manufacturing

Do you remember HeathKit? The company that sold circuit board and resistor kits you could assemble to make your own electronics?

Building a HeathKit was no great feat of engineering—it came with a fixed list of parts and the schematic—but it helped you understand how electronics work by letting you assemble your own electronic products. And back in the day, a well-built HeathKit radio was every bit as good as the store-bought ones. » Read more

We've talked about open source cars before, but open source tractors? Marcin Jakubowski has helped to open the designs for 50 farm machines, including a design for a tractor that he was able to build in six days at a cost far less that of a manufactured tractor. By creating and sharing blueprints for open machines, we're seeing the foundation for open civilations. » Read more

Interesting article in Forbes about the way Threadless, the awesome t-shirt company, thinks about community-building. For those of you who aren't familiar with Threadless, they do about $30 million in revenues with a unique cultural/business model that merges a community of t-shirt creators and consumers into one happy family (you can read more about them in the Forbes article). » Read more