 I'm going to be talking to you about the Makonet Alliance and ending up discussing an idea we've got for a visual ecology interface to help navigate open hardware designs. So I'll start off by giving you an introduction to the Makonet Alliance, what it's about. I'm going to very briefly introduce three of our members, telling you about what they do. We'll talk a little bit more about the third one I'm going to talk about, Enable, and some of the challenges they've got in being able to find the right design among the many hundreds out there. And then talk about this idea we've got for a potential solution, and I'm going to be asking you some questions and we'd love some feedback on the idea. And I understand this mic is only going to the camera, so if anyone can't hear me at any point just put up your hand if I'm not speaking loud enough or trying to remember to shout more. So the Makonet Alliance is a grouping of people and organisations who are interested in working on local manufacturing all around the world. The idea being to decentralise manufacturing so that it happens much closer to the point of use. Now we think about this in terms of three main areas. The actual local production, which is factories, maker spaces, all kinds of physical places and machines where the things get made. There's a global knowledge base which includes things like business models, product designs, quality standards, and then there's digital infrastructure that can join the two. In terms of what we do, we think about all of these three elements, but what I'm going to be talking to you about today is focusing on the product design elements of the global knowledge and potential digital infrastructure that could help support that. The idea being how do we get the global knowledge into the hands of the people who actually need it, who are making things in small places all around the world. So some of the members we've got in the Makonet Alliance started out about two years ago. There were five organisations, came together and did a consortium, did a project that was funded by the German equivalent of our department for international development to trial some ideas around local manufacturing in Kenya. Since then we've broadened out and many other organisations and individuals as well have become members. I think we've got about 35 members now. And they fall into all of those three categories that I mentioned on the previous slide. So some of them are involved in doing the manufacturing. They can be maker spaces like Fablab Winnam, like Kamasi Hive. They can be private companies like Xena Technologies, is the black logo in the bottom right corner, CLAX 3D. So those are some of the ones that are actually doing the manufacturing. Then there are some members who are focused on the global knowledge part. So humanitarian makers that I'm going to talk a little bit more about in a moment is one of the organisations that helps to develop open source designs that can be used in other places. A number of organisations are doing work in, for example, tech for trade, doing work around proving business models for local manufacturing in different contexts. Then we have some organisations that are more focused on the infrastructure that can link the knowledge to the actual manufacturing locations such as Appropedia and Wevolva. Now I'm going to give a brief intro to a few different members just so you have an idea of how this can work. A lot of what I'm going to talk about refers to 3D printing and a lot of our members at the moment are focused on 3D printing. That is not the be-all and end-all of this. I think there is more happening at the moment in terms of distributed manufacturing in 3D printing because it's so easy to share file information. Because printers are so common now, but we are also doing some work on other types of hardware, but we're all talking about manufacturing of physical products. Project Cajenzi is a project of Penn State University from the US. It's a project that's based in Kenya in a county called Kasumu, which is in the west of Kenya. They embed 3D printers and engineers who know how to run them with biomedical engineers in the county healthcare system. This is in the government run system, the equivalent of the NHS. The big teaching hospitals have their own maintenance departments and smaller hospitals may have small departments as well or may receive visits from travelling technicians. They wanted to see their focus is 3D printing. They wanted to see what use would 3D printing be in this context. Throughout much of the developing world, broken equipment is a really big problem, particularly in healthcare systems. Equipment gets donated to places, so you may end up with a system that has a total mishmash of different types of devices, many of which are pretty old and no longer made. They just aren't the supply chains for the spare parts. I was in Kenya earlier this year and I had the opportunity to meet with the head of maintenance from the district hospital that had been the main focus from this project. I could ask him what benefit this was to him, what use he saw of it. What he said was that if they needed to repair something made of wood, he had carpenters in his team who could do it. He had plumbers in his team who could repair plumbing. If he needed something made of metal, he had fabricators down the road that he could call on. If something broke that was made of plastic and it couldn't be replaced by a part made from a different material, then the only thing he could do was to try and track down the actual spare part for it. He had no way of making anything out of plastic. The use case for him was speed, which was even more important than cost. When a piece of equipment goes down, this hospital probably doesn't have multiple backup of the equipment. They've got to get it back into use as quickly as possible. From his perspective, the major benefit was that he could get exactly what he needed made in a short period of time. The fact that it was also often cheaper than the spare parts that could be bought was a bonus, but what was really important was that he could get it within a matter of a day or two instead of perhaps six weeks. Another member of the Maconet Alliance, Humanitarian Makers, this is a global volunteer community of people who are interested in open hardware, specifically for disaster response and also some development applications, and who contribute to designing this hardware or also sometimes testing things that other people have made or contributing to documentation or reviewing other people's documentation to see if it's legible, this kind of thing. I just wanted to mention them briefly in case anybody is interested in getting involved. Their URL is on the slide. Now I want to come on to Enable, which is again a global volunteer network. This one focused on upper limb prosthetics and on 3D printing. Humanitarian Makers in the previous example is not purely 3D printing. I know they've been working on some electronic products and assembly instructions and some mechanical products as well. Enable focuses on 3D printable prosthetics. It's been going for five years. It's been extremely successful. There is a network of several hundred chapters around the world, all of volunteers who tinker around with designs and also produce prosthetic limbs for people who need them. The community will also do a matching service that people can sign up by the website to say I'm in such and such a place and I need a limb and can match them with chapters that are as close as possible. This has been enormously successful. There are many people who contribute to the designs, who contribute to the testing of the designs and who actually print them and give them to people who need them. There are a lot of people out there who have limbs as a result of this. It's a movement that's growing all the time. One of the challenges that has come up as a result of that success and that growth is being able to find the right design when you need it. Now, every prosthetic is unique pretty much because people who have had amputations or whatever born without a limb, the socket is always different. The joint at which the prosthetic needs to start is different. Enable focus is on upper limb prosthetics, which are less risky, although they're wanting to move into lower limb prosthetics in the future. Even if you just think about upper limbs, that can be anything from trying to replicate a shoulder joint in a full arm through to just a digit, a single finger. There's been a huge proliferation of designs which do fantastic things, some of them, and some of them will be dead-end, some of them aren't particularly good. It's a volunteer network. How do you test the quality of the designs? How do you even find the designs in the first place? They're not stored on a central repository. This is a decentralized, volunteer community that doesn't want to be dictated to. They don't want you to say, you have to put it here and tag it like this so that we can find it. Three platforms that are used to a significant amount by the community are Thingiverse, Imagine and Revolver, but there are all kinds of other places. There are some designs for this on GitHub. There are whatever. This is the challenge that to an extent all these other applications of open source hardware for development and humanitarian purposes in developing countries is going to come to. How do you find the right design that's got the right functionality for you and how do you know that it's good quality? I wanted to ask among this community, is this a problem that you recognize, this fact that there is a proliferation of designs and you don't know how to find the best starting point to modify for whatever your purposes are? Can I just have a show of hands? First of all, who has never come across this problem who doesn't believe it's a problem? I'm not sure if you're asleep or what, but the second question, you haven't come across this? Absolutely, yes. That's very true. That's a great point. Does anybody recognize this problem? Does anybody come across it? Can I have a show of hands? That's probably about half. Is anyone aware of solutions that already exist? You've just mentioned one, which is give up and make your own from scratch, which is one that's used quite often. What else could you do? Any other thoughts on what solutions to this might exist? That's a great point. That can help when you know which designs you're looking at and you've got them perhaps on a single platform. I know on one platform you often can get an idea of how many times has this been used, how many times has this been downloaded, but it doesn't necessarily help with the proliferation across different platforms, and the platforms themselves are proliferating. Anything else on this point? Absolutely. You're absolutely right. A design can be for a very specific piece of equipment, and in this particular example, the prosthetics, you might have designs for just a hand and designs for a full arm, and maybe there's a design for just a finger that's got a really innovative development in it, and you're looking for designs for an arm, and you don't necessarily think that you actually need to look at the finger bit and join it on to the other one. How do you find out where the good, useful innovations for specific purposes are? Thank you very much. That's some really useful suggestions there. I'm going to move on and tell you about an idea that Enable have had, which is to have what they call a visual ecology interface. In the past, they have done this manually. Developing a tree that shows what is derived from what else in terms of designs. You have a sort of forking parent type tree, and you can also have things coming back together, obviously, when things are mixed together. They have done this a couple of times in the past, a few years ago, when the community was smaller and the proliferation wasn't as great as it is now. But to keep doing it manually is not practical. One of the things that they're thinking about is would it be possible to automate this with the use of AI? If you were doing it for prosthetics, then you could do it for other 3D designs. What I really want to ask you today is to what extent this could be useful for you. Just to talk a bit about the ideas that we've had so far around it, this would not be a new platform for sharing designs. It would sit over the top and it would let designs be stored and shared and would have the platforms that their designers wanted to use, which seems to be something that's required by the community. People have preferences in what platform they use and they don't want to be told to use a certain one. This would link to multiple ones. It would show the lineage of a design. You would be able to understand that, yes, this is a design that's just for a finger, but it was taken from this one that was a whole hand or whatever. Crucially, to your point, it would incorporate some visual diff tools. We know that these exist already. Possibilities to compare CAD designs visually. They aren't widely used yet. I believe that GitHub has developed one, but it's not really done much with it. I know that Wikifactory is working on one in their new platform, but that will only work within their platform. The idea is that this would have a diff tool so that you could look at designs, even if they're stored on different platforms, and it would visually show you what the differences are. The idea is that this could, ultimately, it would make it easier to do something like this if you had the cooperation of the platforms where the files are stored, but you could get going with a mixture of some kind of manually pointing out where things are and some conventions like getting people to use hashtags like remixed from or something, at least to prove the concept and then use that to demonstrate. Project Kagenzi that I mentioned just before, one of the things they're working on, is the idea of could you develop a library of open source spare part designs, essentially that are parameterised and can be adapted to what you need by users who don't have particularly advanced CAD skills. It's something I'm working on. I don't know as much about how it works in the context of prosthetics. I don't know, for example, if what you need for an adult is just a scaled up version of a child. I'm sure there are differences, but that's a great point, thank you. Think about that in the context of Enable, the prosthetics community. They already do the active role. They already try and show people what is useful and this is a good way to do it and so on. I think to a degree you're always going to end up with things that haven't been done according to those practices and guidelines. Also, this is a volunteer community. There isn't funding for somebody to spend their working life doing this. The idea is could a tool to be developed that would do it this most of the way there? Thank you. I'm going to have to leave it there. As I said, I'll be around later on to talk to you more. The organisations that I've mentioned, their URLs are up on the screen now and thank you very much for listening.