e-NABLE e-NABLE Presentations/Interviews, 8 May 2019

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: re:publica 2019 – Jon Schull: e-NABLE

Description

Full Title: e-NABLE: A Global Network Of Volunteers Making Free Opensource 3D-Printed prosthetics
Find out more at: https://19.re-publica.com/node/32437

e-NABLE is a global mutual aid network built on an infrastructure of electronic communications, emerging technologies, and good-will. This recipe could, and should, go way beyond 3D-printed prosthetics.

Jon Schull

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Germany
(CC BY-SA 4.0 DE)

A

A

B

Greetings: I'm going to talk to you today about a global network of volunteers, which I am a part of I. Think it's particularly interesting in this meeting, because we're actually doing this I've heard a lot of presentations, some very interesting presentations about the current state of affairs about the future own attempt, I'll talk to you about the present and the near future, and something which is working quite well. Although we don't know how it's working well and so I think there's an opportunity here.

B

To make a long story short, this is what we do. This is Shay. She was 6 years old at the time, she's, probably about 13 now, and if you look carefully you'll see that her right hand is missing fingers. She was born that way and she's getting a plastic 3d printed mechanical hand from a volunteer and she bends her wrist and it makes a fist and she smiles and that's what we do. We make children smile, we make parents weep and we make nerds rejoice, that's our whole story. I'm finished.

B

Okay, there's more, this started for me about six years ago, when I saw a video on YouTube about a South African carpenter lost the fingers in a shop accident, and he found a puppet maker from Washington State and together they had figured out how to make mechanical fingers and eventually figured out how to make mechanical fingers with a 3d printer, and they mentioned that they were giving these devices away for free.

B

So here's the puppet maker and that's a device that he had made and these two collaborated and they figured out how to make a mechanical hand. This video explained that they had realized that the hand they were making could be useful, not just for carpenters and adults, but also for many children who were born missing, fingers or hands, and they also mentioned that they were putting the design online for free and I had an idea.

B

I was supposed to be preparing a class, but instead I was watching YouTube videos and I put a comment on the YouTube video, because I noticed that people were saying. This is really good. I would do this, so I gave them a way to do it.

B

I made a Google map and I told people that if they had a 3d printer and they wanted to help, they could put a red pen on the map and if they knew someone who needed a hand, they could put a blue pin on the map and it was an experiment. To my surprise, that night there were seven pins on the map and within six weeks there were 70 pins on the map and people started. Calling me saying: okay now, what do we do and I didn't know so?

B

I created a Google+ community and, as you know, a month ago, Google+ went away, but we had 10,000 people who had registered for that community and we've produced many designs, and we are now all over the world. So I want to tell you a little bit more about enable and what we do and then talk a little bit how it works.

B

And then, hopefully it get to talk with you afterwards about how the kind of thing we're doing might be useful for things that go beyond 3d, printing and prosthetics, because I think we may be onto something really valuable. So first let me say that these devices are laughed at by professional prosthetists. A professional prosthetists looks at this and says it's plastic. It's brightly colored, it's made of plastic, it's gonna break. It looks like a toy. A kid looks at one of these and he says it's plastic. It's brightly colored.

B

It looks like a toy and they like them and they wear them, whereas in fact children don't like wearing medical grade prosthetics because they're heavy and they can't take them into the pool and they can't get them dirty and besides they will outgrow them and they can cost as much as five to ten thousand dollars we're giving ours away for free. We can do that because they're made with consumer grade 3d printers they're made by volunteers and, frankly, they're not up to medical standards.

B

They are up to child standards and they're up to a standard that I want to recommend to you. My standard is: is it substantially better than nothing? This is not German engineering.

B

This is the idea that in a world in which many people have nothing, if you have figured out how to make something that is substantially better than nothing, it is immoral to keep it back, even if it's not up to your high professional standards and if you make it available to volunteers, and you give it away for free, you can do things that businesses and engineering, schools and medical prosthetic companies can't do or don't do.

B

So part of our success is that they're just good enough and they are kid friendly, but the other part of our success comes from this kid who I like to call our director of marketing I call him that, because he got in one of our early hands, it happened to be colored, orange and yellow, and while he may have been born without fingers, you can see that he was born with one of the great smiles right and the picture was taken of him. Saying: look.

B

I got an Iron, Man hand and FoxNews picked that up and within weeks the Enable community was making iron man, hands and Wolverine hands and Captain America hands and the whole thing got a little bit out of hand.

B

But for a kid this turns out to be more than just a convenient metaphor. Remember: every superhero is born with some kind of a flaw and then through some magic of technology or something they get the ability to do things that they couldn't do before and so for these kids. It turns out to be not a metaphor. It turns out to be a good way of understanding.

B

What's going on now that was basically four and five years ago, and you can see that the original device from the video has evolved two devices that are much more natural-looking and has evolved in two directions: two devices that are much more complex end devices that are much simpler.

B

This device has one moving part I'm trying to push my community, which I cannot control, but I can encourage to go for the simplest thing that will be useful because that will ultimately reach the most people possible, and you can see that there's been real progress, even though our global community of volunteers has no director no business model and it's all free and open source I want to say a little bit more about the devices and the meaning of the devices.

B

This became clear when this kid was interviewed. Another secret of our success is that this turns out to be a story that news media love to tell you've got a smiling kid. You've got these crazy people on the internet. You've got this mechanical hand and the man and the hand is spectacularly cheap. It turns out to this kid. None of that mattered and I know that, because this kid was interviewed six weeks before he got the hands, so it's really not about the hand he said you know. I was born with a funny hand.

B

I was born without fingers and I have bad dreams, and in these dreams there are monsters who are coming after me, and now I just turned to them and I say you don't scare me, because I have two hands.

B

This is before he got the device. We've come to understand that with kids, as well as with devices, the psychosocial aspects of this device are even more important than what you can do with it or to put it another way they what you can do with it is. You can feel good about interacting with other people on your own terms. With your superhero hand, so I was in South America six months ago, and I met these two young men who had both gotten arms from any naval chapter in Honduras.

B

Both of them were instantly unemployed when they lost their arm. They couldn't get work turns out. Both of them got arms and both of them actually started their own business.

B

This fellow sells houseplants this fellow sells sandals in his own store. They were both electricians before they had their accidents and I asked both of them. This was on the same day, so it it finally got through I said: how often do you wear this device, because prosthesis are not worn that much of the time, even if they're, 10 and $20,000 medical grade prosthesis, these guys said well, we wear them every day and I asked him in particular.

B

Well, what's the most important thing you do with your hand- and he looked at me like I- was an idiot and he said this is the most important thing I can do with my hands. I can hold my daughter's hand and I can go for a walk this guy, while he's demonstrating the sandals I, asked him the same question he said well now, when I'm out with my buddies, I can do a fist bump I.

B

Was in Thailand just a month ago, I'll be going back in three days and in Thailand, as you know, everyone does this about 30 times a day, so only when I got there that I realized that our hands can't do that. The mechanics are such that you can do this, so we're now trying to make a hand that will flatten out for this purpose, because we are still learning that the psychological and the social meaning of these devices, both the fact that they give them a role.

B

They change the conversation and they were made by caring people through this mysterious magic of the internet. That's something that I think we can all learn from makes it really quite important, so enable now is in 80 countries around the world. I'm gonna be visiting a group in Munich in a couple of days, but they're there everywhere.

B

These are all chapters on Facebook, but what I want to call to your attention is that each of these chapters is its own invention using our open-source designs and using our processes, but each of them is on their own.

B

There is as little central organization as we can possibly have, and yet it seems to be working, and so I want to talk a little bit about how it's working and whether other things could work this way as well, because it's an unanswered question but I think it's a potentially important question on that first day, when it was just an experiment and I didn't really realize that I was well I, say it's sort of like getting pregnant. You indulge yourself for 20 minutes and the next thing you know you're responsible for all of these children.

B

So for 20 minutes, I made this map and it took over my entire life. But when I made up the map, I also made up a slogan now I'm very proud of this slogan. It was my biggest and first contribution. I said enable is a global volunteer, assistive technology, Network built on an infrastructure of electronic communications, 3d, printing and goodwill, I would say now I would say not just 3d printing. But this is a really important recipe.

B

It's a recipe, but it doesn't actually explain what the cake is like when you bake it. So I want to tell you a little bit more about what the cake is like. How does enable actually work.

B

There's a book called the starfish versus the spider, and it points out that you know animals that walk around on land come with two basic architectures. A spider like us, like a human, has a central nervous system. If the central nervous system goes, the whole system breaks down a starfish and an Internet, if it doesn't become too centralized, is not like that. A lot at all. It's got a whole bunch of parts. They interact. Some parts interact with other parts, but there's no central control.

B

Therefore it is very robust and while it may not be able to go through as much planful behavior, it may be able to survive and adapt in a lot of different environments.

B

Now this is actually the way enable is currently organized, and frankly, every one of these bubbles is at a different URL or a different website or a different server. This is an ecosystem. It's not an organization. You can go to enabled org, but probably you'll end up enabling the future, and that will then send you to our new home on wiki factory, because we emigrated from Google+ just in time. We've now set up shop again on wiki factory and we're actually enjoying it quite a bit. Thank you Christina and company.

B

So it is a whole ecosystem of websites and volunteers.

B

And somehow it works now there are probably people in the room who understand this slide, which I made better than I do. But here's what I'm trying to understand and if, if you do understand it better, this is why I'm here I want you two to talk to me. It seems to me the challenge that we have as humans in civilization is. How do you take an idea from a few people to many people?

B

We all know how command-and-control organizations grow right, there's some sort of a visionary and evangelist and they start a company and they find investors, and then they hire employees, and then they have managers, and then they have a commander and they develop policies and laws and they can hire people and they can fire people and they can put people in jail if they break their contract and that's the way the world works. That's the way a lot of the world works, except when it doesn't, and it doesn't work a lot.

B

In fact, these days, I think we're finding that the planets biggest problems are side effects of command and control organizations that are not really paying attention to the things they can't do well enable is different and I can tell you with some confidence that were different, because we encourage groups and individuals to figure things out by themselves and do it their way as seems fit to them.

B

We do have a shared vision and shared values and shared goals, and we were lucky because a smiling child with the 3d printed prosthetic somehow tells that story, even without words, people see that it gets picked up by the media. They say I want to do that too, and because everything we do is open-source and because we celebrate people telling their stories to each other. We have shared practices which bring us together somewhat the way the rituals and religion bring people together, and then we have increasingly these optional utilities and services.

B

No one needs to do any particular thing, but we build web sites and web tools that make it easy for people to do what we think might be useful for them to do. You know the expression it's difficult to herd cats, people talk about this and software development and engineering all the time. Well, my argument is that it's actually not that difficult to herd cats.

B

If you get to structure an environment in which the cats will go, where it's easy for the cats to go in this kind of an environment, all this guy needs to do is jump up and down, and the cats will end up in the room that you want, and so you see all of these different websites and tools that we have are really there for the purpose of making it easy for people to learn about enable to volunteer to give devices to people who want them or to request devices from volunteers who are eager to provide them who want to participate in what is called the planning, but really just involves the discussion and the raising of issues that the community needs to think about.

B

To make it easier for people to navigate this complicated ecosystem, this is our current challenge and to make it possible for people to vote on how to use a certain amount of money which we now have in something called the enable fund. So we have some simple governance: no one needs to use it and no one is bound by it. But if you have a good project, I encourage you to think about writing a proposal joining this website. Where you can make the proposal you'll get feedback on it.

B

Other people in the community that could include you will vote the proposal upper or down and if 80% agree that it's a proposal worth funding and at least 15 people vote on it, it will be approved and will dispense the money. That's as close as we have to governance as possible. Most enablers don't use this mechanism, but it does exist and it does give us at least a mechanism for accepting tax-deductible donations and helping groups develop new devices or new initiatives. That will be useful.

B

So that's the process that I just talked about. So we have chapters we have teams. We have individuals, they write proposals they are reviewed by who needs to approve them. If they're reviewed, they go to the enable Fund reimbursements happen and is, it is all documented on a website called open, collective comm, which is itself an open-source platform to facilitate this kind of thing.

B

So I want to say a little bit about what motivates us and what could motivate more people to do more things of this sort. We there's a whole profession called economics which is all about why and how command and control organizations get people to do what they should do. We don't really have a good theory for why people should do what we do, but I think people should do what we do, and so here are there's some beginnings of an idea: you're, probably familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

B

The basic idea is that we all have needs. We take care of the critical ones first, when we've got our safety and our physiological needs met, we start worrying about love and belonging and then about system and then about our purpose in the world.

B

We all have problems, we all struggle with them, but there are other people who, unlike us, who have the luxury of being nervous about this end of the spectrum. There are other people who are at that end of the spectrum and there's a really happy partnership between these two groups, which is to say what we do is not charity. It is a partnership, it's not a sharing economy, although everything we do is shared. It's a caring economy and that's a little bit different.

B

My claim is that governmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations and businesses are great, but there are gaps and people still fall through the gaps, and it's not a pretty picture. We don't take care of them adequately. I think that enable may be a prototype of a new form of organization which not only is creating a safety net, but is also creating a pathway that allow people who are currently throwaways to become important parts of a better human society to fill those gaps and to help us do much better than current institutions can do.

B

As I look into the question of what other organizations are organized this way, and why does what we do work, and could we do more of it I begun to think that it boils down to belonging. This purpose and efficacy has facilitated by internet communications and what other other technical tools are available to us.

B

But I recently realized that that's also true of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is a great organization which has this same sort of distributed organization, and it's also about the Christchurch shooters and other online terrorist networks. They also have this distributed values and idea based form of organization, so I think that the personal connection in which a volunteer interacts with a child or with a partner in making the world a better place is a really important part of this.

B

We gave this Incredible Hulk arm to this kid just ten days ago, two weeks ago, and he asked me a question which is the question I asked you he. He said two things to me, which were really quite fun, and this is why we do it. The first thing he said was I'm never taking this off, which of course, is what you want to see. As I say, this is not what you want to hear. This is not charity. This is the most rewarding work.

B

Most of us have ever done and I encourage some of you to try it out. I think you'll get a lot from it, but the other thing he said he asked me twice, he said: are you from the future and.

B

I will suggest to you that that is indeed the question, because I think we could do much more of this. So thank you very much be here tonight and tomorrow, look forward to hearing from you.