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Goal: lower the barrier to entry of semiconductor fabrication

How: making an open-source DIY version of every nanofabrication tool

Collaboration

Any individual, club, university, or company is encouraged to replicate and contribute to Hacker Fab.

The only metric that matters is how many people recreate your work. People will recreate your work if it is safe, performant, simple, cheap, and well documented. This goes for tools, processes and devices.

Rules:

• Don't gatekeep
• Help others
• Try new stuff
• Learn

We communicate asynchronously on Discord and have a regular cadence of small reports and voice chats to sync up on progress, plans, and problems.

A goal of Hacker Fab is to give more than you take.

Clear documentation without duplicated information is core to the collaborative nature of this project. Hubs are encouraged to use a cohesive project management and documentation style. This is organic and we discuss options as we grow on Discord. Currently, we use a number of tools to align efforts:

• hackerfab.org top level website
  • links to all universities
  • maintains a list of who is building what tool
• Discord
  • never use DMs for technical information
  • only use fab-specific channels if it's completely irrelevant to people outside your location
  • every fab has an onboarding channel of fab leads, points of contact, current projects, how to get started
• Github/Gitbook
  • everyone's work exists in one place
• you are encouraged to fork documentation and hardware projects
  • when you feel that others would benefit from your work, make a pull request

Social Media

The goal of using social media is to show people cool stuff we are building and to attract collaborators. Hacker Fab staff may crosspost high level plans and updates from collaborators on HackerFab Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Discord Announcements, etc. Individuals and universities are encouraged to make their own accounts too!

Funding

Hacker Fab is not a commercial entity; you must obtain your own funding. People in Discord may be able to help point you in the right direction.

All the open-source resources make it easy to show a sponsor timelines and capabilities.