Latest updates on Fablabs.io

by Maria Ustarroz     Posted on December 13, 2016

Fablabs.io - Fall 2016 updates

TEAM

We are happy to introduce you to the people that will be working on the day by day aspects of the design, development and management of the Fab Lab community social network, communication tool and provider of future services to empower us. Since late October 2016 a new team started working on Fablabs.io, it will grow in the next months and at the moment these are its members:



-Massimo Menichinelli, Project Manager

-Matias Verderau, Network Manager

-Gui Seiz, Creative Director and Design

-Mariana Quintero, Design

We are currently in a transition phase for the new team to get to know all the details of the current state of the platform and plan its future development, and the priority right now is to fix existing critical issues and in finalizing the development of several changes we have been working for several months. We have already been working on a first draft of a roadmap for the future with issues and milestones on the Fablabs.io GitHub repo, and once we got through this transition, we will complete the roadmap and proceed with the development of many more features. From just a list of labs, Fablabs.io is becoming a more complete platform for connecting people, projects and laboratories, and especially for this reason its development is now under reorganization. For example, we just added our cookie and privacy policies and our terms of service, an important steps towards growing as a full platform: please read them carefully, by using Fablabs.io you acknowledge, accept and agree these terms and policies.

DISCUSSION

For this reason, and for implementing advanced functionalities for community discussion and organization, we set up the discussion section of Fablabs.io at discuss.fablabs.io. The discussion platform is based on the open source software Discourse, and we have already started working with its APIs in order to add more functionalities in the future. We are still working on its integrating with Fablabs.io (so threads on the discussion section will be automatically created and linked to pages on Fablabs.io), but you can already use it, and we have these categories for the discussion:



-Labs: regarding the labs on Fablabs.io (existing labs, new labs, how to launch a lab, how to manage a lab and so on);

-Machines: regarding the machines and technologies on Fablabs.io;

-Projects, regarding the projects on Fablabs.io;

-Events: regarding the events on Fablabs.io (a feature under development at the moment) and other related events like the FABx events: FAB14, FAB13, FAB12, FAB11, FAB10, FAB9, and so on.

Furthermore, there are also these categories that are not yet present on the main Fablabs.io, but that can be very useful for you:



-Education: this is the category for all the discussions regarding education and related activities: Fab Academy, Fab Academy X, Bio Academy, and so on;

-Research: this is the category for all the discussions regarding research topics and projects, publications, dissertation, theses, and so on;

-Organizations: this is the category for all discussions of all the continental, national, regional, local associations and organizations of Fab Labs and Makers (and a new section for organizations si currently under development on Fablabs.io);

FEEDBACK

Finally, we have the Site Feedback category for discussing Fablabs.io, its features, development, how it works and how we can improve it. We would love to hear your ideas and comments about Fablabs.io and its future on the Site Feedback category; if you have instead messages regarding the technical development or bugs of the platform, we would ask you to discuss these on the Fablabs.io repositories on GitHub (Fablabs.io is open source software!) at https://github.com/fablabbcn/fablabs.

The development of Fablabs.io and the new discussion section bring us to the very important topic of the Fab Lab registration and approval process on the platform. We approved most of the pending Fab Labs that registered to the platform during the last 6 months, the queue grew until 300 labs due to confusion in the approval process, lack of communication of the process and some bugs in the backend. For this reason, we’d like to ask you to report any problem with this in the discussion platform in the Labs category. Few threads have already started for discussing this situation for Brazil, New Zealand and Mexico.

NOTE

to the Labs approved during the last month: You will be asked to provide detailed information about your lab and to get in contact with super nodes in the network.

We will keep you updated about the future development of Fablabs.io.