us have, but if we don't use it, it withers. Right, right. All right, before we go to questions, I would ask you guys one last question to each of you. Forget economic value or whatever. What is the coolest maker project you've seen in the last six months? Well, I think the DIY biology stuff and some of the stuff that is coming out of the iGEM community. This is a student competition that stands for International Genetic Engineered Machines. There are some amazing things that are coming out of that. So. Any particular example you can think of? You know, bacteria taking photographs. So. Be better than my kid's photo. Dale. Well, the one that I came across the other day at the Dallas Makerspaces, they were using bacteria to grow fabric and create a sturdy, kind of transparent sheet of fabric that they were going to make units of and then make into a dress. And I thought it was really kind of very interesting in their little biolab. You know, there's lots of things. I always kind of find it hard sometimes to pick out different things. But the same space, there's a guided, programmed interface to a vending machine so you could go to a website and use PayPal to type in what you're, you know, you're going to pay for and then use a code to go to the vending machine and just type the code in. You know, so it was just clever little ways. But, you know, the vending machine was not dispensing candy. It was dispensing arduinos and sensors. So it's, you know, that kind of stuff is pretty neat. My favorite maker t-shirt is the one that says, I void warranties. That's really good. All right, so putting bacteria to work is the lesson. So now let's open it up to your questions and comments. And there's a microphone here. So, sir, right here, glasses over that, his hand up. James saying, I have two questions actually related. One, Tim, when he was talking, we talked about Steve Wozniak and his desire to use his own materials. His materials didn't grow on trees. There were commodity microprocessors, ROM, RAM, all that stuff. Is there any way of better integrating the maker community with those who produce commodities? So in fact, they know what the frontier is or are we in a situation where whatever's commodities is what the makers work with. And related also, then, does it make a difference economically who makes the commodities, whether they're made abroad or made here in terms of getting the most value out of this movement? So you say commodities. You mean components and things? Yeah, right. But one answer to this, if you take something like the Wii controller or the Kinect, is the companies that are like Microsoft or Nintendo that are building these devices are reducing the price of those components inside those. So what some of the makers do is buy those devices and then take them apart, like I ran across a musician taking apart the Wii controller because he wanted the accelerometer in it and various other sensors. And it was the best quality at the cheapest price to get it that way. So there is this sort of mix of being able to source things is important. And we kind of have a global sourcing market today. It's easier to find things. And the issue is sort of quantity. And price is still dependent on quantity for parts. But it's accessible to more people. We tend not to think that way. I think it's like what do we have and what can we make with it? But new materials come in. And I think you see something. I know we look at it and go, well, what would it be a kit to use that component? What's the application of that? I think there's a lot of parts out there that we don't have good applications for. I'm sorry. Right here, ma'am, in the front row. Please identify yourself. My name is Lee Yang, independent TV producers. I just wonder if this kind of invention or idea that's stored in your mind or in your computer. And I'm thinking that those occupy Wall Street or occupy NYC or occupy DC and they are homeless. Can you give me some idea of economic value they lost? Or if they can through the government for all those losses? What kind of value do you think you can estimate? You get my point? No, I'm not sorry. You lost me on that. I mean, thinking that everything you can really attach with some economic value. If they have an idea there and they have a potential invention, they have potential benefit economically, especially if they want to have some invention come up with some software or high-tech machine. But everything was lost because their home was taken and they are homeless. They cannot keep everything in their mind. Their computer was taken. And I just want to just tremendous loss. Can you give me some idea, estimate, or just kind of loss? Let's move on to another question. I don't think that applies exactly to here. It's more an intellectual property question. Yes, sir, with a mustache here. Hi. Nick Rodanik, sometime hardware designer for electrical engineer. Can we have a supportable ecosystem here, design ecosystem, if all the parts and fundamental work is being done in China? Well, I don't think all the work is being done in China. I do think that it is the case that if all of the sort of high-value-added manufacturing moves overseas, that that will have knock-in effects in our ability to do R&D in design. Because there are some types of activities where those activities are integrated and we really benefit from co-location. But there are two other issues associated with that. One is there's an article yesterday. It's not like it's on. It is. I'm just not talking loud enough. I saw an article yesterday saying that people want to do hardware design are going to China, because that's where the ecosystem is. And I forgot the other point. But anyway, have a go at that. Yeah, I mean, I think that President Obama believes that it's important to have a strong manufacturing sector. It was a major focus of his State of the Union address. And he's using a variety of tools from R&D to tax policy to trade policy to try to make sure that we have a really strong and vibrant manufacturing sector in the United States. In the back of the only thing I'd add is we should be studying some of the secrets, just as we had to study the Japanese car manufacturers earlier. I mean, the word ecosystem is really true. They have a lot of talent and a lot of close connections. And I think that's where a lot of the value is. Right there, yeah. Hi, thanks for providing this opportunity. I'm Phyllis Klein, founder of FabLab DC. And I was wondering how the administration and the Office of Science and Technology Policy can help maker spaces like FabLabs and Hacker Spaces as we're sort of scrambling to do the educational outreach and provide these spaces for the community to come and learn and make things. Well, a couple of things. First of all, we're funding a lot of the underlying R&D. So FabLabs is a good example. NSF supports the Center for Bits and Atoms that was the genesis of the FabLab technology. DARPA has a mentor program, which is supporting some of Dale's work. The government is looking at technologies like additive manufacturing that are going to allow, not just for the printing of plastic things, but things made out of titanium and nickel that will really dramatically increase the number of goods that we can make. The president is also using the bully pulpit to call attention to this. So he just had a science fair where he invited the winners of science and engineering competitions to the White House. And he got to meet a young maker, Joey Hewdy, who developed an extreme marshmallow cannon that could fire a marshmallow 170 feet. And it totally went viral. And the president can't stop talking about this guy. And the speech he gave to the National Governors Association, he was joking that he's going to offer him a cabinet post. So the president is really committed to using his bully pulpit to raise the visibility of these issues. I also think that we need to have, I think we talk about the maker movement, but I really do think that we need to have a movement of individuals and institutions who are, would be committed to working together to dramatically expand the number of kids who have access to this in the same way that Andrew Carnegie said, we should have public libraries in every community. Right here, blue shirt, glasses, young man. Anderson Ta, local entrepreneur. In regards to the maker movement in school systems, is there something being done about having qualified instructors or mentors? Because I think if you kind of push out a curriculum with people that aren't really passionate about what they're teaching, you kind of end up in the same situation. Yes. So one of the president's goals that he's been able to make progress on, thanks to a lot of leadership from the private sector, is to help prepare and recruit another 100,000 high-quality STEM teachers over the next 10 years. So that's one thing that we're doing, but I think there's a lot of room for makers to spend some time in their local school district and support and encourage efforts to create maker spaces in schools. I think that's true. I'm finding initially, I think our first wave is to find teachers who are makers, and we're finding them. And they're able, they see what this means and they're able to act on it. But I think connecting makers as mentors is important. But I think these young people that are growing up as makers today want to do some of this work as community service and in other roles. So getting them to involve in summer camps, after-school programs, working with a teacher in their own community, even while they're going to college, might be one of the answers here. I'm here. Hi, my name is Mike Whitfield. I would consider myself a tinkerer. I started out in the games community, which is like a highly entrepreneurial community. We were developing it like the cutting edge. And then kind of what we found was that the tool sets started reaching into the millions in terms of overhead. We had access to them. In that particular community, we were using what big companies would release open source. And so while that is kind of a solution, it's almost like not even the talent development was there to actually utilize all these tools. And then I think when we look at the app store and we look at a lot of the innovation in tinkering coming in conjunction with whatever a company releases as an interfacing tool, I think we need more of a cultural ethos that actually creates this interface between that corporate technology and the new tinkers. What could we do to address that and sort of bring that to the cultural forefront between all companies? Well, there's some really interesting research on this by an MIT professor, Eric Von Hippel, who talks about user driven innovation and how there are a growing number of companies that are essentially making kits available to consumers so that they can customize products and services. So I think that's one example of something that could be encouraged. I mean, you use the word culture. And I think it is a cultural thing. I think there are companies that have good cultures for this and others that don't. There are institutions that have supportive cultures. There are communities. And I think what we're seeing in some things like Hacker Spaces and stuff, they're trying to create that culture to do that. So there's not a recipe for that. But there is, I think this word DIY is you have to figure out that you can do something. And that's where the genesis of it is. Right here, white shirt. You've been very patient. Product designer. And my comment is just I heard conversation about do-it-yourselfers, entrepreneurs, and then big businesses. But I didn't really hear how the little guys become the bigger guys. And it seems to me like that's where innovation more easily continues as opposed to the big companies actually continuing to innovate. Well, that's what our, in large part, our VC sector is all about. They're looking for firms that are really small right now, but have the potential to address a large market and get big. And that is the whole focus of the President Obama's startup America legislative agenda, which is something where I think there are some promising signs that Democrats and Republicans will be able to agree on some things in this area. And one of the things that would enable is crowd-maker project to get them something that made them agree. But one of the things the President is pushing is legislation that would enable crowdfunding. So that's one of the ways in which you could see more small companies being able to raise money. I think we need VCs to understand this a little bit better. That needs to be kind of while we have a little activity. It's a different model than software and they love the way the software scales just endlessly. So we need some patterns to get established where they recognize that. But it's an interesting opportunity for the rest of the country that's not in Silicon Valley to say, well, why don't we put some of our money into these new kinds of startups instead of trying to compete in the same space as a lot of the money that comes from Silicon Valley. Tim, we're going to do two more questions after this one. So I know we're going to talk about patents later, but I wonder if you could talk about other cases where these sort of makers have run into legal barriers. So two examples that come immediately to mind. The drones obviously have troubles with the FAA and people who do software radio come into contact with FCC regulations. Is the government sort of responsive to those sorts of concerns and are there things that can do better to accommodate them? Jump in there. I wrote a little post in response to the Slade article, I think it was, but it was sort of creating maker-friendly cities. I think there are things where I've seen some of these spaces running up against zoning restrictions or misunderstanding of light industrial. In many ways, our cities don't want industrial facilities and they kind of will put this in that category and then kick them out. At the same time, economic development arms that are going out trying to attract this kind of new business into the city. So they've got to kind of understand that better. I do think there's some of the other legal areas, I think about liability and risk, getting understanding of that again, normalizing some of the risks around using, everything from doing an equivalent of a shop class again in schools. But I think those that patents tend not to be the, the open source hardware movement is sort of going out on a limb and saying, hey, all our designs, everything is free and open. And if you want to replicate it, go ahead and do it. There's sometimes some tensions be when someone actually goes ahead and does rip you off. Just because you said it was okay, doesn't mean I wanted you to do it. But I think that's kind of small scale stuff at this point. One, we're gonna take the two questions, one from you and one from you and we'll take them together. So you, sir. Jeremy Pesner, a student of tech policy at Georgetown University. There's a lot I could ask you about, but I think I'll just keep it to this one. When it comes to the policy around these emerging technologies and these hacker innovations, I wonder how we can sort of communicate these to policy makers in charge. I've seen evidence of late to suggest that certain policy makers may not have a thorough understanding of the internet, which has been around for in the commercial space for over 20 years. So this leads me to ask, is there some sort of potential framework that could be established for the understanding of new technologies or are they too disparate and different and they just kind of have to be taken on a case-by-case basis? That's one question, sir. Why don't you give your question and we'll just take them quickly together and then wrap up. Jeff Howe, a future tense speaker. Your next speaker. I'm at Northeastern University. It's a question for Dale. Have you heard of CAD Nano? So it's a Harvard project. It's an open-source AutoCAD system for on a nano biotechnological level and essentially would enable nano makers. I just wanted to know if that was something you'd looked at, if there were other projects similar that... No, I haven't. I haven't. It sounds interesting. I think part of it, we need to see some of the outcomes of these kind of projects. If you think about electronics, it remains that people can take a blinky light and make something. Some of even the DIY bio and stuff have yet to kind of figure out those sort of basic apps that people kind of get really excited about and get them in there. And I think nano's yet another leap into that. But I'm glad to see the tools are there and I think that might be something worth following. And Tom, do you want to take that first question about is there a framework for educating people to understand technology better and particularly policy makers? I don't know that there is a substitute for just having people who understand the technology, both from a technical point of view and a market point of view and a societal point of view, spending more time with members of Congress and their staff and being really vocal when they get it wrong, which the tech community has been getting better at doing. All right, Tom and Dale, thank you so much. One final thing, do either of you have a contact way people can reach you that these folks who maybe didn't get to ask a question, what would be a good- Sure, my email is dale at orally.com, O-R-E-I-L-L-O-I dot com. And I'm T. Khalil at O-S-T-P dot E-O-P dot gov. Great, thank you all so much. Thank you. Thank you.