About
What
Fablabs.io is the online social network of the international Fab Lab community. It started as a spin-off project in Fab Lab Barcelona by Tomas Diez and John Rees, and is the current official list of Fab Labs that share same principles, tools, and philosophy around the future of technology and its role in society. Fablabs.io is an exchange platform for people, labs, projects, machines, events and groups that operate around the Fab Lab Network, which collaboration and communication tools in order to align interests and to expand the global scale of this community.
The Fab Lab Network is an open, creative community of fabricators, artists, scientists, engineers, educators, students, amateurs, professionals, ages 5 to 75+, located in more than 40 countries in approximately 1000 Fab Labs. Fablabs.io is the official platform for the Fab Lab Network, where Fab Labs are mapped, knowledge is shared, projects are developed and where the community discuss these topics. You can read more about Fab Labs here.
By using Fablabs.io all Fab Labs are mapped and connected globally, and their knowledge and technical and design innovations become embedded in the larger ecosystem of the Fab Lab Network, which is an open, creative community of fabricators, artists, scientists, engineers, educators, students, amateurs, and professionals located in more than 75 countries.
Why
Around 1000 Fab Labs around the world are currently using this platform to share developments and collaborate online. The Fablabs.io platform also fosters interactions between designers, makers and users, and aims to engage discussions about matters of concerns of the wider public in which Fab Labs are embedded, in cities and remote areas of the world.
Fablabs.io is not intended to replace existing platforms such as Facebook or GitHub, which are widely used by makers, hackers and technologists to document and share open source developments. In fact, when adding a project to the Fablabs.io repository, it is possible to include links to Github repositories.
By adding new features and integrating existing platforms, Fablabs.io facilitates distributed collaborations across participants in different Fab Labs and it embeds their creations in the more specific ecosystem of the maker community.
Who
FabLabs.io has been developed since 2014 by the Fab City Research Lab (aka Fab Lab Barcelona) team at IAAC and in collaboration with the Fab Foundation. It is a free/open source software, released under an AGPL license. Currently, its development and its source code can be accessed here: https://github.com/fablabbcn/fablabs.
The current team started working in October 2016, it will grow in the following months and at the moment these are its members:
- Massimo Menichinelli, Project Manager
- Matias Verderau, Network Manager
- Gui Seiz, Creative Director and Design
- Mariana Quintero, Design
Future
As Fablabs.io is open source, you can collaborate on its development. We have set up the Site feedback category on our discussion platform for discussing, Fablabs.io and its future; if you have instead messages regarding the technical development or bugs of the platform, we would ask you to discuss these with issues on the Fablabs.io repository on GitHub at https://github.com/fablabbcn/fablabs/issues