Fabricatorz recently custom-designed a website for Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB). Jon and Brad took lead duties in the construction of this dynamic platform based upon Aiki Framework that offers a look into Chinese business knowledge:

The focal point of this open sharing platform is practical insight into China business from CKGSB’s world-class faculty and influential alumni network. These insights as are presented alongside interviews and analysis from executives from China and around the world and other leading authorities.

Along with building the site, Fabricatorz completed the design and public launch of CKGSB Knowledge. Contact us for more information about working together.

If you're an artist, you've been there: applying that final touch or minor adjustment that finishes the piece off. You're done! Everything looks exactly as you'd imagined it, and you can't wait to put it out there and show your prowess to the world. In the few years that I've been working on websites, I've found the building process to be strikingly similar. My latest assignment, the recently updated Open Font Library, placed me in a position I have never quite been in before: the "Code Middleman". Along the way, I learned a lot about the process of a singular developer and how encouraging collaboration in this medium can be.

The task sounded simple enough. Manufactura Independente had been contracted to craft a visual upgrade to Open Font Library. They did so (and quite well). My mission was to take the series of HTML/CSS/JavaScript mockup pages and apply them to the existing work our own Christopher Adams had done in building the site in it's initial form.

What I hadn't anticipated was the hair pulling and sleep-deprived nights that would lay ahead as I began to untangle the two webs and retie them into a functioning whole.

The Open Font Library was built on an open source web software called Aiki Framework. While Aiki is continually growing and gaining in popularity, it wasn't a software that Manufactura were immediately familiar with. The visual upgrade was only one of a number of features that were to be included in the upcoming release, so it soon became necessary for an Aiki-experienced developer to apply the completed redesigns to the site as work on the additional upgrades was going on behind the scenes.

Trial and error was key. I dove in pasting some design code here, amending an existing Aiki-built widget there, as the site slowly began it's metamorphosis. Things often broke, but communication with both Chris and Manufactura Independente helped me stay on course by establishing the commonalities between the two sets of code and ways of thinking. The veil of mystery often surrounding web development began to lift, in the process.

Why is collaboration so difficult in web development anyway? I think the software, as well as our processes and perceptions are at the heart of the issue. To many in my everyday circles (parents, peers, etc), what I do is a very ambiguous thing. I've described my work process in such vague terms that I began assuming the role of a wizard holed up in a tower solemnly researching and brewing his next potion. Sites are increasingly about speedy deliveries and giving clients dynamic control. Management systems like WordPress have evolved to make these solutions easier, but nothing has excelled at allowing real-time collaboration between multiple developers. Standard procedure often involves a repetitive process of a single developer designing, setting up, and configuring a site for general use.

With the completion of Open Font Library's latest release, I found myself leaving behind my worst working tendencies. I lost the desire to forge ahead in solitude or to be overly attached to work I completed and hyper critical of other's work. The necessity of communicating between multiple groups through a new software and meeting a tight deadline has helped me grow as a developer. It stopped feeling like a competition and started being about learning from and helping others.

Is Aiki Framework the ultimate collaborative solution? Not in it's current form, but each release brings us closer, and each project is another opportunity to build together.

Just today, Fabricatorz have publicly released a new and improved site for Beijing-based Naihanli&Co. Brad and Jon stepped up to the plate to deliver this latest offering, contributing on site design, implementation and deployment under our Aiki Framework platform. Naihanli&Co. founder, Jinjing Naihan Li strives to create furniture built on functional and socially responsive designs:

"..she introduces furniture as a fashionable, social concept that accommodates the mod- ern and mobile lifestyle we live. Her work poses the question, why not have furniture that represents the way you live? And, why not have fun with it? She does."

If you're interested in having Fabricatorz work on your next project, contact us!

Cambridge, MA — Thursday, 16 June 2011 — The AcaWiki project has announced their summer drive to gather summaries for the top 100 academic papers around the world. The AcaWiki website (http://acawiki.org) features an updated logo and theme that brings it into alignment with Wikipedia and other popular Wikis. AcaWiki continues to make strides in improving global access and exposure to academic research and scientific findings. When completed this new list of top papers, along with the over 500 summaries already available, will provide a solid base to fill the needs of many students and academics doing research.

"Our goal for this summer is to collect a clear set of summaries of the top papers from every field,” explained AcaWiki’s founder, Neeru Paharia. “This is a huge task, and one that we will not be able to achieve without the active participation of students and academics from every discipline. While AcaWiki has a growing collection with well over 500 Creative Commons licensed summaries of academic papers, we want more coverage in fields such as economics, psychology, sociology, business, and computer science. In order to do this, we need leaders, and readers, in all major fields of research to join us.”

The AcaWiki project addresses two key problems in the public access and understanding of modern academic research. While the overall volume of significant, cutting-edge research is growing apace, the dissemination of important findings and results is mostly limited to traditional, subscription-based publishing outlets and peer-reviewed journals. Even research that is publicly funded is often not made readily available to the general public, while universities in developing countries are often cut off from access to knowledge by exorbitant subscription fees for standard journals. Since a lot of academic research is couched in jargon that can only be understood by experts, the problem of limited access to knowledge is compounded by a very real deficit in communication between academia and the general public, as well as between academic disciplines themselves.

AcaWiki offers a workable solution to both of these problems by making use of social software and leveraging a community of graduate students, academics, and citizens, to write summaries and long abstracts of academic papers. Contributors are encouraged to write two-to-three paragraph summaries of academic papers and contribute them to the AcaWiki pool. Unlike the original articles themselves, the copyright for these summaries belongs to the contributor. AcaWiki stipulates that all entries on the site be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so they are free for international distribution via the Internet or in hard copy. Other contributors can annotate, comment, or append information to the original entry, adding greater nuance or clarity.

Along with community leaders Mike Linksvayer, Jodi Schneider, Reid Priedhorsky and others, the open production company, Fabricatorz is improving AcaWiki and growing the project. “By updating the AcaWiki logo with the great design by Aleksander Stachurka, we hope to crystallize the reality of the project,” said Jon Phillips, Fabricatorz Founder. “And, by switching to the default MediaWiki theme, as seen on all Wikimedia Foundation Wikis, we are making it easier to be compatible with the majority of real Wiki communities and developers. We want to collect more high quality academic summaries and to encourage more students and researchers to use the site and help us achieve our goal.”

The project has released a public roadmap for the next three to six months on its website at: http://acawiki.org/Roadmap Beyond summarizing academic papers, the Roadmap is an open plan for others to help by filing bugs and developing plans for making AcaWiki a better resource and community.

Targeted List of Disciplines

* Anthropology
* Arts and Literarure
* Astronomy
* Biology
* Business
* Chemistry
* Clinical Research
* Computer Science
* Economics
* Education
* Engineering
* Geosciences
* Health
* Mathematics
* Medicine
* Neuroscience
* Philosophy
* Physics
* Psychology
* Sociology

For More Information

* http://acawiki.org
* http://acawiki.org/Top_100_Papers

About AcaWiki

AcaWiki is like "Wikipedia for academic research" designed to collect summaries and literature reviews of peer-reviewed academic research, and make them available to the general public. AcaWiki is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with seed funding from the Hewlett Foundation.

Press Contact

* Jon Phillips, press@acawiki.org, +1.415.830.3884

Press Kit

* http://acawiki.org/about
* Release as PDF
* Release as ODT

The Fabricatorz recently capped off an exciting and eventful week at the 6th annual Libre Graphics Meeting, in Montreal. The 4-day Conference was packed with developers and users of free software including Inkscape, Scribus, Gimp, Blender, DeviantArt, and many more. Developer Brad Phillips closed out the Day One talks with a guide to making our unique avatars, as well as announcing the Release of Open Clip Art Library 3.0.

As the talks rolled into Day Two, Christopher Adams revealed the highly-anticipated, refreshed Open Font Library, to much adulation.

The hits kept coming through Day Four, when Fabricatorz Founder, Jon Phillips, unveiled the Milkymist video synthesizer, alongside a vision of an open hardware future for LGM.

The Fabricatorz want to send out a big thanks to all involved in organizing and hosting events for this year's Libre Graphics Meeting. More great events and Releases lay ahead, as we look forward to the rest of 2011!