 Hi, I'm speaking to you through another body as I am alas in Brussels at the moment with several bodily impairments called infections ending in ITIS Nothing too dramatic. It will pass yet. I am quite sad to miss LGM. Hello everyone. I know that Hi LGM So this session is a report of a work session that happened in Spain in March 2016 in collaboration with Mediala Prado constant organized the work session objects in common as the final event in a series that started in 2015 with functional mentors objects in common and diverse bodies followed by interactivus material cultures in the digital age and Gregory pixel makers and energy in African cities the series Object those communists wants to explore other ways of doing such as Design for functional diversity Situated digital manufacturing in for example African cities It takes making ordinary common objects as a point of departure During the week of the 7th to 12th of March 2016 20 to 25 makers and thinkers have looked at the potential but also at the problems of sharing practices processes of manufacturing and the documentation of physical objects Taking both the permission to reproduce and the availability of source files as a given There are still many questions to ask about the actual commonness of digital objects and their potential physical life or afterlife We documented the session in several ways a first version of the raw archive of the event can be found on the website of Wendy I think capacitor dot constants Vzw.org I Can post a link actually well I'll post the link later And I lost the PDF there it is So who was there how what and why on The website there is a booklet with all the participants including a small questionnaire The biggest part of the participants were Belgians From fab labs Hacker spaces maker spaces and other who all are makers hackers thinkers themselves Another part came from Spain quite diverse from Madrid, Barcelona working around recycling and reuse or reappropriation of objects organizing documentation, etc One of the reasons we did the work session in media lab at the moment was the possibility to link up with totally different structures and ways of doing link to the gregory pixel project The two weeks before our work session Four people invited by media lab were there working on their own projects around cost energy and lighting built within a community Through specific funding and alas laborious visa procedures Which all luckily succeeded we had cocu and Lolo a mega Yibo from Lomé to go Mamadou in gum better known as Modou in gum from said Takar Senegal and Mamadou Cooley Bali from Bamako Mali and Zineb El Fasiki from Casa Casablanca, Morocco We had five work days and five themes so The first day Monday was talking about spaces and relations Space being a fab labs Hacker spaces making spaces and the relations that can happen inside those spaces The second days was about repositories sharing platforms and documentation whether manuals or videos. So what we did is we Did a round table to see how everyone in those spaces or practices were dealing with that the third day? We looked at resources materials and relations and especially there was a presentation on e-waste not actually What I found interesting is that and here I speak as Julian Is that it was not on but e-waste analysis in the context of Africa or not only Africa But also e-waste in in Spain actually there is a Problem locally there also Then the fourth day was about licenses and the relation they introduce and Then the final day was about digital to physical physical the file formats the vectors the limitations of transforming and Etc. So the raw written documentation of these themes is also available day by day We wrote on a local server with etherpad. Thank you Michael. Can you please give me the name of that project? did you Either dump that that's what it's called So it was a local etherpad on hosted on a raspberry pi on a local network, and that's what was used locally You can find an HTML version of the notes including the authorship colors and spelling chaos galore On top of that there was quite a linguistic soup in the making because some people who spoke English and Dutch Some only French some French and English some Spanish and English and some mostly Spanish As the group was quite large we worked with question and challenges You can see them reproduced in the pads a kind of collective brainstorm semi construct structured writing process Basically, I can go on describing what we did what we talked about, but I know do not feel ready to make a general conclusion This is not over and the information still needs to be and is being processed instead Is being processed? Instead two topics really struck out for me. I think Julian and Anne who were At this work session to can confirm this confirm this is Anne here I know she's gone So there's two topics That I would like to distill these two topics in a thinking moment with you and I don't know how much time Do we have five minutes? Okay? So she has I have prepared sorry It's hard to switch. I have prepared two ethopads and I would like you to answer them from your point of view No idea who's in the room, but here it goes Copy these questions and fill your version or do this out log with the person who's reading this and log it here so Why is it Okay, so those are those are the two ethopad links So there are pad.constant, you know that Slash public underscore pad or I see for objects in common underscore lgm underscore doc or underscore lgm underscore data But the questions and I think we can maybe talk about it out loud By the way, she is in the chat of the one of the pad so get on there to talk to her Yeah, there she is and for me I don't have text-to-speech, but So I'm gonna read out loud the questions and I guess we can maybe start interacting live around this and I have one that I'm Really would like a feet. I mean a feedback and even a solution if that's possible So the first one how can a community be stimulated to a document How do you experience this is in your own practice and Even die-hard fablab wiki fans are thinking about switching to something like instructables because there is a community and it's points And it points out incompleteness things not working etc Do you have any experience with it or any other ideas? And the other question is in documentation Can can there be special attention for the sizes of files a lightweight version for example for PDFs? Local mirrors for software in Africa are often only in the South Africa Is it possible to provide local repositories for software in other countries or try to take this into account? Including support for other languages, and I'd like to come back to that point There are often informal documentation or software exchanges Copy sessions in togo between friends and of a specific network Are there ways to get information in inert USB hard drive? Stay to specific people in countries where the postal system isn't reliable That are on demand and shipped by a network of trusted people and the other ideas And I'd like to actually that's one of the topic that I was really touched by when I met these these people from Especially the guys from Mali to go So internet that is totally in reliable a really funny thing And I'm gonna ask it as a question is because they they made fun of us with this one And that was really funny is how many of you know about the snake game on YouTube? Raise your hand one two three Do you know why there is a snake game on YouTube? It's because in countries where the the internet is so slow that you have to go take a coffee To actually be able to watch a five minutes video on YouTube There's a snake game if you press the right arrow key while the video is loading which none of us can do Mostly then there's a snake game you can stop playing in in the window And so you have these three guys laughing at us because none of us knew that this existed So that was a very enjoyable moment And but I think it this gives me a I mean, yeah this gives like Clear example of what's going on the other thing that I found really sad is that one of them was chooses Provider internet service provider, which was not the cheapest or anything because that was the only one that was offering a repository of Software for Ubuntu, you know, so when you do your updates your system, you know We do this as a breeze it takes a couple minutes to download the security packages and all that But there might take they do this usually when they leave work and they hope that then when they come back in the morning it's done and He uses I mean he paid this ISP because the ISP runs on Ubuntu So they have the packages locally so he can benefit from that But I think as a free software community There's a big responsibility here because we think that we're doing freeze. I mean, I think sorry that we do free software because we can then transfer this knowledge to Develop in countries, but if they don't have any way to access it I mean this is going in in the clouds, you know and not in a in a real factual Situation so I'm be happy to hear if you have any Suggesting questions, so maybe we can take that up for our five minutes left to discuss But first an applause for when the Julian So any comments or responses to these questions that came up Hi, this is yeah, it's more a comment than a question I spent a while working in Tanzania with their schools and internet access and free software there and And the big yeah internet speed was obviously a huge problem But the the slow point wasn't within Tanzania. It was between Tanzania and the outside world The mobile phone companies could provide a huge amount of bandwidth within the country itself And they were perfectly willing to do that if they had a reason to So we there was one of the projects we're doing putting Linux computers in schools and they provided free bandwidth for Everything basically we were running virtual desktops over their network and they were perfectly happy with that and the network could support it Yeah, so it's the speed issue isn't within the country. It's between the country It's the outside line basically the internet Um, yeah No, but exactly it depends from one country to another because I understood that Mali for example is connected to the Senegal which then connects to Spain as with a Underwater cable so everything that all their communication goes from Mali and Senegal goes to Spain And that's where they get their Ubuntu server when they want to update it or Debian or whatever But it's true that inside the countries themselves. It's there is there is network. That's why I don't know if it It came up to me like shouldn't we as a free software community Find a solution to have servers running there which can be somehow hosting packages so that They have an easier way of updating updating their Their systems But that's my take on this. I mean, it's a when these presentations about a broader issue and it's about objects in common I'm just I was just being pointing this. I don't want to hijack her presentation or the subject here, but So it's not the question but Hint I haven't tested myself, but some people from Holland made supergroup this Kind of server that you plug into your electric plug In as I understood it is a promise to go back to host yourself your own website But we had having a huge computer making noise and heat in your literal space so maybe it's also a way to serve software packages and Everybody could have this little thing, but of course it's also material to buy to post name One example I can and can also give which was very I mean for me was really full of I mean very interesting is that so we ran around about these open source projects about like You know how I'm making like your own 3d printer and or your own knitting machine or The fact is there's a lot of artisan locally doing a lot of stuff So there was this questions. Why would we need something like this? But beyond that, let's say, okay, there's an interesting open source project using Arduino or something like this Finding an Arduino in Africa is mission impossible. I mean no Online store will accept a visa payment coming from Africa So that means they cannot order anything and get anything delivered so the way they do it is that they Find someone who's traveling abroad and then they ask them to order and then bring back the Arduino or the equipment They're needing for all the rest of the electronics finding capacitors or whatever Basic electronics and it's kind of easy in a sense that what they do is that they go up to the local guy that goes grapes Landfills and they go with a picture on the phone saying I need that equipment and then they pay up front And then they wait and they wait three weeks, maybe or two months until the guy during his Research in the landfills. He's not interested into electronics at all But then since he has an insistence in here Yeah, some something to find then he will come back with the piece at a certain point That's the reality of Africa and dealing with open-source Hardware with that story and when these usually ends presentation, you know where to find them So if you have ideas or comments, please leave them with them. Thank you very much. Thank you