Building a Maker Community Around an Open Hardware Platform
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CHI 2017 Denver (CO) - 11/5/17
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Building a Maker Community Around an Open Hardware Platform
- 1. BUILDING A MAKER COMMUNITY Around an Open Hardware Platform FABIO MORREALE GIULIO MORO ALAN CHAMBERLAIN STEVE BENFORD ANDREW MCPHERSON
- 2. • Hacker and maker communities formed around toolkits and platforms • Previous studies in HCI have mostly focused on established communities • The process by which user groups develop around a new digital tool is overlooked • No previous attempts to identify design decisions that influence the formation of a community of makers exist
- 3. What design factors can promote the successful uptake of a maker platform ?
- 4. open source embedded hardware for creating musical instrument and audio applications
- 5. embedded BeagleBone Black / 1 GHz ARM processor it can be powere d from battery
- 6. connected 8x, 16-bit Analog Out 8x, 16-bit Analog In16 digital GPIO Stereo Audio I/O
- 8. easy to get started
- 9. easy to get started C / C++=
- 10. research tool 2014 2 absence of tools that could satisfy the requirement for the development of the D- Box 2015 2016 2017
- 11. first public workshop instrument designers developed more code and applications for the board 10 2014 2015 2016 2017
- 12. teaching tool A few students contributed new features relevant to their own work (simple API) 30 2014 2015 2016 2017
- 13. open source release & hackathons free to attend possible to buy the hardware new instrument created 50 2014 2015 2016 2017
- 14. 201 4 201 5 201 6 201 7 kickstarter campaign mailing list subscription social media promotion updates & stretch goals 500
- 15. spin-off company direct hardware sales to support the continuing development of the platform 201 4 201 5 201 6 201 7
- 16. 850
- 18. C / C++ FAUST
- 19. what kind of project do you intend to use Bela for? Music / audio DSP Teaching Prototyping Fun Other C / C++ Pd FAUST Supercollider Python Max/Msp what programming language do you intend to use?
- 20. 2014 2015 2016 2017 communitysize STEIM workshop CHI 2017 submission 2 10 30 50 800 850 500 700 D-Box First workshop Teaching platform Open source release Kickstarter Spin-off
- 25. motivation to participate in the workshop team credibility giving back to the community collocated support I’ve been using supercollider for 12 years. Very actively. And other people invested a lot of time on it. I am just giving back to the community. I am contributing where I can. “
- 26. motivation to use Bela technological innovation improved user experience I have been building instruments for 6 years now. Bela addresses a lot of issues that I encountered so far. In particular low latency. This is a percussive instrument I don’t want to experience any latency. “
- 27. I Design for specific applications We didn’t set out to design a platform. We made an instrument for our own research and gradually made the tool more general
- 28. II Search for signature features New creative possibilities can result from major improvements to existing technologies
- 29. III Low barriers to entry Open source release is not by itself a low barrier to entry.
Editor's Notes
- The work that I present today is about the emergence of a community of makers around a new hardware platform I'll first describe our experience with a case study and then I'll generalise our findings offering suggestions for those interested in building a maker community
- the context is that of * hacker and maker communities a context quite deeply studied inHCI especially with respect to established communities * Arduino community, lilypad *** * this gap is partially due to the fact that the identification of a group of people as a “community” can only be done retrospectively and also
- the question of this paper is * we tried to answer to this question with an inductive approach I'll present a longitudinal study describing the emergence of a community of makers using
- developed by some colleagues of mine at AIL - C4DM that has some interesting features
- it is an embedded system designed to fit inside a musical instrument it is a single board computer so there is no need for a laptop it is based on a bbb with a custom hardware cape
- it is connected the board has stereo audio IO plus analog and digital IO for connecting sensors and actuators this makes it an ideal tool for tangible interactive system
- bela is designed for extremely low latency Bela uses a hard real-time Linux kernel to run audio code at higher priority than the entire OS the resulting latency is < 1ms and that’s much faster than any laptop audio system
- and it is easy to get started there is no need to install complex software just plug the board and connect your browser to get a fully featured ide ** including an in-browser oscilloscope
- another very important aspect that makes it easy to get started is that it supports existing popular prog. lang. so there is no need to relearn from scratch a new language
- now that I described a bit what Bela is I will go throught the cronology of the formation of the community i'll have a look at the the most important events that contributed increasing the community size *An early version of Bela was developed as a research tool we needed a tool for the D-Box, this musical instrument, that had a few technical requirements that none of the existing solutions could satisfy in particular: being embedded, good computational power, large number of analog I/O with very low latency at this point the Bela adopters was formed just by two people
- in late 2014 we run a first workshop at a london hackspace to let people develop other code for the board and more people stared using the platform
- in 2015 was used in DSP class for master students at qmul * The needs of the class influenced the development of Bela it was important for the future community uptake (Low cost, simple API) airharp
- in april 2015 the hardware and software were released open source and straight after a number of workshops and hackhatons were organised in london this resulted in around 50 regular users outside the university
- a very important transition point was the lunch of the kickstarter campaign in 2016 which was necessary to manifacture the product in large quantity prior the launch mailing list subscription having a solid user base resulted being very important for the dissemination of the campaign During social media promotion, updates and stretch goals the campaign was successfull and at the end once the boards were shipped the community counted more than 500 users
- in late 2016 a spin-off company was created to support *
- while doing the campaign we were also building a network of support resources such as
- Online forum, which to some extent is representative of the dynamics of the community most discussions initiated to look for help some members shared newly developed features but also particularly around the time of the ks capaing we started noticing spontaneous contributions
- several bela users added support to other programming languages, sometimes with help from the bela team so pyo, supercollider, and faust were added to the list of programming languages so, now the campaign is over the community has finally some interesting number we wanted to better understand the characteristics of our community
- we sent a survey to our backers to get shipping addresses and We included questions about what they were planning to do with Bela the results showed that community comes from a specific domain (audio/music) rather than a general maker platform like arduino
- this is a summary of the chronology of Bela the survey gave us a broad but shallow overview of our community but we wanted to know more deeply why and how people used Bela to better portrait the charachteristics of our community so we organised an intensive design workshop in Amsterdam at STEIM, renowned centre for experimental music with this workshop we wanted to better understand our users, their motivations, concerns, practices, and priorities and we wanted to write a CHI paper and this was the submission deadline
- the workshop at steim lasted 3 days and 8 Participants join the workshop with the goal to port their instrument to Bela Activities initial demo Bela tutorial
- for the remaining 2 days and half participants were involved in hands on porting final demo
- Want to show you some results
- what was interesting is that one participant expanded core capabilities and created an online tutorial
- Based on dynamics observed during the workshop and the interviews, I now present some aspects that motivated participants’ interest in Bela and in the workshop. Team credibility social presence, the actions that the team has demonstrated that proved an indisputable expertise being open to people's opinion and back user's requests Giving back to the community **** Collocated support make requests to the team learn from programming skills and procedures of the team and other participants
- The technological limitations of existing devices was the main motivation for participants to use Bela Bela offers some technological innovation self-cont low-late **** user experience seamless port without learning a new language coding XP as Bela offers a quality development environment rapid set up -- now I will generalise our findings and present some recommendations we believe are important to allow for a community of makers to exist and develop around a platform.
- Designing for one specific and immediate application can provide focus as opposed to designing general capabilities based on hypothetical future use cases that might fail to provide a unique selling point. bela: ----- we didn’t set out to design a platform, we made an instrument for our own research and gradually made the tool more general Community contributions were driven by immediate personal applications Development of a simple IDE Porting of programming languages
- we suggest that a new platform should have signature features Simple, clear capabilities that go beyond what was easily achievable before *** New creative possibilities do not only result from new categories of technology but also from major improvements to existing technologies for instance, for For LilyPad it was the physical layout of the board, making it suitable for wearable computing For Bela, w1ms latency and self-containedness
- we stressed the importance of the simplicity of getting started, where only a browser is needed Open-source release is not by itself a low barrier to entry learning unfamiliar code takes time indeed in our case whether or not Pd, SC, or FAUST are ideal tools is less important than having large groups of people already knowing how to use them
- finally, In analysing the growth of the bela community we observed a phenomenon that we call pluggable communities Our communitiy has grouwn in a series of discrete leaps that are often enabled by connecting bela to other establisehd tools with their own commuynity **** People that joined bela community are not leaving their original commuynity, rather by porting these sw to bela the two communities connects and they both benefit from this connection by growing their user base and expanding their range of applications // porting SC to Bela rather than building a new language reconises that SC has evolved over many years to suit the needs of its community, and that significant expertise has developed *** to conclude, we believe that this concept of pluggable communities is central for the uptake of a maker platform, indeed If Bela was not easily connectible to familiar tools, would developers still take the time to understand its code well enough to contribute to its development?