have written about Central Desktop several times (e.g. , Central Desktop Moves Up with Enterprise Edition and How Barack Obama is Using Web and Enterprise 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign Through Central Desktop ). If they saw conversations about Central Desktop or relevant social media issues, they would join the conversation. There has been a lot of discussion about Twitter on this blog. This entire week will now be devoted to Twitter stories.

Rather than advanced technological development and education being elite activities bounded by scarce space in classrooms and labs, they can become much more widely accessible and locally integrated, limited only by the most renewable of raw materials: ideas.” An example of this is his own network of Fab Labs : “In making today’s most advanced airplanes or integrated circuits, the intelligence is in the tools rather than the materials, which are cut, carved, mixed, and melted as they have been for millennia. The heart of MIT is its intellectual rather than physical infrastructure: a research culture that creates room for new ideas by emphasizing their evaluation through rapid reduction to practice, and by mixing short-term applications (both serious and silly) with long-term research.

These original phones integrate wacky features like 7.1 One promising indication of how the new generation of small-scale technology will be integrated into flexible manufacturing, in the U.S., Tags: Desktop Manufacturing Open Hardware Open Innovatio The Chinese shanzhai phenomenon was featured recently in posts by Andrew “Bunnie” Huang and Tom Igoe .   To me it’s striking reminiscent of the flexible manufacturing networks of Emilia-Romagna and the Third Italy.

If the digital revolution has caused an implosion in the physical capital outlays required for the information industries, the revolution in desktop production tools promises an analogous effect almost as great on many kinds of manufacturing. Clearly, the emergence of cheap desktop technology for custom machining parts in small batches will greatly lower the overall capital outlays needed for networked physical production of light and medium consumer goods . The conditions of physical production have, in fact, experienced a transformation almost as great as that which digital technology has brought about on immaterial production.

firmware (here defined as software embedded in or integral to the function of the artifact) -Use description –cross-reference to science and engineering principles –cross-reference to integral technique –cultural cross-reference -tool catalog –cross-reference to tool artifacts -materials/components catalog –cross-reference materials characterizations -illustration step by step demonstration –illustration/demonstration/media –cross-reference Looking at the different Maker blogs, I could see that there was an emergent set of information standards forming ad hoc by a popularity-driven process of selection as well as limitations -chiefly in graphics as people generally can’t produce their own drawn illustrations so resort to photos and video.

The radical change is not just ‘more’ information, but more accurate, fair information while enhancing the shopping experience (integrate with you shopping lists, integrate making the purchase (since you’ve already scanned the items)). Tags: Desktop Manufacturing P2P Technolog “The digital and physical world were one separate. Now, there are more and more physical products with a link to the digital world.

million people, the most prosperous in Italy, manufacturing centers on “flexible manufacturing networks” of small-scale firms, rather than enormous factories or vertically integrated corporations. Small-scale, general-purpose machinery is integrated into craft production, and frequently switches between different product lines. Tags: Open Innovation P2P Business This region in Italy is often cited as an example of a well-working ‘cooperative capitalism’, as also argued by Kevin Carson. Below, a more substantive description by a group of visiting coop leaders

When readers can download or mail-order off-the-shelf components and instructions for integrating them, it becomes much simpler to turn fiction into reality. ” Tags: Cognitive Capitalism Desktop Manufacturin In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it. Cory Doctorow , in the science fiction magazine Locus .

This is why I suggest that Jacque Fresco’s Cybernation begins not with some giant ‘electronic brain’ sitting somewhere but, rather, in automated commodities trading networks that evolve so much integral quantitative analysis they just come to know the way the world works -on the numbers- very well and can logically arrive at a model for a basic subsistence overhead for everyone with a sustainable environmental impact derived from very broad/deep demand/production projection. Tags: Desktop Manufacturing P2P Economic Though there is often a focus in the open manufacturing community on technologically enabling individual self-sufficiency as a means to achieving post-scarcity, that comprehensive production capability is a long-way off.

While the tools are already available and significant development has already been done, their integration into a meaningful productive ecology is the remaining task - in terms of providing a useful toolset for Global Village construction. As was said about one particular example of the available technologies - the 3D printer called RepRap - “Think of RepRap as a China on your desktop.” Forwarded from Marcin Jakubowski . This is just the introduction, there is an extensive overview and discussion at the original posting. “