We are GIG
Written by Melanie Chan
What if the ride to work could help make a city safer? DATA-RIDE is a citizen science and urban advocacy initiative developed within LAUDS Factories, in collaboration with Université de Lorraine and the Lorraine Smart Cities Living Lab (LSCLL) in Nancy. At its heart is a simple question: how can everyday cycling experiences become evidence … Continue reading “DATA-RIDE in Nancy: Citizen engagement through bike rides”
Written by Ricardo Ruiz
In 2013, a team from Seeed Studio spent three months walking through Huaqiangbei, the electronics market of Shenzhen. They made several field trips to the market to search for resources, took pictures, and designed and redesigned until the map was ready. The result was the Shenzhen Map for Makers. The PDF was free to download, … Continue reading “Sensing the World: Seeed Studio and the GIG Network”
Written by Geraldine de Bastion
What if we measured the digital maturity of a city not only by the services it digitises, the data it collects or the AI it deploys — but by the agency it gives to the people who live there? For decades, the idea of the “smart city” has been closely associated with the ability to … Continue reading “Beyond the Smart City: From Digital Services to Digital Agency”
Written by Ricardo Ruiz
In August, Ugo Vallauri was visiting independent repairers in Kenya. One of them opens up the power supplies of Lenovo ThinkPads, the kind of thing nobody designed to be opened, and makes them repairable again. While they talked about Repair Day, he had an idea of his own: why not give all his customers a … Continue reading “Repair brings us together: notes from our Repair Day community call”
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 Melanie Chan
We are excited to invite all GIG members and Makerspaces based in French-speaking countries, or those who are part of Francophone communities, to join our first Francophone GIG Community Call in collaboration with the African Makerspace Network (AMN). Over the years, the GIG network has continued to grow across Africa, Europe, and beyond. We believe … Continue reading “GIG Community Call: Francophone GIG Community Call”
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”
