Call for Contributions: FabYearBook 2012!
November is upon us, so it is time to start writing your FabYearBook contributions again! Send in your contributions before December 31st 2011 to yearbook@fabfolk.com. Publication date is February 2012.
Your great contributions made the first ever FabYearBook in 2010 as well as last years FabYearBook 2011 beautiful collections of photos, stories and designs from around the FabLab world. We hope to get even more contributions for the coming edition!
Contribute to FabYearBook 2012!
Now it is time to start creating your contributions for the next edition of the FabYearBook! So get creative and share fun, inspirational, or deep stories about your FabLab and the things that happen there, in the form of text, pictures, drawings or whatever you can think of. We accept contributions in any shape or form. To be part of the book it needs to be in A4 format though. But feel free to also send in fun designs (even better if they fit that A4 format!) we can share in the digital version of the FabYearBook.
The FabYearBook 2012 will be available to print in your own FabLab in February 2012. We will strive to turn the publication into a Polycon video event, connecting many FabLabs together while the FabYearBook gets printed in those FabLabs.
The FabYearBook 2012 will be published under the banner of the FabLab Association, where the FabYearBook has found a home from now on.
An opportunity to connect and share!
The yearly Fab conference, such as Fab6 in the Netherlands last year, or Fab7 in Peru this year are great opportunities to meet face to face and feel part of a bigger global whole. The FabYearBook appears halfway between the global Fab conferences, and is an additional way to stay in touch and feel part of the global FabLab community.
Use the FabYearBook 2012 to introduce us all to the people in your FabLab, the staff, volunteers and makers that make up your local community. Show us what great stuff is getting made in the FabLab. Tell us what is hard, what is fun, what is awesome. Share with us the impact FabLab has on your life, your community, your visitors. Don’t be a stranger, and send in your contributions for the FabYearBook 2012!
Spread the word!
Please forward this call for contributions to others (people, FabLabs) you think may be interested in adding something to the book. The more variety and diversity we have in the contributed stories, the richer and more inspiring the result will be to all of us.
Important info
- Deadline for sending in contributions: December 31st, 2011
- A4 format if possible/applicable
- Language: English, or your own language with a short English summary
- Send contributions (or download links) to: yearbook@fabfolk.com
- Publication date of the FabYearBook 2012: February 2012, with a global on-line event.
Come Get Your FabYearBook 2011!
Later than expected, but still with great pleasure we can announce the release of the FabYearBook 2011!
Cover design by Stephen Gallagher
The 2011 edition is bigger and more diverse than last year’s first ever edition. Again the FabYearBook shows you some of the wonderful things that are being done, created and made in the global network of FabLabs. If you leaf through it you’ll be struck by the wealth of ideas, color and inspiration. A big thank you to all who contributed their stories and examples.
Every time I visit a Fablab I see the same basic thing: everybody, and I really mean everybody, who enters a FabLab leaves it again with a smile on their face. Convincing people of the value of FabLabs for their community is as simple as bringing them into a FabLab. There is nothing more empowering than walking into a FabLab with an idea, and leaving it with an object you made. Even if that object is nowhere similar to your idea, even if it not really works yet as you intended. The act of Making will make everybody smile.
This second FabYearBook is hopefully another step in a yearly tradition of making that value, empowerment and sheer fun visible. Print this book, bind it in a cover you yourself designed and made in the FabLab, or use the one that Steven Gallagher designed and comes with the book.
This FabYearBook 2011 should have been published in February already, but I simply have been to busy to do it, and only too late started looking for help in finishing it. The reason this second edition is now ready, is because of the hard work and time spent by Susanne Welgraven, a student at the FabLab Arnhem in the Netherlands. She took on the work of designing the book and putting it together. Everything that is in this edition is to her credit, everything that is missing is my mistake. Thank you very much Susanne!
You can now download your copy of the FabYearBook 2011 as a zip-file at fabfolk.com!
Join the FabYearBook 2012 Team!
For the 2012 edition (to be published February 2012) we are looking for 3 or more people who want to help form the editorial team. Get in touch if you want to make sure the third edition of the FabYearBook is even bigger, brighter and better. And on time ;) Send an e-mail to ton@fabfolk.com.
FabYearBook 2011 -- Call for Contributions! 4
November is upon us, so it is time to start writing your FabYearBook 2011 contributions! Send in your contributions before January 15th 2011. Publication date is February 16th 2011.
In January 2010 the first ever FabYearBook, containing stories from various FabLabs, examples of things made in FabLabs, interviews with FabLab community members etc, numbering 50 pages, was published.
Contribute to FabYearBook 2011!
Now it is time to start creating your contributions for the next edition of the FabYearBook! So get creative and share fun, inspirational, or deep stories about your FabLab and the things that happen there, in the form of text, pictures, drawings or whatever you can think of. We accept contributions in any shape or form. To be part of the book it needs to be in A4 format though. But feel free to also send in fun designs (even better if they fit that A4 format!) we can share in the digital version of the FabYearBook.
The FabYearBook 2011 will be available to print in your own FabLab in February 2011. Possibly we will turn the publication into a Polycon video event, connecting many FabLabs together while the FabYearBook gets printed in those FabLabs.
The First Edition of the FabYearBook, the FabYearBook 2010, published in January 2010, is still available on-line at http://www.instructables.com/id/FabYearBook-2010/
If you are interested in sending in a contribution please let me know, so I know what to expect :) The first contributions have already been received from the FabLabs in South Africa (Thanks a lot!) It would be great if we can add your own FabLabs’ stories to those first 4 pages! :)
An opportunity to connect and share!
The yearly Fab conference, such as Fab6 in the Netherlands this year, or last year Fab5 in India, or the one next year Fab7 in Peru are great opportunities to meet face to face and feel part of a bigger global whole. The FabYearBook appears halfway between the global Fab conferences, and is an additional way to stay in touch and feel part of the global FabLab community.
Use the FabYearBook 2011 to introduce us all to the people in your FabLab, the staff, volunteers and makers that make up your local community. Show us what great stuff is getting made in the FabLab. Tell us what is hard, what is fun, what is awesome. Share with us the impact FabLab has on your life, your community, your visitors. Don’t be a stranger, and send in your contributions for the FabYearBook 2011!
Spread the word!
Please forward this call for contributions to others (people, FabLabs) you think may be interested in adding something to the book. The more variety and diversity we have in the contributed stories, the richer and more inspiring the result will be to all of us.
Important info
Looking forward to hear from you!
Pictures from printing FabYearBook 2010
FabYearBook 2010 - The How And Why 3
We, the Dutch FabLab community just released a year book for the FabLab community. The first ever year book actually. Consistent with FabLab principles the release was printing the book physically in the CabFabLab in the Hague, and sharing the digital files online so you can make your own copy. Download the FabYearBook 2010 and instructions on how to put it together.
This post is about how the year book came about, and some of the rationale behind it.
FabYearBook 2010
The idea for the FabYearBook came from two things. First, when visiting the then still very empty space that now is becoming the FabLab Groningen, I saw how Bart Kempinga had put together a reader with print-outs from different FabLab websites from around the world. He had placed that reader on a table in the middle of that big white empty room. Visitors and potential partners leafed through it, and it helped them paint with their imagination a vision of what the FabLab Groningen could be on the bare walls around them.
Bart Kempinga with his ‘scrapbook’ in a still empty FabLab Groningen
Second, I worked with a group of students at the local university in my home town in the spring of 2009. I gave a few guest lectures on knowledge management and community building. As part of their assignment I asked them to generate ideas on how to stimulate community building in the FabLab network, as well as knowledge sharing. In a bigger list of ideas, the students also came up with the FabYearBook. Marloes Wilmink, Anne Heesink, Eva Rennen and Karlein Sanders were the students that planted the year book idea firmly with me.
Presentation slide by my students
We put forward the idea for a year book at the global Fab5 Conference in India last August, and sent out calls for contributions in November. Actual contributions started coming in around January 15th, with the latest arriving this week Monday. Now, Wednesday we’ve printed the first FabYearBook 2010. More than 50 pages, from mostly ‘close by’ sources, but already with interesting variety and diversity.
Networks, nodes, visibility
In a network all nodes are distributed. That makes it often hard to see the breadth, depth and potential of a network from your perspective as a single node in it. For you and me to perceive the network from our individual position in it, we need to be visible to others and the others need to be visible to us. You probably know a sizable number of the contacts of your own direct contacts, but after that visibility of people/nodes brakes down quickly. To look further, over that ‘2 degrees out’-horizon from your own position, we need tools. Network visualizations are helpful. Sharing stories from the network in the network is helpful too. All this is true for the global FabLab Network as well. Some nodes are highly visible and see a lot, others are mostly dark nodes in the overall network fabric. The FabYearBook 2010 is a first attempt to share stories in a more persistent way, a beacon as it were in the FabLab landscape. So that visibility can improve, and new connections can be made.
Community, rhythm, predictability
Functioning communities show a number of characteristics that can be also purposefully used to create circumstances for community to grow and blossom. Community creates these characteristics, but the characteristics also help create community.
Rhythm is such a characteristic of community. Our society has rhythms on larger and smaller scales. They help us to feel as part of a whole, and give us predictability where there actually is none. Christmas is such a macro-rhythm in the western world. Even if you haven’t seen your family for a full year, you’ll be welcomed at Christmas. Weekends are a rhythm like that too. Morning coffees as well. For the Dutch FabLab community we’ve set a rhythm through FabTables, regular meet-ups at 6 weeks intervals with a fixed date and time. Anyone is welcome, and they always take place no matter what. I’ve done the same with my wife Elmine to get our local GeekLounges going, at a 2 month interval. Even if you have to miss out on one or two, you know you’ll be welcome at the next get-together, and when it takes place. An existing macro-rhythm for the FabLab community is the yearly Fab Conference. It’s FabLab’s Christmas so to speak. You have to travel for it, and meet up with the extended family as it were. The year book hopefully will serve as a new macro-rhythm, about half way (January) between two Fab conferences (August), and it comes to you.
Looking forward to when next year January sees the next FabYearBook coming out.
The First FabYearBook Is Here / Come Get It
Yesterday saw the first FabTable (a 6-weekly informal and open get-together of the Dutch FabLab network) of 2010. We kicked off the new year at the CabFabLab in The Hague, with Xander and Gertjan being great hosts again.
During the FabTable we printed and released the first ever FabYearBook! With contributions from different labs, lots of photos and stories of projects made in a FabLab and some good articles on open design, the meaning of FabLab, and how to get one started, this first edition comes in at 53 pages. Mark Kizelshteyn, at home at CabFabLab, designed the cover that is created with a laser cutter.
Laser cut the cover, then connect the dots
Mark also wrote the instructable that you can use to figure out how to download and print your copy of the FabYearBook 2010, and put it together.
The FabYearBook 2010, have fun reading!
We’re counting on you to contribute to the FabYearBook 2011, which will appear in January next year. Watch your e-mail inbox in the fall for the call for contributions.
Let's Make A FabYearBook!
January 2010 will see the release of the first FabYearBook ever. The FabYearBook won’t be a regular book of course, but a book consistent with the FabLab concept: every FabLab that wants to can contribute a part of the whole, and the resulting design file for the complete book will be distributed. Every FabLab then can print the FabYearBook in the way it sees fit, using the materials they have at hand. It is entirely imaginable that the FabYearBook will be a salon table glossy in the Netherlands, a wooden etching in Costa Rica, or a calendar in Afghanistan.
With the FabYearBook we want to highlight the diversity, inventivity and creativity of the worldwide FabLab network, and make our unity more tangible at the same time.
We invite all of you to contribute to the FabYearBook. Would you like to add a page (text, images, lasercut design, instructable etc.) or more to the FabYearBook? Let us know (ton@fablab.nl)! Contributions can be in English, Dutch or any other language (as long as you state in which language it is, and adding an English summary would be great!)
The date the FabYearBook will first be issued is January 27th, at the New Years Meetup of FabLab Netherlands. We will print the first hardcopy live at the event, and will send out the digital files to all contributors and FabLabs worldwide. The printing of the first hard copy will be streamed live on the FabLab video conferencing system, as well as on Qik/Youtube.
Please make sure your contribution, in any shape or form, reaches us before December 25th 2009 at ton@fablab.nl
We gaan een FabYearBook maken!
In januari verschijnt het eerste FabYearBook. Het FabYearBook is niet een gewoon boek, maar een boek in lijn met het FabLab concept: ieder FabLab dat wil levert een onderdeel aan, en het ontwerp van het geheel wordt weer digitaal naar iedereen verspreid. Uiteindelijk kan elk FabLab het FabYearBook printen en vermenigvuldigen op de manier en met de materialen die men zelf wil. Zo zou het FabYearBook zomaar zowel een scheurkalender in Afghanistan kunnen worden, een houtgravure in Costa Rica, als een salontafelboek in Groningen.
Met het FabYearBook willen we de diversiteit, veelzijdigheid, inventiviteit en creativiteit van het wereldwijde FabLab netwerk tastbaar maken. Daarbij is ook jouw bijdrage welkom! Heb je een pagina (tekst, beeld, gelasercut ontwerp, instructable etc.) of meerdere om toe te voegen? Laat het weten (ton@fablab.nl)! Inzendingen mogen in het Nederlands, Engels of elke andere taal (als je er maar bij zegt welke taal het is, en een Engelse samenvatting geeft)
De verschijningsdatum voor het FabYearBook is 27 januari, de nieuwjaarsreceptie van FabLab Nederland. Dan wordt het eerste exemplaar live geprint, en het ontwerp digitaal aan alle andere labs ter beschikking gesteld. Het printen van het eerste exemplaar zal per video live worden getoond in het FabLab videoconferencing systeem, en eveneens live op Qik/Youtube te volgen zijn.
Het FabYearBook is als concept bedacht door studenten van de Saxion Hogeschool voor de zomer, in het kader van het versterken van de FabLab community.
Lever je bijdrage in welke vorm dan ook voor 25 december 2009 aan. Mail ton@fablab.nl.
