Internet of Production Alliance Wants You to Think Globally, Make Locally [Hackaday]

March 1, 2024 Greg Cross Soul Machines

A map of the world with continents in light grey and countries outlined in dark grey. A nuber of yellow and grey circles with cartoon factories on them are connected with curved lines reminiscent of airplane flight paths. The lines have seemingly-arbitrary binary ones and zeros next to them. All of the grey factories are in the Americas, likely since IoP is currently focused on Africa and Europe.

With the proliferation of digital fabrication tools, many feel the future of manufacturing is distributed. It would certainly be welcome after the pandemic-induced supply chain kerfuffles from toilet paper to Raspberry Pis. The Internet of Production Alliance (IoP) is designing standards to smooth this transition. [via Solarpunk Presents]

IoP was founded in 2016 to build the infrastructure necessary to move toward a global supply chain based on local production of goods from a global database of designs instead of the current centralized model of production with closed designs. Some might identify this decentralization as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. They currently have developed two standards, Open Know-Where [PDF] and Open Know-How.

Open Know-Where is designed to help locate makerspaces, FabLabs, and other spaces with the tools and materials necessary to build a thing. The sort of data collected here is broken down in to five categories: manufacturing facility, people, location, equipment, and materials.

Open Know-How focuses on open designs having more consistent metadata to fast-track someone making it instead of trying to piece together the varying amounts of data available for a build. They even have a database of designs that already follow the Open Know-How standard. Given the focus on relief work and developing countries, there seems to be a higher density of medical and rescue equipment than you might find elsewhere. Some of the organizations you might recognize with members that helped develop the standard are the Open Source Hardware Association, the e-Nable Alliance, and Appropedia.

We have a HackChat about on-demand manufacturing, have pondered the opportunities for Open Source Hardware to be more like software, and have also seen biohackers pushing for more distributed production of drugs. Modular platforms like OpenStructures and the Open Robotic Platform could certainly help too.

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