We are GIG
Written by Ricardo Ruiz
Notes from a GIG community call on open technologies, locally generated data and environmental challenges Four centimetres. That is the resolution of the drone imagery Tommy Charles showed us from Freetown, next to a satellite picture of the same street that blurs everything below twenty or thirty centimetres into a grey smudge. At four centimetres … Continue reading “GIG Community Call: Open Environmental Sensing for Climate Resilience”
Written by Ricardo Ruiz
On April 18 and 19, 2025, makers filled the GrEEK Campus in downtown Cairo for the tenth edition of Maker Faire Cairo. A robotics demo ran next to a calligraphy station. A workshop on AI powered design sat beside a class on shaping bioplastics. The theme was Dots Connected, and after ten years the phrase … Continue reading “San3a Tech: Ten Years of Making in Cairo”
Written by Ricardo Ruiz
Last October, more than 3,500 repair events took place in 50 countries, all within a single two-week window. A broken radio somewhere in Querétaro. A jammed sewing machine in Bühl. A laptop that just needed a new battery in Portsmouth. Somewhere in that count there was probably one of GIG hubs, quietly doing what they … Continue reading “Repair Brings Us Together: GIG Joins International Repair Day”
Written by Ricardo Ruiz
Zuzana Šmrkovská’s knitting machine is from the 1980s. It’s a Brother, one of the 900 or 950 series, the kind that used to hum through Czechoslovak textile factories before that whole industry collapsed. She runs it now from her laptop, through an open source controller built by the AYAB community. Same machine, different century. That image opened … Continue reading “Crafting Connected Communities: A Material Library and a Hacked Knitting Machine”
Written by Ricardo Ruiz
Nathan Parker, GIG member since 2017, is back to walk us through four years of work most of the network has only heard about in fragments, the Open Hardware Manager. Nathan traces the story back to Kathmandu, where he met Geraldine de Bastion and Andrew Lamb. He had just come from two months in the Black Rock … Continue reading “GIG Community Call: Open Hardware Manager – Connecting Designs to Distributed Manufacturing”
Written by Ricardo Ruiz
The mathematics building of TU Berlin, May 23 and 24, 2026. A heat wave pushed temperatures to records, and inside the corridors of a concrete campus, several hundred people from dozens of countries gathered around circuit boards, knitting machines, flow batteries, and looms. For the first time in its history, the Open Hardware Summit came … Continue reading “Distributed Roots in Berlin: GIG at the Open Hardware Summit 2026”
Written by Ricardo Ruiz
A sewing machine 300 metres from a refugee camp in northern Greece. A farmhouse in Alsace, dating from the end of the 17th century, with a bell that still calls people to communal dinner. A row of benches in Vilnius made from the demolished pillars of a Soviet-era trade union mansion. Three scenes, three countries, … Continue reading “Make-A-Thek Community Call: Crafting Connected Communities”
Written by Ricardo Ruiz
Somewhere in a library in Punggol, Singapore, a machine the size of a small suitcase is pressing dots into a sheet of aluminium — dots that a blind person can read. The machine did not come from a manufacturer. It was built from 3D-printed parts, stepper motors, and a solenoid, following instructions available for free … Continue reading “From Bhutan to Singapore: spreading an open-source Braille printer across Southeast Asia and to the world”
Written by Ricardo Ruiz
The fashion industry has a waste problem. Every year, 92 million tonnes of textile waste is generated globally, while garment use has decreased by 36 percent since 2000, meaning clothes are being made faster and discarded sooner than ever before. Waste is built into the process from the start, where roughly 15% of fabric used … Continue reading “Local Hubs, Global Impact: The Blueprint for a Sustainable Fashion Revolution”
Written by Ricardo Ruiz
Together with Fashion Revolution Germany and Circular Fashion Foundation Poland, GIG hosted a make-a-thek community call that brought together library practitioners and circular fashion advocates to explore how libraries can become meeting points that connect communities around advancing circular fashion. Our speakers included Ariane Piper (Fashion Revolution Germany e.V.) and Agata A. Zgliczynska (Fundacja Mody Cyrkularnej/ Fashion Revolution … Continue reading “Collective Movement & Community Participation in Fashion Revolution”
