ICT has already revolutionized content creation and communications. In principle, today, everybody with Internet access, the right skills and equipment can produce digital content composed of virtual "bits" and make it instantly available across the globe. The same is now happening to manufacturing for everyone with access to tools like 3D printers. This inter-changeability of bits and atoms is being called the maker movement, which started as a community-based, socially-driven bottom-up movement but is today also impacting mainstream manufacturing through increased efficiencies, distributed local production and the circular economy. The maker movement thus has significant promise for increasing social, economic and environmental sustainability, but is it currently living up to this potential? This paper reports on work undertaken by the European-funded MAKE-IT project has examined this question through detailed qualitative and quantitative empirical research, including ten in-depth case studies across Europe and a detailed examination of 42 maker initiatives at Europe's foremost city-based maker faire, supplemented by extensive secondary research. Despite the maker movement's short history, the overall results provide sound evidence of its important though variable contribution to sustainability thus far. In addition, there is a strong gender dimension showing that females are underrepresented both as users and leaders of maker initiatives, whilst female leaders tend to achieve much higher sustainability impacts than their male counterparts. There is also clear evidence that maker initiatives in close collaboration with each other and other actors in city-and region-wide ecosystems are much more successful in achieving sustainability impacts than others.

Abstract. The Maker Movement emerged from a renewed interest in the physical side of innovation following the dot-com bubble and the rise of the participatory Web 2.0 and the decreasing costs of many digital fabrication technologies. Classifying concepts, i.e. building taxonomies, is a fundamental practice when developing a topic of interest into a research field. Taking advantage of the growth of the Social Web and participation platforms, this paper suggests a multidisciplinary analysis of communications and online behaviors related to the Maker community in order to develop a taxonomy informed by current practices and ongoing discussions. We analyze a number of sources such as Twitter, Wikipedia and Google Trends, applying co-word analysis, trend visualizations and emotional analysis. Whereas co-words and trends extract structural characteristics of the movement, emotional analysis is non-topical, extracting emotional interpretations.

Diversity and inclusion in the technology sector is increasingly debated, specially in the context of equal opportunities for all and a shortage of experts in many tech related industries. The need to be more inclusive can refer to different age groups, people with diverse culturally and linguistically backgrounds or gender. All in all, ethnic, gender and socio-economic diversity is not yet at the forefront of fabrication laboratories (FabLabs) agendas for change. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion of diversity and inclusion by primarily elaborating gender relations in FabLabs and, to a lesser extent, discussing age and socio-economic conditions of makers. Our analysis is based on 39 interviews and the analysis of 55,450 data points extracted from the log files of 3d-printers, CNC milling machines, laser cutters and cutting plotters. This combination of qualitative and quantitative data reveals that, indeed, some machines are used more frequently by men or women. However, the main difference is in absolute numbers, i.e. women are not joining FabLabs for a variety of reasons ranging from uninviting cultures to the lack of role models in technology driven areas in general.

Abstract. The Maker movement represents a return of interest to the physical side of digital innovation. To explore expectations and values within the Maker movement, we applied qualitative research method, interviewing 10 managers of maker initiative as well as 39 makers from eight different countries. The paper analyses how the Maker movement is contributing to a change in production, logistics and supply chains and how it changes the relationship between producer and consumer. Based on the interview data and supported by literature, the study indicates that the Maker movement has the potential to impact producer-consumer relationships in many ways. Making, on a bigger scale would mean producing locally, de-centralised and on-demand. This would have an impact on the logistics and the supply chain. Long transportation routes would be avoided and shorter supply chains would make some of the-inbetween vendors obsolete. Makers as prosumers, who produce for themselves, are introducing two growing phenomena: a more personalised relationship between maker and object and personalised products as a form of self-expression.

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