Not a lot of information is available as yet about bildr. It’s presentation video provides a run-down of its basic concept. But it’s a very powerful concept that, if implemented, could catalyze a breakthrough in open technology development

Bildr.org is a new community who is completely rethinking the idea of DIY. bildr is for anyone interested in the world of electronics and code:

bildr – new DIY site from Adam Meyer on Vimeo.

Commentary from Eric Hunting:

“Not a lot of information is available as yet about bildr. It’s presentation video provides a run-down of its basic concept. But it’s a very powerful concept that, if implemented, could catalyze a breakthrough in open technology development. Currently, a number of open hardware projects have emerged dealing with the issue of collecting, organizing, and presenting open hardware knowledge in ways paralleling that of the open software movement and mediating the gap between human-readable information and machine-readable information. This has proven a daunting proposition because, unlike software, the media in which the larger sphere of technology knowledge is embodied is extremely diverse. Different engineering disciplines employ different systems of nomenclature and different graphical languages. Information is created in text, graphic, video, multimedia, and machine-specific forms. And data file formats for these different forms are endlessly diverse, often proprietary, and often not readily converted. But bildr offers an interesting possible approach to tackling this. It proposes a modular object-oriented structure for technical knowledge that would allow the designs for things to exist as a kind of network in a space of interdependent knowledge/component/design data that is owned by a user/developer community. Thus the designers of artifacts can build descriptions of their designs as assemblies of this elemental knowledge and makers of artifacts can drill-down through the interdependent links in this knowledge-base to get at information the designer need not specifically present. And, of course, it is proposed to integrate the full diversity of media in this knowledge-base with -presumably- some form of common platform. The potential of such a knowledge-base as a repository of open technology knowledge would be revolutionary and has ramifications far beyond bildr’s goal of a knowledge-base for electronics. Indeed, as they develop this platform it is unlikely they will be able to contain its focus on electronics alone because of the way electronics intersperses with so much else. But to say their objective is ambitious is an extreme understatement. They have their work cut out for them.

This general concept is not entirely unique to bildr and a growing number of groups are exploring this dream of a central digital repository of open technology from various angles. Collaboration seems, so far, a bit rare and is perhaps due to a general ignorance of the actual variety of efforts, adrift as they are in the noise of the Internet. We are in an exciting era of punctuated equilibrium in the ad hoc evolution of open technology and things can be a bit messy. But that is perhaps a necessity. It will be interesting to see what becomes of bildr and how far it gets in this emerging evolutionary competition.”

Commentary from Sam Rose:

“I think if bildr can convince participants to adhere to the modular approach they propose, *and* if they can attract enough participants, they will succeed.

The problem, as you mention below, is that many are already active in spaces that are centric to various existing projects. So, bildr is recreating some of this work already done elsewhere.”