I am helping coordinate an interdisciplinary summer programme called the Biomaker Challenge, where we’re encouraging students, researchers and makers in Cambridge to team up, build and document open biological instrumentation over the summer. We have almost 40 teams now and after much deliberating we have them documenting their projects on github
However, going forward we’d like to link things up better for next year and we don’t have funding to develop a custom website. Has anyone had experience with https://www.hackster.io/ or other community sites that they would recommend? Any open source solutions lurking out there?
The main reasons we’ve looked at hackster.io is that it links people projects and bits of kit quite well and the layout looks good, but I’d be really interested to hear other people’s experiences whether you’ve used these types of systems or custom-built websites.
Thanks in advance for any advice or recommendations!
Did you guys look at hackaday.io? I like their platform and the way the projects are organized (videos get automatically embeded, there is a photostream for each project, plus space for descriptions and parts list).
In this specific case, you could create a “hackerspace” for the Biomakers project and then have each project inside the hackerspace (and participants). As you know Hackaday has a very active community and a lot of contacts to a lot of electronics companies (which could be a plus?), also they have the yearly hackaday challenge, which could be an extra incentive for some people (and if you are lucky a source of extra funds).
But maybe it would also be good to have them start the project description and documenting with Docubriks? @Tobey, would this be possible?
I would also recommend to take a look at Docubricks.com and Wevolver.com. We are lurking at OnShape, because it actually allows for collaborating (forking, modifying, etc) of the 3D parts in an assembly. But that’s a very specific need. GitHub gives a lot of freedom, but is a bit too intimidating for non-techies
Yes that is definitely possible if the site-team is interested. Later this year the DocuBricks team will help some other repositories to implement it as an documentation option as well.