This document summarizes Peter Troxler's background and involvement in the Fab Lab movement. It discusses key thinkers and texts related to digital fabrication and the Third Industrial Revolution, including Neil Gershenfeld, Jeremy Rifkin, and Chris Anderson. It also touches on challenges around organizing the Fab Lab ecosystem through collective action and self-organization while protecting open access to knowledge.

1. Third Industrial Revolution
?
Peter Troxler

2. Peter Troxler
• Industrial Engineer
– PhD 1999
– Factory Automation
– Knowledge Management / Research
• Community
– Fringe theater company and arts festivals (1990s; 2000s)
– Knowledge management researchers (2000s)
• Fab Lab
– 2008/09 Fab Lab Amsterdam
– 2010 Fab6
– Fab Lab Luzern (Switzerland), Rotterdam (NL)
– International Fab Lab Association

3. Third Industrial Revolution
?
Peter Troxler

4. Industrial Revolution
• Neil Gershenfeld, 2005:
Fab. The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop
• Jeremy Rifkin, 2011:
The Third Industrial Revolution. How Lateral
Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy,
and the World.
• Chris Anderson, 2012:
Makers: The New Industrial Revolution

5. Gershenfeld
[P]ossession of the means for industrial production has long been the
dividing line between workers and owners. But if those means are easily
acquired, and designs freely shared, then hardware is likely to follow the
evolution of software. Like its software counterpart, opensource
hardware is starting with simple fabrication functions, while nipping at
the heels of complacent companies that don’t believe that personal
fabrication “toys” can do the work of their “real” machines. That
boundary will recede until today’s marketplace evolves into a continuum
from creators to consumers, servicing markets ranging from one to one
billion. (FAB. The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop, 2005)

6. Gershenfeld
http://web.media.mit.edu/%7emonster/screambody/screambodydiag.jpg, rights unclear

7. Gershenfeld
[T]he killer app for personal fabrication in the developed world is
technology for a market of one, personal expression in technology (…).
And the killer app for the rest of the planet is [to overcome] the
instrumentation and the fabrication divide, people locally developing
solutions to local problems. (TED talk, 2006)

8. Gershenfeld 2
• Examples from book
http://web.media.mit.edu/%7emonster/screambody/screambodydiag.jpg, rights unclear

9. Anderson
In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the
New Bits (Wired, January 25, 2010)
Local Motors: Rally Fighter
$50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer
“crowdsourced” design, BMW clean diesel engine
Gizmodo, January 26, 2010:
Atoms Are Not Bits; Wired Is Not A Business
Magazine

10. Rifkin
[T]he conventional top-down organization of society that characterized
much of the economic, social, and political life of the fossil-fuel based
industrial revolutions is giving way to distributed and collaborative
relationships in the emerging green industrial era. We are in the midst of
a profound shift in the very way society is structured, away from
hierarchical power and toward lateral power.

11. Rifkin
[A] new digital manufacturing revolution now opens up the possibility of
(…) the production of durable goods. In the new era, everyone can
potentially be their own manufacturer (…). Welcome to the world of
distributed manufacturing.

12. Rifkin
1st revolution 2nd revolution 3rd revolution
Printing press Electrical com- Internet
Steam-powered munication Renewables
technology Oil-powered Smart buildings
combustion Smart grid
engine
E-mobility
19th century 20th century

13. OSS = OSH ?
Or: Is Fab Lab Easy?
• continuum from creators to consumers
• killer app = market of one

14. OSS = OSH ?
Or: Is Fab Lab Easy?
“[I]t would be naïve to believe that open source software practices could
be simply copied and applied to the manufacturing domain without any
alteration or adaptation, ignoring the constraints and opportunities that
the materiality of hardware entails.”
“[M]ore than four in five Fab Labs are set up and run by institutions
rooted in the old world order that by their very nature struggle to
understand polycentric structures and heterarchies, are alien to lateral
power relationships, and a fail to embrace a peer-production commons.”

15. Gilbreth
Frank Bunker Gilbreth
1868 - 1924
scientific management
motion study

16. Industrial Revolution

17. Industrial Revolution
• Efficiency
• Exploitation of Labour
• Command and Control
• Time Motion Studies
• …
http://cdn.politicalscrapbook.net/wp-
content/uploads/2011/01/stakhanov_coal_face.jpg?cda6c1

18. Tavistock Institute 1951
Socio-technical system
1960s
Eric Trist
Ken Bamforth
Fred Emery

19. HOW TO RUN A FACTORY

20. Eric Steven Raymond
The Cathedral and the Bazaar (2000)
Linux is subversive.
Linus Torvalds’s style of development—release early and often, delegate
everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise.
cathedral … carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages
working in splendid isolation
a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (…) out of
which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a
succession of miracles

21. Raymond
I think the future of open-source software will increasingly belong to
people who know how to play Linus’s game, people who leave behind the
cathedral and embrace the bazaar. This is not to say that individual
vision and brilliance will no longer matter; rather, I think that the cutting
edge of open-source software will belong to people who start from
individual vision and brilliance, then amplify it through the effective
construction of voluntary communities of interest. (p. 23)

22. Yochai Benkler
on a political economy of information
1. economic—concerned with the organization
of production and consumption in this
economy
2. political—concerned with how we pursue
autonomy, democracy, and social justice in
this new condition

23. Kurt Lewin (1952), Field theory in social science: Selected theoretical papers by Kurt Lewin. London: Tavistock. p. 169
THERE IS NOTHING MORE
PRACTICAL THAN A GOOD THEORY

24. Practice
• in music • piracy is the new radio’
(Neil Young)
• in journalism • e.g. Huffington Post
• in encyclopedia • Wikipedia has outgrown
its printed predecessors
in volume, depth,
recency and use.

25. Yochai Benkler
COMMONS-BASED peer production is a socio-economic system of production
that is emerging in the digitally networked environment. Facilitated by the
technical infrastructure of the Internet, the hallmark of this socio-technical
system is collaboration among large groups of individuals, sometimes in the
order of tens or even hundreds of thousands, who cooperate effectively to
provide information, knowledge or cultural goods without relying on either
market pricing or managerial hierarchies to coordinate their common
enterprise.
Benkler, Y., and H. Nissenbaum. (2006) Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue.
The Journal of Political Philosophy 14, no. 4: 394–419.

26. How do we organize the ecosystem
• Text books
• Industrial practice
• Consultants

27. Fab now
• Neil Gershenfeld
• “outreach programme”, started 2003
• FAB, the book
“The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed” William Gibson

28. Landscape

29. How do we organize the ecosystem
• How to build effective forms of collective action and
self-organisation, for Fab Labs?
• how to break free from traditional systems and
creatively design new systems that tap into the
capabilities of distributed digital manufacturing?
• How to evaluate developments and monitor progress?
• How to achieve equity and fairness?
• How to protect the interests and creative freedom of
makers while also ensuring wide access to new
knowledge, processes and products?
• What are appropriate and effective “business models”
for distributed digital manufacturing?

30. How?
Option 1
traditional knowledge of governance
Option 2
experience from OSS
Option 3
trial and error, perpetual beta
Option 3+
what do we know

31. WHAT DO WE KNOW?

32. • Ronald H. Coase, 1937
The Nature of the Firm
• Mancur Olson, 1965
The Logic of Collective Action
• Oliver E. Williamson, 1981
The Economics of Organization: The
Transaction Cost Approach

33. Ellinor Ostrom
• 1990. Governing the Commons, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
• with Charlotte Hess, 2003. “Ideas, Artifacts,
and Facilities: Information as a Common- Pool
Resource.” Law and Contemporary Problems
66, Winter/Spring: 111–145.
• with Charlotte Hess, 2007. Understanding
Knowledge as a Commons. From Theory to
Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

34. Yochai Benkler
• 2002. “Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature
of the Firm.” Yale Law Journal, 112: 369–446
• 2003. “Freedom in the Commons: Towards a
Political Economy of Information.” Duke Law
Journal 52: 1245–1276.
• 2004. “Sharing nicely: on sharable goods and the
emergence of sharing as a modality of economic
production,” Yale Law Journal, 114 , 273–358.

35. Christian Siefkes
• 2008. “From Exchange to Contributions.
Generalizing Peer Production Into the Physical
World.” Berlin: Siefke.

36. Eric von Hippel
• with Jeroen P J de Jong and Stephen Flowers.
2010. Comparing Business and Household
Sector Innovation in Consumer Products:
Findings From a Representative Study in the
UK.
• Hippel, von, Eric. “Open Source Projects as
Horizontal Innovation Networks - by and for
Users.” MIT Sloan School of Management
Working Paper.

37. Tineke M. Egyedi and Donna C. Mehos
• 2012. Inverse Infrastructures. Disrupting
Networks from Below.

38. Peter Troxler
• 2010. “Commons-Based Peer-Production of Physical
Goods Is There Room for a Hybrid Innovation
Ecology?.” Free Culture Conference, Berlin.
• 2011. “Libraries of the Peer Production Era.” In: Open
Design Now. Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive.
• 2012. Making the Third Industrial Revolution. The
Struggle for Polycentric Structures a New Peer-
Production Commons in the Fab Lab Community. In:
Shape your world. Theoretical, empirical and practical
insights into FabLabs.

39. Epistemology
in philosophy: in “practice”:
the study or a theory of Karin Knorr-Cetina
the nature and grounds of Epistemic Cultures
knowledge especially with an "amalgam of
reference to its limits and arrangements and
validity mechanisms – bonded
through affinity, necessity
and historical coincidence
– which in a given field,
make up how we know
what we know"

40. LET’S ORGANIZE THAT 3RD
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

41. Organize? Really?
• YES
– banque
– Lenin
• NO
– be prepared to get surprised
– dare to fail
– disagree, but constructively