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GIG news no. 23: Looking forward to 2023
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Hello world!
The year 2022 brought many foreseen and unforeseen challenges. The world is dealing with Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the increasingly consequential effects of climate change in different regions of the world and the ongoing effects of the Covid-19 epidemic and will be for the years to come. In these times, creating meaningful exchange between grassroots communities and around the innovative ways they are tackling these challenges are ever more important. In the past year, GIG has embarked on new projects addressing these global challenges in an attempt to support the development and scaling of open source solutions that will help dealing with their effects.
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In February, we started the mAkE project, funded through the EU Horizon 2020 programme. With mAkE, we’re connecting networks of makerspaces in Europe and Africa and introducing new data standards, business opportunities for hardware startups and a common learning and capacity development infrastructure that will enable makerspaces to develop distributed manufacturing capacities.
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Further, GIG has joined the Tolocar project where we support makers from the Ukraine and enable sharing of open medical and other relevant resources, supported by giz. Through our projects, we continue to build relationships with our members and partners, such as the African Makerspace Network and the Internet of Production Alliance. We are also continuing our support to our members in accessing funding from the Nord-Süd-Brücken Foundation, including the Labmobile, a space for learning, hacking, making, knowledge sharing and community building together with Platform Africa in Uganda in the beginning of 2022 and a project on climate action with Procomun and Casa Criatura in Brazil in the coming year.
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We’re thankful that 25 new amazing individuals and organisations joined the GIG family in 2022. In the last months have piloted new membership formats: We are the proud partners of 15 Hub members and happy to also welcome supporting members that help us fulfill our mission.
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We brought our community together through finally meeting again in person with many old and new members, but even more importantly we have introduced new online formats including our monthly Meet the Members meetup and our online peer to peer knowledge sharing sessions (watch them here). Furthermore, GIG now has a map and an open library. We were also excited to host physical gatherings again and meet our members in person at the 2022 re:publica in Berlin, the African Makerspace Gathering in Cape Town, as well as the Fab Festival in Bali.
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We have only recently been able to dedicate more of our resources to community support and growth and with your support we hope to continue to do that even more. Please reply if you or your organisation could consider becoming a supporting member and would donate regularly. You can also support us with a one-time donation: click here for details
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Thank you so much for the journey,
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Fadia, Geraldine and Sandra, for the GIG team
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Announcing project Tolocar!
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We’re thrilled to announce a new project supporting makers in Ukraine by connecting them with makers from the GIG network, facilitating exchange and co-creating open hardware projects for local needs. Some of our members are already part of the project, e.g. creating mobile makerspaces. You can learn more here
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The two newest workshop of the mentoring programs are by Bahar Kumar, founder, Impact Hub Kathmandu, (previously known as Nepal Communitere) and Georgia Nicolau, founder, Instituto Procomum, Brazil.
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Click on the images below to watch the video
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CoAct project wraps up with the launch of the Global Perspectives publications
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Over the last three years, GIG acted as consortium partner of the Horizon 2020 project CoAct, which set out to develop a Citizen Social Science Approach. As one of our main responsibilities was to build a community, we made it one of our core missions to increase diversity of perspectives and to demonstrate the plenitude of civic driven science already existing around the world once we break open certain understandings of science and education.
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One out of numerous activities we undertook was the co-creation of a publication compiling local views and experiences from around the world – the Global Perspectives Publication which was launched during DOTS (our annual Impact summit) this year.
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Click here to go to the Global Perspectives page and read the publications.
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Distributed Roots in Berlin: GIG at the Open Hardware Summit 2026
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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 to Germany, and the Global …
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GIG Community Call: Open Hardware Manager - Connecting Designs to Distributed Manufacturing
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Join us for a latest GIG community Call exploring how open hardware designs can be connected to the people and places that can actually make them. Discover how open standards and distributed manufacturing infrastructure can strengthen local production ecosystems, humanitarian response, and community resilience. GIG is pleased to welcome back Nathan Parker, a long-time GIG member reconnecting with the community …
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From Industrial Memories to a Circular Future for Heritage Craft, Textile Production and Fashion Design
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Reflections from the make-a-thek Central Eastern European Study Tour The EU-funded make-a-thek project integrates modular makerspaces into public libraries to promote circular approaches to fashion and craft. In June 2026, we conducted our first make-a-thek study tour through Germany, Czechia, and Poland to explore regional circularity practices and build long-term collaborations. During this tour, we encountered some recurring themes and …
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Make-A-Thek Community Call: Crafting Connected Communities
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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, one question running underneath all …
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15th July 2026 Community Call: Crafting Connected Communities (ECA x GIG )
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Co-hosted with the European Crafts Alliance (ECA), our upcoming make-a-thek community call explores how craft and maker culture contribute to community building, resilience, and social inclusion. Together, we will look at how creative initiatives become spaces for civic engagement, shared learning, and collaborative production - through the lenses of People, Place, and Resources. To ground the conversation, we will hear …
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The Africa Makerspace Gathering 2022
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The fourth Africa Makerspace Gathering was held in November, 2022 at Cape Town, South Africa. It took the form of a physical event and saw a total of 109 attendance for the three-day period. With representatives from Africa and Europe, the Gathering saw a number of fun activities with some dialogues focused on some amazing topics.
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AMG saw its first edition in 2019 in Ghana and has been happening every year since then. The first Gathering took the form of a physical event and even so, its nature has been adapted to fit an entirely virtual or hybrid form, dependent on the global conditions presented each year.
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GIG and mAkE take on Fab Fest + Fab Island Challenge 2022
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GIG hosted a panel discussion at the 2022 Fab Fest which took place from 12th – 23rd October at Jimbaran Community Hub in Bali. The panel looked deeply into the reality of the future of decentralised manufacturing, discussing the practicalities for this to become a reality as well as necessary interventions and measures that would need to be put into place to create global opportunities for sustainable maker communities.
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open culture feminist cafe
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After the pandemic induced hiatus from in-person events our friends at the r0g_agency were excited to recently re-launch the Open Culture Feminist Café an initiative that brings in speakers to discuss issues surrounding feminism, with a focus on African feminist activism.
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The first event, held in November, discussed the idea and implementation of feminist foreign policies, looking at examples from around the world and, in places where feminist foreign policies have been implemented, the discussion centered on whether these have helped center the lived realities of marginalized people. For the event, Rosa Burç, a PhD candidate, discussed the Kurdish feminist movement and Sara Abbas, a political scientist, discussed the Sudan revolution.
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The second event, held in December, hosted the scholar, activist, and poet Stella Nyanzi, who discussed her work and how poetry can be used to empower and talk back to oppressive power.
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To read more about it and stay tuned for future events, click here
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Colmena: open debate on innovative open source technologies
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Together with specialists in various areas of communication, DW Akademie Lab and Colmena organized a workshop exploring the role of innovative open source technologies in media development and international cooperation.
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The event began with a session on best practices, featuring Colmena as a collaborative ecosystem for community media; the Brazilian data and storytelling lab Data Labe; the independent newsroom Correctiv; the open source social enterprise Wakoma; and the technology specialist organization Tactical Tech.
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Events
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Webinar series
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Next year as a part of the mAkE project, GIG GIG Hub Members network and Manufacturing Change will be running a series of webinars on business models. The first one will take place on Wednesday 18th January at 13.00 UTC and will focus on consultancy as an element of the business model for makerspaces. You can register here to receive the invitation and more information.
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