The central goal of developing a People and Skills Standard is to create a shared understanding of the explicit, implicit, tacit, and procedural knowledge necessary for individual makers to participate in and easily navigate a distributed manufacturing ecosystem; this navigation will be enabled by using a digital ‘maker passport,’ the criteria for which will be defined by maker community members.
An immediate use case for this work is application to the open system infrastructure developed as part of the pan-African mAKe project. Participating makers who are issued a digital ‘Maker Passport’ will have a way to communicate experience and skill levels automatically for ease of navigation through the ecosystem (estimate of 500+ instances) of Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs).
In an effort to launch this work in a transparent and community-centered way, I have outlined the People and Skills work, including long and short-term goals, as well as a timeline in this public pad: People and Skills Specification Overview.
I invite you all to have a look and provide your feedback and/or questions, keeping in mind that this is a very general outline scoping the work.
I have established a critical mass of individuals who are interested in being involved in a kickoff discussion, and I am looking at early January to schedule a meeting. If you are interested in joining this community dialog, please respond here or I can be reached at sarah.hutton@internetofproduction.org
We also invite you to contribute to our growing list of resources and research on maker passports, which, as a Discourse user, you can freely edit as part of the wiki functionality.
