Civic making merges the maker movement's spirit with youth development and service learning, emphasizing community engagement through making and problem-solving. The initiative encourages collaboration within communities to identify and address issues via technology and DIY strategies. Upcoming projects will focus on sustainability and community revitalization, leveraging diverse skills from participants to develop innovative solutions.

1. CIVIC MAKING
Connecting makers to community
December 8, 2015
PaulTreadwell
@ptreadwell

2. Hello!
I am Paul
Treadwell
I am Distance Learning Advisor at Cornell
Cooperative Extension. I also work (when I
can) with youth and technology in NewYork
State, and Nicaragua.
My blog is at: http://paultreadwell.com
You can find me onTwitter: @ptreadwell

3. Civic making fuses the spirit & energy of the
Maker Movement with youth development
and service learning.

4. Defining our conversation
■ Civic – Of or relating to the duties or activities of people in relation to their town, city, or
local area - OED online
■ Making - The process of making or producing something - OED online
■ Maker Movement - the name given to the increasing number of people employing do-it-
yourself (DIY) and do-it-with-others ( DIWO) techniques and processes to develop unique
technology products. - techopedia

5. Make, hack, fab, tinker and/or DIY
■ Knowledge sharing
■ Increasing availability of inexpensive hardware
■ Sharing of expensive components
■ Evolution and also a reconnection
– Long history of DIY
– Hacking
– Crafting

6. MAKING IN, FOR, AND
WITH COMMUNITY
From self-referential to tech transfer to participatory development

7. Making in community
■ Organized spaces:
– Makerspaces, fablabs, etc. as community.
– Membership, norms, rules…..

8. Making in
community
Knowledge sharing
Tool sharing
Cost sharing
Personal expression

9. Making for community:
■ I have an idea:
– Making to solve an issue or problem
■ I have the expertise.
■ Here is the thing I made to fix x.

10. I can fix that!
I see the problems
I see the solution
I’ll build the solution
Technology transfer

11. Making with community:
■ Making with community:
– Making in consultation and collaboration with a specific community to identify,
define and solve an issue or problem.

12. We can…
Define the problem together
Develop solutions together
And do it again…
Participatory design and development

13. Technology as tool for change?

14. Making
technology
‘appropriate’

16. Weaving technology and community
action together
■ Pilot session July 2015
■ Youth gathered data about
community issues
■ Design teams focused on an issue
and developed a prototype solution
■ Civic making seeks to enlarge the
scope and impact of making in order
to embed the practices and
affordances a diy mindset into the
reality of our lives as civic beings.

17. Civic makers pilot July 2015

19. Making for Sustainability –
Technology, community and
agriculture.■ Our focus for 2016:
– How does technology connect communities? How can the Maker Movement
contribute to sustainability? During this session we’ll explore these questions in
order to design and prototype technologies and systems for a vibrant, multifaceted
community nexus.
– Some of the issues we’ll be exploring include: sustainability and innovative food
production, community revitalization and the value of technology and its role in
forging community.We’ll work with 3D Modeling, 3D printing, Arduino/RaspberryPi ,
littleBits, pen and paper and more to develop solutions to our design challenges.
– We’d love to have a mixed group of artists and tech savvy participants for this
session. Help us build a diverse team for this community focused session.

20. Computational to procedural to
community literacy
■ Making is an act of agency.
■ Working with technology develops a mindset, a literacy.
■ By developing an understanding of code, and coding practices, participants will develop a
procedural literacy that can then be used to understand, re-create and build a diverse
range of systems, including technological, legal, governmental and social systems.

21. The praxis of civic making
■ It is critical reflection and action in order to transform reality.
■ It creates an explicit relationship between:
– a concrete community with issues and needs
– digital/computational literacy and maker mindsets
■ It is critical hope in action.

22. Inspirations and others doing similar
■ IDEO – Human Centered Design
– https://www.ideo.com/work/human-centered-design-toolkit
■ Fab Labs and other MIT things
– https://www.fablabs.io/
– http://littledevices.org/
– And much more
■ Meaningful Making – Projects and inspirations from FabLabs and Makerspaces (pdf)
– http://fablearn.stanford.edu/fellows/sites/default/files/Blikstein_Martinez_Pang-
Meaningful_Making_book.pdf

25. My contact info
■ PaulTreadwell
– pt36@cornell.edu
– @ptreadwell
– http://paultreadwell.com

26. Image credits
■ John Dewey - http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3a51565/
■ Making in community from: http://www.msichicago.org/whats-here/fab-lab/
■ I can fix that: http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/72700/72765/72765_burroughs.htm
■ All other photos - PaulTreadwell