One of the topics I’ve listed as crucial and strategic for research and the Fab Lab Network / whole Maker movement is: how do we understand the impact of Maker iniatives?
Within the MAKE-IT project tens of Social Impact Assessment (SIA) methodologies were analysed, and they all provide promising approaches for this task. The next question would be: which ones are the most promising, and which ones can we easily implement on Fablabs.io (i.e. which ones can be encoded in software and can be easily scaled with thousands of Labs, Projects and Users)?
This topic might be interesting for several researchers, but as you can see it’s important also for Fablabs.io as a platform!
The methodologies analyzed so far can be found in the D6.2 document and also in this open dataset.