Global Innovation Gathering (GIG)
is a vibrant, diverse community of innovation hubs, makerspaces, hackerspaces and other grassroots innovation communities alongside individual innovators, makers, technologists and changemakers.

GIG is pursuing a new vision for global cooperation based on equality, openness and sharing with solid roots in the global south. We aim to enable more diversity in technology production and global innovation processes and support open and sustainable solutions developed by grassroots innovators.

GIG provides a platform for meaningful connections and exchange by fostering knowledge exchange and collaboration between its members, positively impacting the policies and frameworks for grassroots innovation.

We support research in innovation and development, digital rights and technology ecosystem questions carried out by local experts and international teams.

What we do

Open Innovation

GIG believes in harnessing the powers of grassroots innovation for societal change. In particular, we believe in involving the people affected in policymaking and technology design processes. Through our Open Innovation projects, we bring together different actors and perspectives to work on open solutions for social and economic development.

Citizen Social Science

Citizen Social Science combines equal collaboration between citizen groups (co-researchers) that share a social concern and academic researchers. Such an approach enables robust research methods to address pressing social issues embedded in their social contexts from the bottom up. In GIG, we aim to co-create socially rich knowledge.

Global Gatherings

As a global community, GIG knows the power of convening like-minded innovators worldwide to work on digital innovation and digital rights-based policy topics. As Wau Holland, the founder of the Chaos Computer Club, once said about their annual congress, “Some digital things are best done in person”.

Open Health

One goal of digitization should be to make medical care more participatory and involve patients in developing solutions. New technologies open up new possibilities to apply to the user or the patient and new innovative actors, not only in data collection. GIG works toward open health systems through our supported projects.

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