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Super smooth from Boston to Pune.  Now at the Centurion hotel, about to rediscover the joys of “horizontal”.  If you’re here come to my room, I probably brought stuff for you.

When the Fab Folk return to Afghanistan in late August, we’ll move the lab to a new site at the sharwali, or public municipal area.

One of the things that’s really attractive about the site is the space we’re given will allow us to establish a small lending library. We’re already informally loaning out digital cameras, technical books, and the like but we want to include regular books and machines as well.

On hitting the ground, our initial focus is to move and install the Shopbot then embark on a massive Shopbot furniture build. We’ll make the shelves, tables, and chairs to flesh out a small library and study area.

We need two kinds of help - the creative furniture design (imagine using the negative sheets remaining from a cut, especially from FabFi with all those little curved pieces, as screens between study cubicles) and help filling the shelves with books, games, resources, machines, and technology.

Oh, and I guess Shopbot experience on the ground, if you happen to be around town…

Note Tupperware enclosure for router…

Keith and some more FabFi are out the door - Keith should be leaving Amsterdam about now. FabFi 2.0 features meshing and auto-nearly-everything. It’s neat, really neat. Check out http://fabfi.fablab.af/blog/ if you haven’t been in a while.

We’re really excited because in Pabal we’ll finally be able to do our dream of putting a “large” antenna on the tower, loading the other onto the back of a Jeep (or ox-pulled rickshaw), and driving as far away as possible to see what happens. Even more exciting is Kerry will be there too - you might remember him from the cold snowy attempts at Mt. Wachusetts.

Down to the wire but got my passport back today, now with India and Afghanistan visas. Diran Visa Services in DC was successful in getting me a 6-month multiple entry visa for Afghanistan in one day - so very cool. I’ve been unsuccessful in the past getting a multiple entry visa but I guess at some point even the embassy tires of making a new sticker for you each time.

People ask all the time about going to Afghanistan. It’s surprisingly easy. You apply for a visa from the embassy in DC, you get a plane ticket to either Dubai, Delhi, or Frankfurt. From there, several airlines fly to Kabul and some fly directly to Mazar and Kandahar as well. That’s it.

I suppose I’ve forgotten a few steps such as immunizations (see http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1056.html) and health insurance (in particular extraction coverage).

USA and UK governments warn against citizens traveling to Afghanistan, in particular on their own and without support on the ground. They explicitly state that you don’t get the support of your nation should anything happen. I don’t know about Kabul but you generally don’t want to randomly get into a cab or hitchhike because their is some temptation for kidnapping an international person for ransom.

pottery of the northern plains

But the reality is there are lots of expats living and working in Afghanistan. Every time I’ve flown from Dubai I meet people who are on vacation, going to Afghanistan to visit friends stationed there in some capacity. And parts of the country are trying to rebuild their tourism industry, such as Bamiyan where the Fab Folk hope to get to on this trip (see http://www.amherstdaily.com/index.cfm?sid=266006&sc=510) and Istalif which is a day trip from Kabul.

So then I suppose the real question is, why go? And what are you going to tell your mom?

The India fab lab shipments went out the door last week - these are for two new labs at COEP and NIF and equipment refreshing at Vigyan Ashram.  We can now walk, more or less, through the hallway outside our office again.

Those of us going early from MIT are making our final travel arrangements now and filling the hallway again with project materials to take with us.  Kenny’s making all sorts of composites, including prosthetic springs and molds.  Ilan and Max are building yet another desktop mill.  Keith and I are FabFi-ing, and Kerry and David are filling their pockets with thinner clients.  Our lab in 023 is busy 24 hours a day now and it’s common to catch us on the polycom at all hours of the day and night.

FabFolk.org web work : we need help setting up our server with all the goodies to direct people to the wealth of info that’s just crammed in various ways near my desk. We have a linode and own all the domains (.net, .org, .com) and are using google for mail and other apps. Also need help uploading content and making it comprehensible and useful for visitors.

You don’t have to develop everything, it can be the stuff you’re interested in. For example, I just spent some time searching my hard drives for lab layout diagrams from various labs. Somewhere I’ve also scanned in every cut sheet - a convenient packet you you’d want to hand to your electrician. There’s also “lab install setup notes” and “list of tools needed to build the Shotbot” or “instructions and photos for building the Torchmate”.

A FabFolk session is planned for August 22 to the first couple of weeks of September. Big tasks include finishing settling in to the new fab lab site at the sharwali, upgrading to FabFi 2.0, establishing the tech lending library, and lots of Shopbot and related large scale NC machining skills. Additionally we’ll check up on existing business clubs, encourage the spinning up of new ones, pull together all the “deliverables” from the summer internships, and possibly venture in the digital pathology area.

We could use help in country with Shopbot training and uses. You must arrive already knowing how to use a Shopbot PRS Alpha and the Windows based Part Works / Part Wizard. The goal is not for you to make things but to teach Afghans how to use the Shopbot with hands-on projects. We have a high speed spindle in Jalalabad.

We also need help getting FabFi 2.0 ready - this is networking, routing, meshing stuff and needs to be done before arriving. This is development work and you should already have a clue about hacking the Linksys WRT54GL. Of course more hands (especially female ones) available during the deployment are very helpful but we won’t be able to train on site. You must arrive self-sufficient to be on one end of the link.

A small group of Afghans want to go through the Cisco CCNA course and we need a facilitator. You do not need to be a certified instructor, this could be a “cat herder” for group-self-study. This can begin in person then transition to online or vice versa.

The tech lending library (varied things from digital cameras and laptops to power tools) opens up the possibility of a co-located “regular” book library too. There is no public library (lending or reading) in eastern Afghanistan. We’ll have a staff person who could double as a librarian and a secure space in the center of city. Will you be the book (or other media) library champion and organizer? This region has no tradition of public lending libraries and much of the policies and practices will need to be developed.

All,

At:

http://fab.cba.mit.edu/academy/about/index.html

I put a revised draft description and curriculum for the Fab Academy; the goal is to start the first Diploma students in Sept., aiming at ~10 labs with ~10 students each. Let me know if you have comments/edits (without cc’s, to minimze broadcast traffic; I’ll summarize). This is in a git archive that will be shared across participating labs.

Unlike last year, we’re going to fork this and teach it separately from my How To Make (almost) Anything class at MIT (although I will still connect to the videoconference for that).

What’s going to be rate-limiting locally is having instructors on hand in each of the participating labs who can supervise and evaluate each of these areas. We also need to pin down now the faculty who will be taking responsibility for the content and global lectures for each topic. And we need to confirm the students, in particular hand-picking the special students we want to seed the program with.

We’ve done draft lists for each of these; by this broadcast I now want to confirm them. So, which labs want to commit to assembling a quorum of students and instructors and shepherding them through the year? Who wants to take ownership of particular bullets &/or overall topic areas for the global lectures? Who wants to sign up to be an instructor, providing local hands-on training and evaluation?

The expectation is that all of this will be compensated, and could turn into an important revenue source for fab lab sustainability, but that should be viewed asynchronously — the priority is on getting the content in place first, with the supporting finances to follow.

Let me know who wants to do what where (again without cc’s to minimize email), and I’ll assemble and circulate a revision with people and labs listed.

We want to have all of this in place by FAB5:

http://cba.mit.edu/events/09.08.FAB5/

Neil