Peter Troxler

Unconferencing as method … New Paper Published

In 2008 I had the chance to design and run a 24-hour creative marathon for ETH Zurich (for details and credits see here). The over 100 participants generated 17 project proposals how to reduce CO2 emissions and energy consumption at this university. Not only was this great fun to do; Patricia Wolf and Ralf Hansmann,…

Open Data Special @ PICNIC ’10

Open Data Special @ PICNIC’10 Frank Kresin, Karen van der Molen and Tom Demeyer, all Waag Society, Amsterdam, served a whole day of discussion on Open Data at the 5th Picnic media festival last Friday, 24th September. The day consisted of presentations from a panel of five experts in the morning and an—extremely well-attended—bar-camp like…

FAB6 Programme Is Shaping Up

FAB6 is the 6th International Fab Lab Forum and Symposium on Digital Fabrication — I’m proud to be helping the organizers to put together the programme (for details check here: http://fab6.nl). This will be an exciting week!

3rd Free Culture Research Conference

The 3rd Free Culture Research Conference will bring together scholars whose work contributes to the promotion, study or criticism of a Free Culture. Together, we will as, a multidisciplinary group of academic peers and practitioners, identify the most important research opportunities and challenges, and attempt to chart the future of Free Culture. http://wikis.fu-berlin.de/display/fcrc/Home

Commons-based Peer Production of Physical Gods — Is There Room for a Hybrid Innovation Ecology?

I’ll be addressing how Fab Labs are positioned around ‘open sourcing’ hardware, a territory hardly ever explored in research, maybe apart from the open design people such as Ronen Kadushin and the people around Kerstin Balka. The paper will then report a number of case studies where ‘open source’ in hardware really has happened. From…

OHANDA: an open hardware “trademark”?

OHANDA (http://www.ohanda.org/) — short for Open Hardware and Design Alliance — has proposed a system to “open source” hardware by taking the four freedoms from the software world and transferring them to the hardware world. On a superficial level this is done by simply replacing the word “program” with the term(s) “device /& design” in…

Congratulations, Ton, and Thank You

Past Friday and Saturday, I spent 2 days with Ton Zylstra and his friends and family celebrating his 40th birthday with an unconference and a BBQ. It was an awesome opportunity to reconnect with old friends and make new ones — and to exchange insights and opinions on stuff as diverse as Lilia’s “unschooling schools”,…

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Creative Commons Patent Licences Anytime Soon?

Creative Commons’ Thinh Nguyen invites us to comment on their new patent tools, the Research Non-Assertion Pledge and the Public Patent License. The address to discuss is the public Creative Commons wiki. These two tools are pieces of the underlying infrastructure for how to share and transform publicly available unpatented know-how and patented inventions. Eventually they…

Designing a Business Model for the Next Digital Revolution: Personal Fabrication

First there was a digital revolution in computation (personal computer), then in communications (convergence and mobile phones). The next digital revolution, according to MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld (2005), is in the field of manufactured physical goods (personal fabrication). Gershenfeld and his colleagues have created so-called Fablabs around the world: fabrication laboratories, equipped with digital fabrication machines…