Maker, innovator, and cottage industrialist Dominic Muren wants making to be open, global and modular. He’s just launched his latest project, Alchematter – an online open source platform that breaks down and spells out instructions on how to make, well, anything. He gives us the ins and outs of the site, covering everything from reverse crowdfunding to bricks made of eggshells and pee.

When you first became a Fellow in 2010, you were pretty amped about the concept of skin-skeleton-guts (SSG) manufacturing involving modular electronics — a watch could be modified into a camera, and a camera into a phone, and so on — as well as local production. You wanted to make invention on a small scale possible again.

My design lab the Humblefactory began with this idea of how could I actually be a manufacturer, because it would be fun to make stuff. And then it grew into, “How might I, as an outspoken individual, help this small-scale manufacturing movement grow?” SSG is a design framework that I am still exploring. I’m actually working on putting together a little travel laptop netbook that’s human powered.

But I’m not as single-mindedly focused on electronics anymore. Right now, the main project coming out of Humblefactory is Alchematter.org – a platform that allows makers to share open-source designs for objects. What makes it different from Thingiverse, Instructables and such sites is that what you share on Alchematter is a whole procedure for the creation of objects. Those procedures are defined in a very modular way — which allows them to be really easily remixed or adapted or searched for.

For example, Thingiverse is excellent for describing things 3D printed from plastic or things laser cut, but they basically have to be monolithic, one-off objects. It was meant for: “Here’s a 3D printed part. You want to print this part? Great.”

But what if you wanted to share a procedure for creating, say, a woven piece of cloth? Thingiverse doesn’t have a lot of functionality for instructions. You can write whatever you want, but it doesn’t tell you “Here is the pattern for the cloth, and here is the procedure for using a loom.” Those things — the pattern you follow and the procedure for the loom — are two separate pieces. If you separate those, which Alchematter does, then anytime you want to weave something, you can use the technique for the loom and all you have to switch is the pattern.

Give me an example of something I might want to go to Alchematter for.

Let’s say that you are Peter Haas or one of the other Fellows that has a non-profit that makes a thing, that wants that thing to get massively distributed. The global maker community is a cool way to do that. If you can tell them how to make the thing, then they can just make the thing. You don’t have to spend time replicating it and shipping it, and so on.

The problem with that is the raw materials and the skills and the tools and everything that are available in any one locality are very different from one another. How could you know how to adapt a technique for making a stove, for example?

Let’s say that your non-profit had successfully launched stoves in Rwanda, and you decided, “This is great, we’re going to do it for Bolivia also.” Those are two different places, and it will cost you a lot of money to do the on-the-ground research or partner with an organization. Alchematter lets makers share information about what they’re capable of in Bolivia, building up a knowledge base of what materials are available, what tools are available, even what makers are available — in other words, who are the people who have made projects that look like your stove? And then you can just get on it and say, awesome, here are some of the ways we could tweak it. Here are some of the people we need to get in touch with. These are the materials we might use.

So you’re offering instructions from one place and allowing people with resources, tools, and materials in another place to adapt them.

Yes. The fundamental idea is to separate the description of the object from the restrictions imposed by reality — either because of skills, tools or materials — and to allow much more easy adaptation of designs for things to your local situation.

Another cool thing is that Alchematter modularizes stuff. Again, let’s think about the stove. Let’s say that, in most places, those stoves tend to be made from some kind of factory brick. Let’s say that you wanted to make these stoves in a place that had very low fuel availability, and you wanted to make some kind of method for making a fireproof refractory, so that you didn’t have to fire it — or maybe you had to use a lot less fuel than normal, which would lower the price of the stove.

But this is tricky. How do you do that? There are some methods — for example, there’s this woman who makes bricks out of bacteria and urea, of all things. You can basically pee in a jug, feed it to this bacteria, and its adds urease, an enzyme that breaks down the urea, using that energy to precipitate a calcium ion out of a solution. This makes a marble-like substance.

Out of pee?

Out of pee. It has to be calcium-rich pee, but you could still do that. You could grind up some eggshells with some vinegar that you could make locally using whatever sugar you had. And then you get a bunch of pee. If you put those two solutions together on sand, you get a solid because the calcium sticks the sand together. It’s a ceramic — there’s no glue.

This is the kind of thing that Dow Chemical or Raytheon or somebody develops, but not people in their garages. But Alchematter breaks that fundamental innovation out. You can still define a hypothetical product that uses this pee bacteria thing, and you can say, “Hey, I saw this research that somebody did. I would like to have it adapted to stoves. Here’s the procedure for the stove and here’s the stove I could make if I had this thing and this hypothetical material. I will pay this X bounty for this description.” And then somebody else can come in and say, “Oh, I would pay X bounty,” or “I would pay twice that bounty. My organization can use that too,’ because the thing will be open once it’s shared.

Essentially, you can crowdfund in reverse: instead of a smart person with an idea coming to the community and saying, “Hey, I know how to do this thing. Pay me for it,” you can have someone with a need come to the community and say, “I want this thing pretty bad. Make it for me.” And other people who need it can chip in. So it’s a different model.

How would they know they had a need before the solution was presented?

Since Alchematter is built around these modular procedures, it’s fairly straightforward for a designer to make, say, a table with a marble top. Another maker could pick that procedure up, and make a copy with a hypothetical material in place of the marble — a sort of placeholder, with certain specifications defined. Again, they only know what their limitations are, what skills, materials, costs, levels of energy, or tools do they have access to. So they can pitch in as much as they know, and then rely on the rest of the community to fill in the blanks. In the case above, some other maker might create a new derivative procedure which fills in the marble material with the pee rock from Professor Dosier. That’s how makers help each other be smarter than the sum of their parts.

Where’s all the data coming from, and who’s feeding the information into the system? And who breaks down all the information into modular chunks?

We’re initially targeting hackerspaces, mostly because they do the biggest variety of making. At least in the beginning, this site will look like Thingiverse or Instructables. But when you define a procedure, the platform asks you very clearly: What are the components that are going into this? What’s the technique that transforms them? Defining an entire procedure from scratch is actually a significant amount of work. This is not just like uploading a 3D file and writing a really short description.

But because it’s modular most of the procedures that get made will ultimately actually be remixes of existing pieces. So for example, let’s say that you wanted to make a wood table. You could literally take an existing table and just go into one part which shows the cut list dimensions and change some of the dimensions, or you might add a piece in the assembly drawings that adds a drawer. You append things onto this existing table rather than doing the whole thing from scratch.

But the maker who wants to upload an object is in charge of breaking it out into modular pieces that are going to be understood? That’s a lot of work. Do you provide guidelines?

This is a stepwise, scaffolded process that makes it easy and can distribute the labor. We’re like Wikipedia. Let’s say that you want to define “Barack Obama,” and in order to do that you have to define what a US president is, and in order to do that you have to define what the US is, and that gets complicated. But you can make a stub, and somebody else can improve a procedure by adding what’s missing. And we can encourage people to help flesh out broken pieces of procedures using game mechanics kinds of things — like you get badges or points. Alchematter is just a tool that lives online and has a community that organically participates and grows around it.

We might also offer contests to encourage participation. A competition to make the best stove would encourage a hundred stove design entries. Only one of them wins, but we get a hundred procedures that flesh out the site.

Or there could be a contest asking: “What could you do with pee and eggshells?” It’s really meant to be a cross-disciplinary experience. We want to give undergraduates in mechanical engineering and chemistry and electrical engineering an opportunity to a Capstone project that actually matters rather than a fake startup that you know will never go anywhere. I was part of that machine. The engineering and sciences in undergrad create a lot of work that is unvalued, never given a chance to be used. Alchematter gives such ideas a chance to become a real, practical resource.

How do you ensure safety and quality?

We are actually in the process of figuring out how to deal with liability for users and liability for the community as a whole. Within the method of description, it asks you a number of times, “Enumerate the dangers of this process.” Once you have those things checked, it can do a rating of procedures and it can this is this difficult and dangerous, this is less difficult and dangerous. We also will have a terms of use that basically outlines what is appropriate for the community. It will be very specific. And we will have a community standards review process.

What are the components of the site?

The main two pieces would be that you have a procedure editing facility, searching and editing facility. You can browse as a non-user, but as soon as you want to make something you’ve got to be on the system, because we need to know where that thing came from and how you did it. So you can search for something, browse through, pick up bits and pieces either by taking a procedure and saying, “I want to start with that and I want to make some adjustments,” and that will copy it into your editing space. You can also learn techniques for materials or tools. So in your editing space you have these pallettes of commonly used materials and commonly used techniques and that sort of thing. This chain of nodes combines and combines until you get to one final thing until you get to the point where you find what you want to make.

The site is GUI based. You can also upload photographs, and we encourage videos. But it does have to be scaffolded within that structure: just having one giant video is not the best way. Instruction needs to be modular.

All of the stuff on Alchematter will be on a viral license, a “you have to share and share alike” license. So if you use this thing and you want to share it, then you need to share it in some way, you need to show the whole thing. We would hope that people would be excited to contribute back, but really we’re much more interested in getting to the point where somebody makes the thing from the site. That’s number one. And thing number two is somebody contributes something back to the site.

Dominic Muren on why electronics recycling is stupid, filmed at TEDGlobal 2010.

Do you cater to any kind of maker? Chemists, woodworkers, cooks, knitters?

That’s the most important piece. The coolest things that happen in making happen because you get experts in various domains interacting. You smush them together and end up with something that’s actually new — something that actually never would have happened before.

Whenever I talk about this, everybody immediately says, “Oh, yeah. And the wealthy people in the West would totally be able to give all their knowledge to those people in the developing world.” To me, that misses the point: most of the knowledge that people in the developed West for making stuff is crappy because it requires huge infrastructure and a lot of capital investment and a lot of space. Much of the manufacturing technologies that are being used in the very informal developing world – even the more formalized developed developing world – are smaller-scale tools and small shops and raw materials that actually come from farms rather than coming from Dow Chemical.

I want to catch that information, number one, before globalization of the economy succeeds and wipes them out; or, number two, before shit hits the fan — this massively centralized, industrialized economy runs on oil and it runs on a stable climate — and Dow goes out of business and we don’t have any raw materials. There’s so much good knowledge that is out there that is in danger of dying, either by success or by failure. Both of them are going to kill it.

I’m hopeful that through efforts like Alchematter will be able to capture enough of the knowledge that exists as well as generate new knowledge that doesn’t exist yet that will help us to more gracefully make the continuing transition. It’s going to be all transitions from here on out. We’ve never had stasis. I don’t know if we’ve ever had stasis, but we want to be more graceful in our transition and more resilient in our response.

I also want Alchematter to be an active exchange between art and science. I intend to see, artists who work with science — such as Fellows Kate Nichols or Suzanne Lee — come on the site and learn how to do scientific procedures in order to serve the arts. And I intend to see scientists doing stuff in order to serve the arts rather than only to serve biotech startups because they pay you a lot of money. That’s not the only reason that you should be excited to be a scientist.

How will you get to far-flung places that don’t have the digital reach?

The maker community is quite well distributed around the world. We also have some exciting partners in the Maker community. TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is working with us with Open Source Ecology, Fellow Catarina Mota with Smart Materials, and PopTech Fellow Amy Sun, who runs FabFolk, the social organization that is aligned with fab labs.

This is a powerful community to start with, but we recognize that there will be parts of society that we’ll never be able to reach through a rich web content application. We already are thinking about how are we going to deal with using SMS, or how are we are gisting this stuff so that it can be made into a PDF, or printed on paper. The exciting thing is, because we are modularizing these pieces, it’s easy to omit stuff or restructure this data so that it can fit into a different viewing format, and fit into bit-sized chunks. We know that that is a crucial piece, and we want to capture that information. I want to know how the Maasai make everything. I want to know how the Yanomami make everything. I don’t know how to get to those guys. They don’t even have cell phones. We may have to send Fellows out to gather that information at some point.

Catarina Mota: Play with smart materialsAs Mota demonstrates, smart materials will allow us to make some very cool things. But not a lot of information is currently out there about how these materials are made, how they work, and how they can be used. This is why Mota co-created OpenMaterials.org, a website for the sharing of experiments, information, tutorials and DIY projects involving smart materials.

“Innovation has always been fueled by tinkerers,” says Mota. “So many times, amateurs — not experts — have been the inventors and improvers of things like mountain bikes, personal computers, airplanes.”

To hear some examples of how makers volleying ideas can lead to innovation, watch this talk. And below, Mota shares some of the smart materials gaining momentum on her site.

Conductive Inks are paints infused with conductive particles like silver and carbon. They are used to create both hand-painted and printed electrical traces on paper, and are at the base of one of the most promising branches of material science: printed electronics. Printed electronics allow us to create cheap, flexible and recyclable circuits using standard paper, a slightly modified document printer and conductive ink. The types of conductive ink currently available outside university laboratories are still too resistive to replace copper and other conductors we use for traces. However, conductive ink is a good material for creating sensors in any shape we want — by simply painting them. In the video above, see some experiments I’ve been working on to create variable resistance sensors using only conductive ink, paper and basic electronic components like resistors and transistors.

Muscle Wire is a shape memory alloy that contracts between 3 and 7% when an electrical current runs through it. While this material is not strong enough for heavier applications — like rolling up heavy blinds or pulling any significant weight — it allows us to create motion in a noiseless and smooth way for a number of other applications in which the use of motors is not perfect. On the video above, I used muscle wire to make two small paper wings flap when a handmade paper switch is pushed.

Thermochromic Pigments change color at a given temperature. The two most common types of thermochromic materials are based on either leuco dies or liquid crystals. At specific temperatures the liquid crystals re-orientate to produce an apparent change of color. Thermochromic materials can be triggered by body heat or used in conjunction with heating elements such as nichrome, steel thread or even simply conductive thread. Think: a baby’s bottle that changes color when the milk is cool enough to drink.

Electrotextiles include thread, fabrics and yarn with electrical properties. They are made by blending or coating textiles with metallic fibers and are available in many different weaves and textures. We’re only just discovering uses for these materials — but some of the most interesting, in my opinion, are for making a large array of sensors like the ones developed by Kobakant and pictured above: a zipper slider, a crochet squeeze sensor, a piezoresistive touch pad, an embroidered potentiometer, a knit accelerometer, and a tilt sensor. Conductive fabrics have also been used both by hobbyists and product designers to make objects like roll-up keyboards, jackets with controls for smart phones and electronics-enhanced garments.

Light Diffusing Acrylic is infused with colorless light diffusing particles. While regular acrylic only diffuses light around the edges, this material illuminates across its entire surface. On the example pictured above, we wrapped a strip of RGB LEDs around a piece of this material and made it cycle through several colors to demonstrate its light diffusing properties. Light diffusing acrylics are currently used for interior design and multi-touch applications.

Also, check out the Lotus Dome — an incredible installation built out of hundreds of “smart metals.” It comes highly recommended by TED’s Director of Design Services, Mike Femia.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

One of the things we’re interested in exploring here at TED is … what happens after a talk? Most often, a speaker is telling us a story without an ending — a tale that’s just beginning rather than coming to an end. That’s certainly the case with TED2013 speaker Alastair Parvin, whose project, Wikihouse, is really just getting started. Parvin has created an open-source construction set for a house, and I caught up with him in a break at the conference to get more details about some of the projects that are underway to build on it.

One application for this cookie-cutter build-your-own-house system is disaster relief. At least, if done responsibly. “Actually, the last thing you want to do after a disaster is build,” Parvin points out. But those caught up in the aftermath of an event such as an earthquake can find themselves stuck in grim emergency housing for long periods of time. Parvin describes a Wikihouse-enabled project in Christchurch, New Zealand, an area that experienced a huge earthquake in February 2011, and where citizens are still trying to rebuild.

Might Wikihouse help empower them? Parvin hopes so. “They’re looking at coming up with a construction model for sustainable housing rebuilding, led by communities there,” he explains. It’s that last phrase that’s crucial. “It’s an interesting flip from disaster relief housing to community-led development.”

Then there’s Wikihouse/Rio, which is using the system in a rather different way — as an “open-source maker lab in the heart of the favela.”

“There, they said not to worry about making a structure,” Parvin says. “Kids and teenagers can start experimenting, maybe creating furniture. Maybe that will lead to building, but it’s not about us defining what happens from the outset. It’s about being open. We’re giving people amazing tools and saying this could be a serious form of community development, but it’s led by them. If they get to the point where they want to build, that’s great.”

This diversity of applications is central to the promise and potential of Wikihouse. “It’s great to do a TED Talk,” says Parvin, for whom Wikihouse is a passion project he works on alongside the others he undertakes as part of the Zero Zero architecture collective in London. “But this is an open-source project. It’s not about me standing up on stage and showing everyone what we’ve done. It’s more about issuing an invitation to others. Frankly the less control we have, the happier we get.”

Congratulations is in order for TED Fellow Jon Gosier. His mobile app, Abayima, has been awarded a $150,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge, which funds innovative projects designed to get information to all corners of the globe.

While smartphones may be the norm in the West, most mobile phone users in the world — about 4 billion of them, to be specific — use simpler phones, often called “feature phones,” that don’t have a lot of storage memory, and can’t be used when a phone signal isn’t available. Abayima is an open-source application that turns a SIM card into a storage device, using every inch of the limited memory available on a standard SIM.

This means that a cheap feature phone can be used as an e-reader, for instance. And that, in locations where communication networks have been compromised or are under surveillance, journalists can communicate with sources safely using good old “sneakernet,” sharing information hand-to-hand via a small SIM chip.

Gosier and the team at Hive Colab tested a pilot of the app during the 2011 elections in Uganda, when text messages were being monitored and blocked, and were encouraged by the results.

“This is my brain cancer. It isn’t nice,” says Salvatore Iaconesi, the engineer, artist and TED Fellow who recently opened up his medical files to the world, crowdsourcing cures of the medical type as well as those for the soul. In this just-released talk from TEDxTransmedia, Iaconesi explains why he made the decision to release his records via his website — to maintain his sense of humanity.

“Your life really does change. It becomes a procedure,” says Iaconesi in this powerful talk. “You cease to exist because you become a patient. In more than one way, you’re not a human being any more. You’re replaced by your clinical records. Yes, those records are talking about you, but they’re really not talking about you. They talk about some of your body parameters, but their language is different than the language of human beings.”

In this talk, Iaconesi outlines the staggering results of reaching out to the world for cures: 600 poems, 35 videos, 15,000 email conversations and counting. The New Scientist recently created a gallery of some of the artistic “cures” that Iaconesi has received, including a sculpture of his brain tumor created in Second Life by artist Patrick Lichty and a performance piece created by Francesca Fini inspired by the magnets used in brain scanning.

Iaconesi tells The New Scientist that the response from medical professionals has been exciting, too. “I have been able to become an expert in neurosurgery and neurology. Through this kind of complete openness, I could access thousands of people who have provided me with their knowledge, their skills, their testimonies, their life experiences,” he tells the magazine. “Roughly 60 neurologists, neurosurgeons and radiologists contacted me suggesting techniques for surgery and for treatment. They are even talking to each other.”

One of the medical professionals who has been most helpful is TED Fellow Jimmy Lin of the Rare Genomics Institute. As it turns out, Lin is the geneticist who did the first genome sequencing for the very type of brain cancer that Salvatore has, glioblastoma.

Iaconesi recently reached out to Lin with good news — that the latest magnetic resonance imaging shows that the tumor is not growing and that he might be a good candidate for radical surgery. Lin offered to give a second opinion, and has also volunteered to help Iaconesi sequence the genome of his tumor after surgery, in an open source platform.

Overall, Iaconesi says that all the input — artistic, personal and medical — has helped him created his plan for treatment. “It’s a strategy that goes around the world and across thousands of years of culture,” says Iaconesi in his TEDx talk. “No one commiserates with me — no one is sad, and everyone is doing something. And most important of all, everyone involved is really feeling part of the human society. This is a good use for technology.”

For more reading about Iaconesi and the open-sourcing of his cure:

• My open source cure for brain cancer, CNN
• Crowd-sourcing a cure for cancer through the internet, BBC News
• Italian Internet Users Want to Help Heal Cancer, Brazil’s Folha de Sao Paolo
• Thousands of Opinions Can Also Have Risks, Folha de Sao Paolo
• The Story of Salvatore Iaconesi Could Become Law, Wired Italy
• The Cures, written by a friend of Salvatore’s for Huffington Post Healthy Living
• Geeks and Dreamers in Rome Believe in the Future, Italy’s la Reppublica

In the late 1800s, Cuban physician Carlos Finlay had a theory that yellow fever was spread by mosquitos — rather than by dirty clothing, as was the belief of the day. To test his theory, he asked living, breathing human beings to be voluntarily infected with the disease. It was devastating, potentially fatal work. And yet people signed on to be a part of the research. It’s believed to be one of the first times that subjects in medical experiments were given “informed consent,” a document laying out the risks in order to give test subjects the full picture of what they were getting themselves into.

“Informed consent is an idea we should be very proud of as a society — it’s something that separates us from the Nazis at Nuremberg,” says John Wilbanks in this powerful talk from TEDGlobal. “It’s the idea that agreement to join a study without understanding isn’t agreement.”

Rules about informed consent were codified starting after World War II, says Wilbanks, and strict limits were placed on how data could be gathered and used. Under current rules and laws, a situation such as that described in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks would not take place, nor could the notorious Guatemala experiments of the 1940s.

But that said: A lot has changed since the late 1940s. Medical research is no longer limited to experiments that take a small group of individuals and test how a specific pharmaceutical affects them. Today, we recognize that our genomes, environments and choices all play into the overall health equation. And Wilbanks worries that, in this age where data on all these factors could be made widely available, our laws about medical privacy are delaying new treatments.

As Wilbanks says, “The way we gain informed consent — this tool that was created to protect us from harm — now creates silos. The data we collect for prostate cancer or Alzheimer’s trials goes into silos where it can only be used for prostate cancer or Alzheimer’s. It can’t be networked, it can’t be integrated … We cannot take the information from past trials and put them together to form statistically significant samples.”

Wilbanks imagines a different reality for our data — a commons that pools our medical records, genotypes and environmental factors. He is working to build a mine-able database through the website WeConsent.us, which allows anyone over the age of 14 to contribute their medical information and make it available to researchers. The idea: to allow them to see patterns that might not be visible with smaller sample sizes.

“I live in a web world where, when you share things, beautiful things happen,” says Wilbanks. “At least some of us really like to share as a form of control.”

To hear more about why forming a medical commons is so important, listen to Wilbank’s wonderful talk. And if you’re wondering how you can contribute to this project, read below for Wilbank’s suggestions.

Here, Wilbanks’ five suggestions for those who want to be impatient patients:

1. Learn about your data. You can get data about yourself amazingly easily now: your genotype, your electronic medical record, your lab results, your prescription information, your activity levels. Engage your doctor in a conversation about your data. Who’s gathering it? Where does it go? Why does it move the way it moves? Can you get a copy of it? Can you get a copy that is computationally useful — in other words, not a fax? In many cases, people have a legal right to copies of their medical records and other health information. So don’t be afraid to ask for it.

2. Generate your own data. If you’re really interested or motivated, it’s increasingly possible to commission your own data directly from your own samples. Companies like 23andMe.com will help you with your genotyping, and companies like Science Exchange can help you find providers who run more complex analysis.

3. Change your role from passive to active. Being “patient” is all about waiting — waiting for your doctor to see you, waiting for your pharmacist to fill a bottle. But you can be impatient. If you have cancer, you can get on the Association of Cancer Online Resources mailing list, or get in touch with Cancer Commons. You can enroll in a clinical study like the Athena Breast Health Network, or sign up with a patient-centric research organization like the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation Army of Women, or get seriously deep into your genome at the Personal Genome Project.

4. Learn about the reality of identity and data. Be skeptical of promises of strong anonymity that also promise strong research. We can remove identifiers from your data, but as more and more data about you go online, it’s more and more possible to reverse-engineer and rediscover your identity. And one of the things that works best to create really anonymous data — introducing noise into the data, or false data — actively undercuts the scientific utility of the data. So if you’re going to get into this, understand that there are risks, and that many of those risks are poorly understood. This is a brave new world we’re entering.

5. Become a data donor. Go through the Portable Legal Consent process and donate your data to research. Because it’s only if we can create a large enough pool of impatient citizens, who understand the individual risks and still want to share their data, that we will accelerate the rate at which new technologies actually improve our health.

To hear more from Wilbanks, read his blog at Del-fi.org. He will be posting attribution for his TEDTalk slides there, as well as sharing a little bit about the experience of speaking at TED.

“You can imagine the joy of playing with a Tetris game that you wrote in Jack, and then compiled into machine language in a compiler that you wrote also, and seeing the result running on a machine that you built,” says Schocken in his talk. “It’s a tremendous personal triumph.”

Even though “From Nand to Tetris (aka The Elements of Computing Systems)” took their team five years to develop, Schocken and Nisan made the decision to put all parts of it online — from the chip specifications to the software tools. Thousands of people jumped at the opportunity to take the course online, some making their way through it on their own and others organizing classes with friends. The year was 2005 and “From Nand to Tetris” became the first of what are now known as MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses. Schocken was surprised by the wide participation, and was thrilled that students remixed parts of the course, making video tutorials in other languages and creating their own games within the computer’s parameters (some examples after the jump).

To Schocken, the message is loud and clear. Educators don’t always need to teach per se — they can also provide a framework that allows students to experiment.

“These people could not care less about grades. They are doing it because of one motivation only — they have a tremendous passion to learn,” says Schocken. “Grading takes away all the fun from failing.”

To hear how Schocken’s parents fed his belief in self-study, and to find about his newest project making K-12 math classes all about experimentation, watch his talk. Below, find out how you can take “From Nand to Tetris” online and build your own computer.

In this introductory video, Schocken gives a detailed overview of what you’ll learn if you embark upon “From Nand to Tetris.” The course is divided into 14 topics, beginning with “Boolean Logic” and building through “Operating System.” Each topic has a lecture — available in both PowerPoint and PDF format — as well as a chapter to read and a project for the student to work on at their own pace. Get started at the online hub for the class >>

Below, some of the games students have created as their final projects.

Ben Craddock, a student at the University of Georgia, designed his computer to run entirely in “Minecraft.” His project was covered in Wired magazine.

This student incorporated letters into Tetris for their final project. The goal: type the letters before they hit your city.

And here, a Tetris-like game calls “Blox,” also created in the course.

In early September, data artist and TED Fellow Salvatore Iaconesi announced to the world that he had brain cancer. And he refused to let his medical records stay sealed. “They were in a closed, proprietary format and, thus, I could not open them using my computer, or send them in this format to all the people who could have saved my life,” he explained on his website. “I cracked them. I opened them and converted the contents into open formats, so that I could share them with everyone.” He asked anyone with a “cure,” be it a medical treatment or “a video, an artwork, a map, a text, a poem, a game,” to send it his way.

The outpouring of support Iaconesi has received through his website has been tremendous, and he is posting every cure he has received — 300 so far — by mapping them on the image above. Many of the responses have come from those with medical expertise; Iaconesi tells Wired Italy he has heard from “about 60 doctors, including surgeons and experts in neuroradiology. [Of] about 40 of these, we also talked about their former patients or family members of patients.”

But Iaconesi’s openness is having other ripple effects too. Last week in Italy, four deputies of the Democratic Party presented Iaconesi’s initiative to the Ministry of Health, asking them to consider the possibility of releasing all Italian citizens’ clinical data in a fully open format. “The digitization of health information is a useful tool because it cancels distance and time, allowing sick people to reach — potentially — anyone, anywhere,” the ministers write of their initiative.

Late last week, Iaconesi made a surprise appearance at TEDxTransmedia, at the MAXXI Museum in Rome and dedicated to the theme of “Dreamers, Geeks, Mindshifters.” Iaconesi’s talk will be available on YouTube shortly.

And tomorrow, he will present an installation, performance and talk on open data at the Internet Festival in Pisa.

On Iaconesi’s website, take a look at the section “A Random Cure” to check out the videos, photos, letters of encouragement and medical ideas that Iaconesi has received. As you load cures, watch how they toggle on Iaconesi’s beautiful map, creating a web of possibility.

Every day, 450,000 people log on to TED.com. But where are they located? And what are they watching—our newest offerings or our classic talks? In the spirit of visual data artists like Hans Rosling and David McCandless, TED web engineer Alex Dean created a map of the United States which shows when and where TEDTalks were viewed on September 14th. A blue dot demarks those people watching a talk from 2012 and red and orange dots shows those watching our still-beloved oldies.  Above, watch a clip of his map in action. It shows that, yes, there are quite a few people tuning in for talks at 2am. And during daylight hours, marvel at how fireworks seem to appear over many cities.

Alex has open-sourced the code behind the map, so you can see how it was created and even make your own moving maps based on whatever data you like.

Music: MobyGratis

The open-source programming world has a lot to teach democracy, says Clay Shirky.

In this fascinating talk from TEDGlobal 2012, Shirky harkens back to the early days of the printing press. At the time, a group of “natural philosophers” (who would later adopt the term “scientists”) called the Invisible College realized that the press could offer a new way to share and debate their work. However, because printing books would be far too slow for this purpose, they came up with a new invention — the scientific journal.

So what does this mean for us today?

Shirky explains, “If I had to pick a group that I think is our Invisible College — our generation’s collection of people trying to take new tools and press them into the service of, not more arguments, but better arguments — I’d pick the open-source programmers.”

Shirky explains a fact that any programmer knows well — that it is very hard to write instructions computers know how to execute. It’s a problem that’s complicated when more than one programmer is on the case, as it’s easy for them to have different ideas on what will work and to create incompatible instructions.

“The problem of managing a large software project is the problem of keeping this social chaos at bay,” says Shirky.

Software engineer Linus Torvalds saw a solution to this problem—“git,” a system that allows for collaborative development. Building on that, Tom Preston-Warner, Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett created GitHub.com, a hosting site that allows multiple programmers to work on the same source code at the same time, with changes getting unique signatures. [edit: thanks to commenters for the clarification]

“A programmer in Edinburgh and a programmer in Entebbe can each get a copy of the same piece of software. They both can make changes, and they can merge them after the fact, even if they don’t know of each other’s existence,” says Shirky. “This is cooperation without coordination. This is the big change.”

Shirky believes that this same idea management system could easily be used in democratic governments. In fact, he says, there’s just one big reason this isn’t happening yet — that legal experts rarely know about open-source computer programming.

“The law is another place where there are many opinions in circulation and they need to be resolved into one canonical copy,” says Shirky. “There’s the very interesting possibility that this could be used to further the development of legislation.”

To hear more about how this could work, watch Shirky’s laugh-out-loud talk. Below, Shirky gives more resources for anyone looking to learn more about how GitHub could be used in government.

Shirky writes to the TED Blog:

What’s so interesting to me about GitHub isn’t just that it provides new ways to collaborate — though it does that, beautifully — but that it also helps create new social norms. Because the core operation in GitHub is ‘diff’ — what are the differences between two pieces of text — it elevates “Show me” as a social norm. Expressing, clearly and comparably, where you think a particular piece of text could or should be changed for the better becomes a core operation, and, as I said in the talk, the possibility of those social norms being transplanted into democratic politics would be a remarkable change.

So, for people interested in transplanting what programmers have learned about arguing and collaborating into the political realm, here are some good places to start:

Seminal writings

• Abe Voelker: GitLaw: GitHub for Laws and Legal Documents — a Tourniquet for American Liberty
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• Hacker News Commentary on the Voelker essay
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• Quora conversation: What are the nontechnical barriers to adopting a version control system for use in writing bills / new laws? (This is the source of  Ari Hershowitz’s wonderful “People with GitHub accounts”/”Lawyers” Venn diagram above and in the talk.)

Political Uses

• Wired article on Stefan Wehrmeyer’s post-TED move to put the German government’s legal documents on GitHub
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• Wehrmeyer’s GitHub repository
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• The Pirate Party’s Liquid Democracy tool
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• A speech from Silja Ómarsdóttir, a participant in the design of Iceland’s crowdsourced Constitution.
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• An essay by Thorvaldur Gylfason, another participant in the Icelandic effort, on the terms of the citizen-designed Constitution.
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• Ireland’s upcoming attempt at a similar model, presaging a transition from what Jürg Steiner calls ‘election-centered democracy’ (citizens elect representatives and then withdraw) to ‘talk-centered democracy’ (citizens stay engaged throughout the political process).

Related Attempts

• Docracy, a tool for sharing legal documents, mostly for contractual language
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• Techcrunch article about Docracy
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• Everyme, a private social network, puts its privacy policy on GitHub

Interview

• Andrian Kreye of Süddeutsche Zeitung interviewed me at TED about the talk. It’s in German, but the title is translated: Politicians will never be obsolete.