FabLab Year Book Released! The Why and How.

We in the Dutch FabLab community just released a year book for the FabLab community. The first ever year book actually. Consistent with FabLab principles the release was printing the book physically in the CabFabLab in the Hague, and sharing the digital files online so you can make your own copy. Download the FabYearBook 2010 and instructions on how to put it together.

This post is about how the year book came about, and some of the rationale behind it.

What's a FabLab?
A FabLab is a workshop that contains industrial quality equipment that is controlled by widely available software like Google Sketchup, Inkscape or Coreldraw. It puts the power to produce basically anything into your hands as an individual. It does for production what social media does for publishing and sharing. You hit print on your computer, and end up with a physical product. There are four of these FabLabs in the Netherlands, and a couple of dozen worldwide. In the past 2 years I've seen things being 'printed' as diverse as furniture, food, fashion, car and motor parts, jewelry, lamps, and toys. As prototype or as personal unique product. It's amazing and hugely empowering. Remember how amazing it was when you first started blogging: the relationships suddenly forming, the value of conversations? This is the same all over, but now you're turning bits into atoms and change your physical environment.

FabYearBook 2010
The idea for the FabYearBook came from two things. First, when visiting the then still very empty space that now is becoming the FabLab Groningen, I saw how Bart Kempinga had put together a reader with print-outs from different FabLab websites from around the world. He had placed that reader on a table in the middle of that big white empty room. Visitors and potential partners leafed through it, and it helped them paint with their imagination a vision of what the FabLab Groningen could be on the bare walls around them.

Bart Kempinga with his 'scrapbook' in a still empty FabLab Groningen

Second, I worked with a group of students at the local university in my home town in the spring of 2009. I gave a few guest lectures on knowledge management and community building. As part of their assignment I asked them to generate ideas on how to stimulate community building in the FabLab network, as well as knowledge sharing. In a bigger list of ideas, the students also came up with the FabYearBook. Marloes Wilmink, Anne Heesink, Eva Rennen and Karlein Sanders were the students that planted the year book idea firmly with me.

Presentation slide by my students

We put forward the idea for a year book at the global Fab5 Conference in India last August, and sent out calls for contributions in November. Actual contributions started coming in around January 15th, with the latest arriving this week Monday. Now, Wednesday we've printed the first FabYearBook 2010. More than 50 pages, from mostly 'close by' sources, but already with interesting variety and diversity.

Making the year book was not just about making a book, it is an intervention in the global network and community as well. There's two components to that: visibility and rhythm.

Networks, nodes, visibility
In a network all nodes are distributed. That makes it often hard to see the breadth, depth and potential of a network from your perspective as a single node in it. For you and me to perceive the network from our individual position in it, we need to be visible to others and the others need to be visible to us. You probably know a sizable number of the contacts of your own direct contacts, but after that visibility of people/nodes brakes down quickly. To look further, over that '2 degrees out'-horizon from your own position, we need tools. Network visualizations are helpful. Sharing stories from the network in the network is helpful too. All this is true for the global FabLab Network as well. Some nodes are highly visible and see a lot, others are mostly dark nodes in the overall network fabric. The FabYearBook 2010 is a first attempt to share stories in a more persistent way, a beacon as it were in the FabLab landscape. So that visibility can improve, and new connections can be made.

Community, rhythm, predictability
Functioning communities show a number of characteristics that can be also purposefully used to create circumstances for community to grow and blossom. Community creates these characteristics, but the characteristics also help create community.

Rhythm is such a characteristic of community. Our society has rhythms on larger and smaller scales. They help us to feel as part of a whole, and give us predictability where there actually is none. Christmas is such a macro-rhythm in the western world. Even if you haven't seen your family for a full year, you'll be welcomed at Christmas. Weekends are a rhythm like that too. Morning coffees as well. For the Dutch FabLab community we've set a rhythm through FabTables, regular meet-ups at 6 weeks intervals with a fixed date and time. Anyone is welcome, and they always take place no matter what. I've done the same with Elmine to get our local GeekLounges going, at a 2 month interval. Even if you have to miss out on one or two, you know you'll be welcome at the next get-together, and when it takes place. An existing macro-rhythm for the FabLab community is the yearly Fab Conference. It's FabLab's Christmas so to speak. You have to travel for it, and meet up with the extended family as it were. The year book hopefully will serve as a new macro-rhythm, about half way (January) between two Fab conferences (August), and it comes to you.

The finished year book

Looking forward to when next year January sees the next FabYearBook coming out!

Do You Know Academic Sources Regarding Group Size?

In blog based discussions there has been talk of 'effective' group sizes and network sizes in the past (see some of it here from 2003 and 2004). Most of that however was always based on anecdotal 'laws' or Dunbar's number (the application of which I usually see as the mis-interpretation of Dunbar's theory).

Working in different groups.

Of course I know from personal experience the size of groups I am comfortable with in different settings. I like working on concrete tasks with 1 or 2 others, I like teams of 5, I like doing interactive sessions with 8 to 16 people, with an optimum of 12, I enjoyed working for a company where the communication habits didn't scale beyond 16, I like to do open conversational sessions with 20 to 25 people, and I like to present to larger audiences.

But what are the 'transition points' in group size? How much people do you need to have enough variety in a group to increase the learning in that group during learning activities? When does communication overhead become too big to stay with 1 on 1 connections and additional group roles or tools to facilitate communication are needed?
I can imagine all kinds of variables coming into play: variety of skills in the group, group inertia (though the work of Olson seems proven to be false), organizational overhead needed, cognitive overhead, communication needs, in-/outgroup aspects, peer pressure, etc.
All these factors are probably depending on what needs to be done: group learning, a concrete task, problem solving, collective action etc.

Is there any academic source you are aware of, or empirical studies you've seen that cover this, or at least aspects of it? Any pointers are welcome. I will of course blog what I find / receive.

Working in different groups.