I was delighted to take part in the Critical Making Conference as an online panelist.

Thank you to Regina Sipos for the kind invitation.

Implemening RRI across the global maker community, encouraging open access and inclusiveness while fostering positive change.

Critical Making adds scientific insights into the potential of the maker movement. It focuses on critical and socially responsible making, and it shows how these communities can offer new opportunities for young makers of all genders to contribute to an open society via open source innovation.

In this project, we will study grassroots innovation processes taking place in open spaces (Makerspaces, Fab Labs...) and their online extensions. These initiatives will be then related to responsible research and innovation, short RRI, practices and more. We will search for and analyse existing innovation and co-design processes taking place in these open spaces to find out how far they reflect or contradict RRI principles.

A mixed-method approach will allow us to collect data, analyze it, actively improve practices, develop theories and synthesize findings. Besides analysing existing practices, we will co-design, evaluate and disseminate concrete interventions that aim to foster RRI principles in the maker movement. In three case actions, the project will specifically look at aspects of gender, openness and the recruitment of young talents:

The Critical Making Gender Case Action will increase gender awareness practices in the maker community. This is achieved through piloting 3-4 co-created measures to counteract the existing gender imbalance in maker spaces and in online spaces and create guidelines on gender awareness

The Critical Making Young Talents Case Action will support the engagement of young people in maker spaces and further Research & Innovation activities via maker space actions and educational programmes that expand the formal curriculum with skills for responsible research and innovation

The Critical Making Openness Case Action will provide methods to strengthen the social responsibility of the open hardware movement. This is achieved by piloting a mentoring programme for RRI aware, open hardware business innovations with a special emphasis on projects that advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through open science, social innovations or environmental sustainability.

As a result, we will co-define measures how to better implement RRI principles in the open-source innovation movement taking place across maker communities. Our findings will provide hands-on input for practitioners in the field and will enrich the scientific knowledge base in the RRI community on innovation processes outside of academia, aiming to harness the full innovation potential of the global grassroots maker movement.

The Centre for Social Innovation, short ZSI, is a trans-disciplinary social science non-profit research institute in the common public interest. Its headquarters is located in Vienna, Austria. ZSI employs around 60 persons, most of them researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds. The ZSI’s core competencies comprise social-scientific S&T policy studies, patterns of techno globalisation, participatory techniques and models of stakeholder inclusion, etc. It is involved in several projects related to RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation) and socio-technical innovations. Their activities are embedded in the context of open science and open innovation, such as those in the maker community, Citizen Science, the integration of information and communication technologies in learning processes, technology assessment, citizen engagement processes, etc.

Global Innovation Gathering (GIG) is a vibrant, diverse community of innovation hubs, makerspaces, hackerspaces and other grassroots innovation community spaces and initiatives as well as individual innovators, makers, technologists and changemakers. GIG is pursuing a new vision for global cooperation based on equality, openness and sharing. We aim to enable more diversity in the production of technology, and global innovation processes and support open and sustainable solutions developed by grassroots innovators.

VTT is a visionary research, development and innovation organization that drives sustainable growth, tackling the biggest global challenges and turning them into growth opportunities. VTT aims at understanding customers and society's needs and opportunities by working in a challenge-driven way. VTT co-develops impactful solutions to match these needs. VTT is part of Finland's innovation system and operates under the mandate of the Ministry of Employment and the Economy.

The internationally renowned Technische Universität Berlin is located in Germany’s capital city at the heart of Europe. Our academic activities are focused on achieving sharply-defined goals: building a distinctive profile for our university, ensuring exceptional performance in research and teaching, providing our graduates with excellent qualifications and a modern approach to university administration.

Wikifactory is the world’s first social product development platform. Focused on the needs of digital fabrication projects, Wikifactory adapts proven agile development tools from the world of open source software to the needs of product development.