 But today, she will talk to us about who owns the robots. So we often talk about open code. This is pretty much what open source is about. And I found it very interesting to have someone talk about open hardware. So welcome, Gerardin. Thank you. Thank you so much for the invitation, Nina. I'm really, really excited to be here today. And I'm also really excited to be speaking directly after Renata. What an amazing keynote and what a tough act to follow. I think one thing I have going in my defense is that after we heard about some of the things that are very wrong with our state of information society and democracy today, I can give a little bit of hope and brightness and talk about some of the more hopefully empowering technologies that we are developing today. So my talk is entitled, Who Owns the Robots? Who Owns the Robots is also the title of a paper written by Richard B. Freeman, who is a professor at Harvard University. And in this paper, he discusses the necessity to involve workers in the ownerships of the machines that are going to replace them inevitably, which is a very recommendable paper and a very important topic that is not exactly the topic of my talk. It's kind of an adjacent topic. Because when we talk about our information society today, it's not only important to look at who owns the data, who owns the data that drives our societies and our AIs, but also who owns the machines. Of course, these are questions of power and distribution. And what I want to talk about today is how open hardware can be used to empower and democratize. So I'm sure that you have come across different definitions and different projects of open hardware. I still hope to be able to share with you some maybe new and current examples. But just to start out with the basics, of course, open hardware is not a specific type of object, much like open source software. It refers to a set of design principles and legal principles that can refer to a number of different kind of objects. It can refer to robots. It can refer to chairs. It can confer to computers or even houses. And as in software, this set of design principles basically describes how an object needs to be licensed in order for it to be studied, for it to be modified, for it to be distributed and basically reinterpreted by anybody who wants to work with this set object. So kind of creating blueprints that we can share with the rest of the world. And ideally, although this is not the case in all projects, but ideally, open hardware uses available components, works with available and local materials, works with open infrastructures and open source design tools, so matching the software side with the hardware side in order to kind of maximize the idea of the concept. Open hardware is not a new idea, but it's become something that's increasingly developing and it's brought about with a shift of the way that we produce today. So basically, open design and open hardware has been around as a concept, but is now enabled through the open and distributed manufacturing tools that we have today. So you could kind of see it philosophically a little bit, that common-based peer production was first something that we started thinking about in our digital context in regard to software, but we now see the second wave moving through physical space. Of course, philosophers and economic professors like Eleanor Ostrom have written fantastic things about the idea of the commons and why this is an important concept within our society, and many people see open hardware a little bit as a full circle to this or open distributed manufacturing. So the idea that common-based peer production was something that we started out in the material world, the general idea of the commons, a shared space, a shared resources in a society, and then we took it into the digital and virtual space with software and with digital information, goods and products, and now we're taking it back into the physical space. So with the maker movement gaining such traction and the availability of 3D printing and other distributed design manufacturing, this has really gained traction. And there's of course a lot of critique in this movement as well. I'm sure you're all familiar with the idea that the maker movement has been criticized highly for its wastefulness, its use of plastics to create more rubbish in the world out there. So there's a lot of attention to see how can the maker movement actually really contribute to a more ecologically sustainable future. Maybe many of you gathered that made, went bankrupt, and I think there are a lot of reasons why that is so and a lot of arguments around that, but maybe one of them is because so far, made sort of with a more commercial end of the maker movement that was the face to the customer with the make affairs and the magazine kind of failed to connect the dots between the playful tinkering and educating kids, which is great about how to build robots and the sort of, yeah, elitist communities in Western societies with the idea of where open and distributed manufacturing can actually be most impactful and most needed and actually solving some of the world's problems, which is what I think the maker movement should be doing. At this point, I always love to quote a good friend of mine, Bilal Gabib, who is an amazing human, who has set up different maker spaces around the world and raised the question that with all this technology that we have at hand today, with the ability to 3D print all the things that we want to design and print, we need to sit back and reflect and consider what is it that we want to make in order not to fall into this trap of wastefulness but to fall into a space where we can actually create meaning and add useful resources to the world. So I first came into contact with the idea of open hardware when I stumbled across a project called the open ecology movement and basically their idea was to look at what are the most important machines for humanity? What are the machines that we need in the civilizations that we have created today and to create open source blueprints for those and to create what they call the global village construction set, a modular DIY, low cost, high performance platform that allows the fabrication of 50 different industrial machines which take to build a small sustainable civilization with all the modern conflicts necessary so everything from a tractor to a refrigerator and so forth. And when I first came across this, I thought like, wow, this is just freaking amazing. What a great idea. What a fantastic idea to do this. And when I started looking into it a little bit more, I became kind of, well, let's say like, it was a little bit of awakening where I thought like, oh, okay, this is a great idea in theory, but in practice, none of these machines have actually ever been built except maybe one in a farm, I think somewhere in Nebraska. So the idea of actually how to move from the blueprint and the idea and make this something that people can actually build with local materials, there seemed to be a gap in the middle. But this is a number of years ago and now with the technologies that have developed that I just introduced in the last couple of slides, this has changed. And the idea of not just creating these blueprints as a concept, but actually putting them into practice is happening more and more. You should check out also what they're doing. They're actually really trying to build these machines now and in different settings and sort of evolving the project. But by now, there are a whole bunch of different platforms out there that attempt to create global communities to enable people to share these open designs to create open hardware. And I just wanna share a couple of those with you. Instructables is kind of like the get-up for open hardware. So a community of open design, yeah, open design tools and instructions out there from really like simple stuff that anybody can start making any day to really complex things. There's Thingiverse, which is MakerBots design community for 3D printable things. I think it's one of the largest communities with 3D printable design instructions, of course, or also open source and creative comments licensed designs. Another really fantastic project for the especially open source world is Apropedia, which is created by a bunch of people that I'm gonna speak about a little bit more in my examples. It's a site for collaborative instructions for sustainability, poverty reduction, and international development through the use of appropriate technology and also seeing how you can use and reuse certain things and localize them and adapt them. So all built on a Viki, it's a really vibrant global community and I highly recommend that you check this out. And I think this is also something that's really important in this movement of open hardware that this is no longer like a playful exercise for elites in the West, but it is really a global movement adding a lot of meaning, especially to societies that maybe lack resources and access to other forms of technology. I just wanna give you two examples from the Global South, as it's called. One of them is Materia Brazil, which is an open source database of materials created by a bunch of fantastic people in Brazil. As the title says, but it's available in a bunch of different languages and it's a very, very useful and practical catalog of different kinds of fabrics, building materials, all kinds of materials out there and how you can produce and create them with, again, open source instructions. So there are all these platforms out there that share their ideas, but there are also communities that convene and come together. So maybe some of you fancy a trip to Cameroon next year, I can definitely recommend attending the Africa Open Science and Hardware Summit, which is a grassroots effort bringing together researchers, technologists, hackers, educators, but also trying to bring in government officials and the more business-y startup community just to connect the dots and see how some of the innovation spaces that exist on the continent, the open labs, the bio labs, can contribute to the research and citizen science processes and how they can unite their powers to create more effective open designs. So why is this important, especially in our day and age? I just wanna highlight two of the aspects why I personally think that open hardware is a very important topic and a very empowering topic in our day and age. I took this photo in a space called Agloboshi. It's part of the capital city of Ghana, Accra, and it's one of the largest scrapyards in the world. It's a place where all your phones and your computers and all your digital devices end up once you've stopped using them and have thrown them in the trash. So we in Europe ship tons and tons of electronic waste to African countries, such as Ghana and Togo, and they end up there with people working on them in the most ridiculous conditions. I could have made also just like a kind of photo show of what it is like to be in Agloboshi with people burning the plastic off the copper wires with their bare hands and no protection in order to get to the copper. And it's a very interesting space because you can really see how a whole economy and industry has developed around this with also a lot of exciting innovations happening within this space, but it's also really shocking to see not just how our oceans are drowning in plastic, but this is also how we're treating other countries around the world, especially countries where we're telling people not to come here from and instead polluting their environments with our consumer goods. So obviously ecological aspects really matter when you think about open hardware and this idea about creating locally with local resources and local carbon footprints in mind. There's some really great initiatives out there like for instance Precious Plastics which was started by a guy called Dave Hackens in 2013 and is basically a set of different machines for plastic recycling that he's created and created blueprints to Precious Plastics now is a really vibrant also global community with people having built these machines and tested them all over the world. The machines include a shredder for instance to shred plastic waste into flakes, an extrusion machine that you can process these plastic flakes with and create lines of plastic that you then can use for instance as filament in 3D printers, but also an ejection machine and things that you can mold new shapes out of. Precious Plastics as I said has become a global community and is a fantastic idea but it also raises some of the questions that I want to get to at the end of my presentation to leave you with in terms of scalability and the actual sort of ways that we can use this not just to maybe create examples of how we can use open hardware to recycle and improve our ecological situation kind of like an art project but really something that we could put into scale and create impact with. There are also people out there like Oisa Folliebebe who is an engineer from Togo trying to find ways to work with plastic waste in a creative way. He made the spider robot which basically moves exactly like a little spider from discarded printers that he found in Togo where we put I think about an estimate of a half a million tons of e-waste each year. So a very, very small country with a lot, a lot of e-waste and you can check out this BBC article about him, about Oisa where he's interviewed and there's a little video of him which is really cute when he's like, yeah I found all these printers and I built the spider robot and I printed these 3D parts for it. Oh and that 3D printer I also made from waste materials and then the interviewers asked him but where did you learn how to do this and he's like the internet and I think that's a very obvious example how empowering such technologies can be if people have access. So if people have access to the internet and if people have access to technologies and these design blueprints, sorry that they can work with. So having the access and having access to these technologies is important but having policies that enable us to work with such technologies is also important. I want to tie into what Renata said here about the ability to open your device and your right to repair which is a really, really important topic and a really important intersection between the digital rights topics Renata was speaking about and the open hardware movement that I'm presenting to you today. We need to move away from the throw away consumer culture that we have today and it's fantastic that some of the European countries like Sweden have made advances with this by for instance introducing this tax break on repairs for clothes, bicycles, fridges, washing machines, all kinds of things where they've basically reduced the VAT and have encouraged citizens to go back and repair things but we also need the legal rights to open up our machines and not have like full fit or guarantees on a product because we want to try to fix it ourselves. I'm sure most of you are familiar with the Fairphone and the Fairphone idea which is sadly not the best working phone in the world but a fantastic idea and a project that I always hope many other companies will take inspiration on but it's also something that we just need a better regulation for. We need to understand better which resources are used in our devices under what conditions they're being mined. We need to have perhaps a kind of traffic like system to guide consumers to products that were made in a more ethical fashion and products that allow you as a consumer to repair, to open, to learn from them, et cetera which is something that I really hope that the European Union will take inspiration from Sweden and will put into practice and something I hope that you would all help us to lobby for. So some of these are some of the ecological aspects why I think that open hardware is really important. I want to just skim through some of the aspects why it matters socially as well. As mentioned, this matters particularly in some of the countries which are low in resources, in machines and in other systems that we enjoy here. This is a Microsoft that was designed at MIT an open source Microsoft that is being used in Kenya today in different clinics, veterinary clinics that is open and adaptable. Maybe many of you are gathering also have read the articles of the last week so I don't want to talk too much about MIT today because it doesn't deserve its women. But of course it's been the producer of many such technologies that have gone around the world. But as I've pointed out already, these technologies don't just get created in high class research institutions in the West but also in many, many other countries around the world. I mentioned Apropedia. Apropedia is partially created by the people who have an organization called Field Ready and Field Ready uses 3D printing around the world to create medical devices. And it's one of many, many organizations using 3D printing, not just in disaster relief. They got kind of famous because they supplied the whole of Haiti with umbilical cord clasps after the earthquake and there were no deliveries of medical supplies happening. But also things like this little otoscope which is this device that you can look into the ear with that you see in orange up there. And creating medical devices that are locally available but also not the standard size fits all is a really, really important and empowering aspect. Generally with a lot of medical devices, of course they don't see the individual. They see an off the shelf solution that is produced in some factory and any kind of customization would be seen as too expensive. So this idea of open hardware and the maker movement is a huge opportunity to create medical devices, customized devices that are really individual and empower the individual who needs them. I'm just gonna skim through a couple of initiatives. This is a picture from Made For My Wheelchair which is a fantastic project initiated in Berlin by the FabLab community here an organization called Able and Make Here Industries. Basically brings together the people who need these adapted customized objects, the people who are sitting in wheelchairs with the makers and with the engineers to design things that they might need and then put the open source blueprints for those on their website and in their community. So this lights project, how to light up your wheelchair and make it more visible at night was one of them. But also this open source transport device that you can attach to your wheelchair in order to make it what we like to do now with our bicycles, the transport device and not just a mobility device. I'm really proud that a lot of these initiatives on open health devices are gathered under the umbrella of caribos which is a EU funded project that basically brings together, like I said, the maker communities, the people who need these customized healthcare devices, the people that uses the patients and the medical experts. The portal is going to be launched next month and it's going to be the world's largest repository of open source healthcare devices which an NGO that I have up, this Global Innovation Gathering is a part of. So yeah, so I highly encourage you to check it out once the platform is up and running but you can already find examples on it now. So again, I just want to sort of, I think I'm going to skip over this example for the sake of time because I know the next speaker after me needs to go and catch a flight so I'll cut it a little bit short. A last initiative I want to point you at is the MakerNet Alliance. The MakerNet Alliance came into being when organizations like Field Ready identified gaps in the economic system today. So the maker movement is out there and it's doing great things and it's creating a lot of these open hardware blueprints but the people who actually need them often don't know about this and also the local vendors and producers of materials also don't know about this. So how to connect the dots to actually create value chains which the maker movement and open hardware is involved in but also create local benefits and they ran a couple of pilot projects that I just want to share with you very quickly. This is Michael and for those of you who are going to be watching the Africa Haptrip movie at the end of the day today, you might recognize him in this movie. Michael is a fantastic person who currently works with Medicine Sans Frontier but also ran this pilot project for MakerNet in Kenya. So you see Michael here with a number of different devices. Basically what they did is to create a kind of hackathon with hospitals in Kenya and the makers to see what is it that people need there and they came up with a bunch of different things. One thing that I think is really exciting is kind of small and you wouldn't necessarily identify as a digital innovation. There's this little wooden thing at the side there. Does anybody know what it is? Shout it in. It's a fetoscope. So it's like one of the oldest medical devices that's used to listen to the heartbeat of the baby and the mother's womb and there's a shortage of these. So what Michael did is he 3D printed them but then he ran different tests to see what materials these fetoscopes should be made out of and of course would transport sound better than plastic. So he found a local carpenter to produce these fetoscopes from the 3D designs that he made and thereby created this local value chain that I just spoke of including the local materials and the local handicraft people. What Michael also did is he started reverse engineering bits that were broken in medical devices such as this oxygen pump which had a broken valve. So he reverse engineered this valve and 3D printed it and thereby fixed a machine that would have cost at least $500 to replace and would have taken weeks to get to Kenya with a really simple hack basically. He did the same thing with these suction units used in a maternity ward in Kenya where he 3D printed those little bits that were broken from resin and thereby also repaired the suction unit for a couple of dollar costs instead of having to import another high class medical device. So I wanna leave you just with a couple of questions because I think those examples show how powerful these technologies can be. But especially in the case of those devices in the hospital in Kenya, it brings up a lot of questions around our ability to do so. Again, the legal ability to repair such machines rather than just doing this as a hack in a place where maybe it's the better solution but what about the liabilities behind it? People like Field Ready, also people like Michael these communities working on it, they would love to find ways to see how their 3D printed products or how their things that are made from open blueprints especially used in medical contexts can still be reliable and how they can be made liable as producers to really give the consumers the security to use these products the same way you would with something that's bought in a store. So how do we create such systems of liability that work with such design principles and such products, that's one question. How do we create the legal frameworks that allow for such systems of repair is another question. And then how do we enable such projects to scale and really create the impact that we need is another really big open question. And with that, I wanna say, oops, thank you very much. And if you're interested in all of this, please feel free to check out the Global Innovation Gathering and get in touch. Thank you.