MakerBot is an affordable, open source 3D printer rapid prototyping machine developed by Bre Pettis, Zach Hoeken, and Adam Mayer. Build your own MakerBot and it makes things for you, functioning like a personal factory. Digital designs for the MakerBot can be shared on Thingiverse.com, a web-based community initiated by MakerBot Industries, where users post files, document designs, and collaborate on open source hardware.
Crisis Map of Haiti represents the most comprehensive and up-to-date crisis map available to the humanitarian community. The information here is mapped in near real time and gathered from reports coming from inside Haiti via: SMS, Web, Email, Radio, Phone, Twitter, Facebook, Television, List-serves, Live streams, and Situation Reports
Volunteers at Ushahidi's Situation Room at the Fletcher School, in Washington DC, Geneva, London and Portland are mapping the majority of the reports submitted to Ushahidi in near real-time. The volunteers then identify GPS coordinates for the reports and geo-tag the reports on the Ushahidi map. Each report is first read at least once by Situation Room before being published on the map. This Ushahidi deployment represents a joint initiative with members of the International Network of Crisis Mappers. All this information published under Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike).
During the 2000 U.S. presidential election, Vote-Auction.net offered U.S. citizens an anonymous and quick way to sell their vote to the highest bidder. Because of the threat to the outcome of the election, several U.S. states issued temporary restraining orders for alleged illegal vote trading and consumer fraud. Over 2,500 news media outlets reported on the project. Collaborators: James Baumgartner, Tilmann Singer, Aaron Kaplan, Silver Server, lo-res.org, Oskar Obereder, Christoph Johannes Mutter, hell.com, Bootlab Berlin, Domenico Quaranta.
Ghana Think Tank is solving the problems of the Developed World. Local problems collected from communities in the U.S. and UK are sent to think tanks in Ghana, Cuba, Iran, Serbia, Mexico and El Salvador. The think tanks propose solutions, which are enacted back in the problem community, whether the solutions seem brilliant or embarrassing. This project explores the friction caused when solutions are generated in one context and applied elsewhere.