Author: Theresa Fend

As part of the Disruption Network Lab’s focus on Borders of Fear, the r0g_agency’s #migrantmedianetwork hosted a session in October that centered on questions of migration from African countries to Germany. The evening’s activities, which included role play and expert discussions, focused on the obstacles individuals face when attempting to apply for a visa and possible solutions to these hurdles. To read more about the evening, visit our blog here. The session in October was followed by two sessions in November that focused on data privacy and creating safe passages for migration. The r0g_agency’s #defyhatenow project launched it’s latest Social Media Hate Speech Mitigation Field Guide for Cameroon, available in both English and French. The Field Guide, currently also being developed for implementation in Ethiopia, focuses on providing tools to identify and counteract online hate speech and incitement to violence. Read more about the guide and its recent launch here. Our #ASKnet programme hub partners have been running events aimed at empowering...

LAB Procomum is launching an action-research to highlight the role of the black population of Santos-SP.The LAB Procomum citizen laboratory is located in Santos-SP, a coastal city and the largest port in the country. Historically known as the land of freedom and the vanguard in the fight against slavery, in recent years the city has undergone a process of social and racial exclusion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRRYvfMVZso Watch the teaser video of LAB Procomum's project Memórias, Narrativas e Tecnologias negras da Baixada Santista! The new LAB Procomum project Memories, Narratives and Black Technologies from Baixada Santista seeks to highlight the historical and contemporary importance of the black population in the region in an action research and a series of training activities using open technologies, art and culture.The project is just beginning, you can follow it here! ...

We are proud of our Careables members that were chosen for the Global Community Bio Fellowship 2020! Some of our lovely Careables members were chosen for the Global Community Bio Fellowship 2020 - an initiative at MIT Media Lab! Our congrats go to:ARAVINTH PANCH, DreamSpace Academy, Batticaloa, Sri LankaSTEPHANIE OKEYO, Under The Microscope, Nairobi, KenyaJAIKSANA SORO, Platform Africa, Arua city, UgandaMowoh Azong from "With the knowledge from this fellowship, I will be able to establish the Open Bioeconomy in Sri Lanka, and we will be able to create local biotechnology solutions to solve our local challenges, such as to protect the biodiversity in SriLanka. I’m very happy to share this with my friends : Stephanie, Jaiksana and Nadine, who have been making huge social impact in Sub- Saharan Africa." - Aravinth Panch The Global Community Bio Fellowship is designed to provide professional development and leadership training for the emerging global community bioLeaders. This initiative is providing a space for the global community of community biologists, biohackers and open bioLabs. See all fellows here! ...

At the end of the 12-month mentoring and development program  for creative social impact entrepreneurs selected through a public call, "Colaboradora - Empreender e Transformar" launches their downloadable manual! https://youtu.be/5VmoexXbi08 Along with the toolkit the group also released a video that marks the end of their mentoring process. The publication systematises the project's methodology and learnings and contains the pedagogical journey the participants went through. Along with the manual, participants produced a video summarising their experiences with the free and collaborative learning journey that was hosted by Instituto Procomum and LAB Procomum, Brazil. Klick here to download the toolkit! ...

Through the support of the Moss Challenge Covid-19 action, promoted by the Mozilla Foundation, Careables Casa Criatura developed an open-source aerosol box model to use at Intensive Care Units (ICU). The aerosol box is used in the process of intubation and extubation of patients, to avoid the contact of aerosol sprays of patients with doctors. The product was validated with doctors from 2 different hospitals in the Metropolitan Region of Recife, who have experience in the field of orotracheal intubation. In addition to the product itself, a community that brings together professors, medical students and designers from Casa Criatura were created. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSSgnj6U1NQ Aerosol Box development at Casa Criatura As it is an equipment to use in ICUs, we now want to seek certification and registration of a free patent. Find the open-source project to be replied and further developed in your community here! ...

We have been selected as one of the 10 post-Covid “common challenges” projects of the Frena La Curva (FLC) platform, which is present in 16 countries. FLC is a citizen platform where volunteers, entrepreneurs, activists, social organisations, makers and public and open innovation labs, cooperate to channel and organise social energy and civic resilience in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic by giving a response from civil society that is complementary to that of government and essential public services. Our project is named “CoAct: Citizen Science and Mental Health” and is a project of social citizen science on mental health that shares personal experiences on accompaniment and social support networks. Project summary: COVID-19 further emphasizes that the need to strive to maintain good mental health must be a concern of all. How do we care and can we be better cared for? Can people with their own experience contribute their baggage? Can we take advantage of existing resources...

The Olabi, in Brazil, built a digital platform that organises information related to the decentralised production of medical supplies during the pandemic. Protege BR shows the production of more than 220 groups across Brazil, organises online events to transfer technology between them, connect the groups with health agents and donors, and also provides open PPE projects already in use in the country. The project intends to increase the production of urgent items in the context of COVID-19, and also develop a network infrastructure able to promote dialogue around different areas of such a large country (in Brazil, there are 200 million inhabitants spread over more than 8 million square meters). The social organisation is working in partnership with Google.org and the Ford Foundation in the quest to reduce the effects of the pandemic in the country where the contamination grows the most. We organise Zoom meetings every Tuesday 7pm in Rio de Janeiro time. Get in touch and follow our...

You put a lot of love and effort in your open hardware and you want others to find it and see how grand it is? Here is something to help you out: the Open Know-How Manifest Standard Specification 1.0 is out! What is this? A hardware metadata standard for discoverability of open hardware. How does this work? Via a human and machine-readable "manifest" file you can put next to your read-me and license files (see an example here). This simple text file formatted in YAML will flag web crawlers that there is something interesting out there and pass them on the information you want to share about your project! You can create a manifest file for your hardware project in our web interface and add a reference to it in our reference implementation database. This will automatically index it in our automated search page along more than 400 other pieces of hardware. We also currently work on the integration of this standard in the Observatory of Open Hardware, our...

Innovations spanning food supplies, medical records and PPE manufacture were today included in the final three awards made by Mozilla from its COVID-19 Solutions Fund. The Fund was established at the end of March by the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS), to offer up to $50,000 each to open source technology projects responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. In just two months, the Fund received 163 applicants from 30 countries and is now closed to new applications. OpenMRS is a robust, scalable, user-driven, open source electronic medical record system platform currently used to manage more than 12.6 million patients at over 5,500 health facilities in 64 countries. Using Kenya as a primary use case, their COVID-19 Response project will coordinate work on OpenMRS COVID-19 solutions emerging from their community, particularly “pop-up” hospitals, into a COVID-19 package for immediate use. This package will be built for eventual re-use as a foundation for a suite of tools that will become the OpenMRS Public Health Response distribution. Science-based data collection...

Careables is an international platform collaboration that enables citizens to co-design and deliver people-centred health products through means of digital fabrication. In Latin America, partners LabCOCO, Casa Criatura and Coletivo 3D (in Olinda city) and LabProComum (city of Santos) function as the hubs to connect to local communities of citizens with (physical) healthcare needs, carers, and public healthcare professionals with the community of makers and medical herbalists. At the beginning of March 2020, Careables Latin America focused on working with a growing health challenge, the Covid-19 crisis. Events, meetings, open-source stadiometer construction and DIY herbal pillows were left behind, and we started primary research on Covid-19 Careables products feasible to be reproduced in our reality. Much based on Thingiverse, we could select a wide range of facemasks, door openers, sterilizer, steam inhalation tubes. At some point, we shared an open document with a collection of valuable links on that moment of the coronavirus pandemic. Since its beginning, Careables Olinda had a relevant dialogue with the Secretary of Health of Olinda. And after a meeting, we decided to tackle...