Today the WikiHouse Foundation was named one of 30 semi-finalists as part of the 2017 European Social Innovation competition. WikiHouse was selected out of almost 800 applications across the EU and Horizon 2020 countries. This year’s competition saw the judges choose entries with the potential to address the growing gap between those with the skills and opportunities to take advantage of technological progress and those without, who might face wage stagnation or job losses.

Our objective is to get the tools and knowledge to design and build sustainable homes and neighbourhoods into the hands of every business, citizen and community on earth. Our strategy is to digitise and open up the housing supply chain: that is, to create new digital infrastructure that restructures the way that we invest-in, design, manufacture, assemble, operate and disassemble buildings that grows a new sustainable development economy. This will begin with a working MVP with an inbuilt revenue model, allowing it to continuously scale through partnerships.

With over 40 countries participating there has been a wide variety of solutions exploring innovations in tools, services and models to allow all members of society to acquire the appropriate skills and seize the opportunities of the digital revolution. You can see the full 2017 Competition announcement and list of 30 semi-finalists here.

All those involved in the WikiHouse project, from the core team to the Contributors, have seen digitisations transformative effect on the labour market. With the Competition’s aim geared towards rebooting equality and shaping future society by inspiring fresh, energetic approaches to digital inclusion, collaborative economy, connectivity and skills development, our objectives are perfectly aligned. From the 3rd-5th of July we will be in Madrid, attending workshops and visiting other examples of successful social innovation projects in Spain. Following this, 10 finalists will be selected by the jury and the three most effective projects will each be awarded with a prize of €50,000 at the awards ceremony in Brussels in October 2016.

More and more people are being priced out of home ownership. Even if you are lucky enough to own your own home, you will most likely have to face taking on a large amount of debt, a huge driver of inequality. We believe in a future where housing exists without debt. At the same time this goes hand in hand with a focus on building homes for people, not profit. By making the self-build process easier, more affordable, and less risky for individuals, communities, and organisations, we have the potential to establish a new normal.

To find out more about the Social Innovation Competition; visit them here and follow them on Twitter.

Harnessing Technological Change: European Social Innovation was originally published in WikiHouse News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Almere is a unique, planned city and municipality in the province of Flevoland, Netherlands. It is the newest city in the Netherlands and has been growing and developing ever since it became a municipality in 1984 (first houses in Almere were built in 1975). Being such a new and experimental city makes it the perfect place for WikiHouse to be explored in this exciting project led by Ivar Diekerhof and Vincent Muller.

Vincent is an Architect of Ontwerpburo Muller and co-founded WikiHouseNL. He found out about WikiHouse in 2013 and has since spare headed it’s development in Holland together with Jan Willem de Groot and Peter Veldmans. They built a WikiHouse demonstration model several times at events & expositions in Holland. After that, they also built the very challenging WikiTower Pavilion at a showroom for sustainable building. Currently Vincent is the Lead Architect working on an ambitious WikiHouse project ‘Pionierswoning’. Ivar on the other hand is a Property Developer and Process Manager at KAW Architects and Consultants. KAW works for social housing landlords and care providers in Holland. Ivar has worked on different restructuring and regeneration projects in social housing neighbourhoods for the last 10 years. With a focus on bottom up projects which are often citizen led, Ivar believes strongly in the intelligence and knowledge of inhabitants of their own neighbourhoods. Ivar is currently hired by the ‘Woningbouwatelier’ — a think (and do!) tank for experiments in house building — to enrol new experiments. The Woningbouwatelier is part of the Almere2.0 program.

WikiHouse is on of these experiments. Their ambition is to realise 20–25 WikiHouses with a monthly cost from €500 (mortgage + energy).

If that works out, there is a serious alternative besides the overcrowded social housing/rental market.

We recently spoke to them about their Pionierswoning project, the first residential WikiHouse they are developing as an experiment for a larger project consisting of 20–25 units.

What drew them to WikiHouse was the focus on digital production as well as the appeal for exploring what could be the next generation of self-building and housing production. Both topics that are close to the heart of Almere, as one of the most active cities in exploring alternative housing. Vincent and Ivar shared some of the basic principles and ambitions behind what they want to achieve with Pionierswoning, the show home and prototype.

They also began to explore how the Wren System, shared on GitHub, might need to be adapted to fit the context of their local region.

The project is now being submitted for planning approval and the first prototype home will be built by volunteers and students at the end of summer. If you are interested to join building get in contact with Ivar. By the end of this year they hope to have a group together which will build the further 20–25 WikiHouses.

To keep in touch with the progress and to get involved in the build follow Ivar and Vincent on Twitter.

WikiHouse Contributors develop Wren in Almere, Holland. was originally published in WikiHouse News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

New year, new website.

2016 has been a huge year for the WikiHouse project, and in particular for WikiHouse Foundation. The project is moving from a loose, experimental open R&D project to a stage where the first WikiHouse technologies are being piloted in pioneer projects across the world. Teams are working on design, engineering, testing to get the first technologies fully certified for full commercial use. It’s been a long road, but it is moving forwards with increasing momentum. The first thing we want to say is a huge thank-you to the thousands of supporters, contributors, donors, funders and partners who have shared our open vision for transforming the way we make homes and cities in the 21st century, and have used WikiHouse technology and contributed to developing and advancing it to get it to the point where it is today. There’ll be a time to tell some of those stories in more detail, but for now — you know who you are.

The first next step is to start to build better infrastructure to support that R&D. So far, sharing and collaboration have taken place in a fairly ad-hoc labour-intensive way, in various Github repos, Dropboxes, gDrives, inboxes and Skype conversations, with vary degrees of success. We hope the latest web pages will start to do a better job of bringing together basic files and resources, pointing people to where they want to be and, above all, pointing to standardised repos to facilitate better sharing and R&D on open solutions.

There really is no better way to structure open collaboration on files than git, even if it was originally conceived for software rather than hardware. For now, the preferred platform for hosting files is Github. We realise that many hardware designers and engineers find Github an unknown and a bit weird to use, but it’s worth the effort of getting to know it, and how to fork and document new solutions and to track contributions. Please do feel free to explore existing repos, help improve their documentation, point out issues. There’s lots of work to be done to make the library better.

The way we’ve structured the library also reflects our thinking on the three key areas of open solutions around the project:

Tools Open source tools for manufacturing or building homes. At the moment, these are basic things like Mallets and Stepups, but it would be great to include open source CNC manufacturing tool projects into this library too at some point.

Technologies For a long time, people have thought of the WikiHouse project as being synonymous with CNC-manufactured plywood structures. In our minds, these solutions have always just been the first WikiHouse technologies. After all, most of the open, digitally fabricated building solutions and methods that will shape our built environment in the next century haven’t been invented yet. We envision a future where many new ‘vernacular’ building technologies evolve to serve different economies, climates and cultures, like Darwin’s Finches.

The challenge was how to come up with a naming / taxonomy standard that could support this. Individual technologies (or ‘open products’) need to have names, but should ideally be instinctively non-proprietary. It was Alex Whitcroft who came up with a brilliant answer: to name technologies after animals. So the WikiHouse system developed in the UK is called ‘Wren’. Space Craft Systems in New Zealand have named their sister system ‘Tuatara’. We have mapped out empty sections of the WikiHouse library as a kind of open invitation to anyone developing open solutions to solutions across the whole building ecosystem. These might range from forks of Wren to whole new technologies, components and methods.

Types By far the most difficult category (for now) are individual house types. These are not specific project designs but generic house layouts which combine a number of technologies into a building layout which can be adapted to different sites and users. Until these solutions move from static to parametric, we’re being deliberately quite cautious about what we include here, but the Microhouse files have proven quite useful as a good set of starter files, including bill of materials and costings.

If, together, we can build and improve a library of simple, beautiful, low-cost, high-performance solutions as a global commons, we know it will be a hugely valuable resource for society and for a more sustainable, circular economy.

However, beyond a better library and better documentation, there is a bigger challenge: that is to develop better workflow tools and a working distributed supply chain. Can we build digital infrastructure to make the distributed, ‘micro’ sector a scaleable force for building homes and cities, and to bring housing industry into the 21st century? So far, in truth, the WikiHouse project has barely scratched the surface. We have been writing code with a pencil. It’s time to build an operating system for WikiHouse technologies — and perhaps for whole emerging digital building industry — to run on.

This year, we started work on a project to do exactly that. It’s still in early prototyping stage, and we’ll share more news about it into the New Year, but it’s a hugely exciting project, to try to build a truly useful piece of civic digital infrastructure, as the foundation for a more open, democratic, sustainable and digital housing economy. Watch this space.

In the meantime, thank you to everyone for your patience with us (we are only a small non-profit startup), for your support, and for the work you’re doing together.

We thought we could hardly let the season pass without sharing this small laser cut mini festive WikiHouse model by Akiko Kobayashi. Download the file here.

Please let us know if you find any issues with the website, and if you can, do contribute to documentation, R&D, donate, become a member of the consortium or partner with us. Industrial Revolutions don’t happen overnight but, as 2016 has illustrated — the world badly needs one, and it’s important that we get it right.

The WikiHouse Foundation Team

New year, new website. was originally published in WikiHouse News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

WikiHouse Foundation develops digital building systems and tools that make it simple to build beautiful, sustainable homes. The first technology Wren, is available for download on Github.

A WikiHouse Contributor is an individual or team that has interest in developing and improving WikiHouse Technologies. This could include architects, designers, engineers, project managers, software developers, community leaders, doers, thinkers; anyone that is making WikiHouse a reality by testing and developing it.

Recently, we have seen a number of exciting projects popping up so we’re encouraging these contributors to share about their experience.

Since the inception of WikiHouse, the project has existed primarily in the hardware space. Using some basic third-party apps, we have enabled contributors to share design files and learnings across a global community. We are now moving into the next stage of development as we build the online ‘open-chain’ platform. Our aim is to develop solutions, standards and shared digital supply chains for an open, distributed economy. Where every citizen and small business has access to the knowledge and tools to build affordable and sustainable homes.

As well as sharing insights from people using WikiHouse systems and general updates, the publication will provide an insight into the continued development of the ‘open-chain’ online platform and the work of WikiHouse Foundation.

Are you actively exploring WikiHouse in your community and do you have a story or insight you’d like to share, let us know. We are open to hearing all types of stories, from all types of people. You don’t have to be a highly skilled author or have an English major. You just have to bring your unique personal experience and point of view to the table.

This is WikiHouse News.

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WikiHouse News was originally published in WikiHouse News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.