#newknowable

This is the second post in a series where I’ll dive into all the new features, design decisions and thoughts behind #NewKnowable. This time we’ll discuss how components allow you to manage your project better. If you want to start with the first post of the series click here.

Let’s imagine you are building a robot. Most certainly it will have a basic control system, some kind of motor and most probably a casing. If you look at these - very simplified - parts, you’ll notice that they are all very different form one another: The control system may be Arduino based and you need to write code for it to work properly. The motor requires some mechanical skills and understanding. And you might want to print the casing with your FabLab’s 3D printer.

All these task are vastly different – and it doesn’t make sense to discuss them with your co-makers all in the same place. That’s why we came up with the idea of components:

Components allow you to split your project into manageable pieces.

To stick with the robot example: You could create a component for the Arduino, one for the motor and one for the casing. Each component allows you to describe what you want to achieve, upload corresponding files and discuss all of that with other makers.

A list of components for one specific project

A detail view of one component

But components have another advantage: They allow for version control. Your project will change over time - but you probably don’t want to lose all your previous iterations along the way. knowbale makes it easy to save “snapshots” of your project at any time. This enables you to view the history of your project and download past iterations.

Components allow you to save and download old iterations

This is the first post in a series where I’ll dive into all the new features, design decisions and thoughts behind #NewKnowable. This one is meant as a primer - a short overview about the major things we’ve build into our beta - and why.

In Fall 2012 we launched our first prototype of knowable: A rough sketch that encompassed our vision of a collaborative platform where clever hardware ideas could be accessed form around the world and - most importantly - refined by the community. This prototype did an amazing job at setting the general direction of knowable and getting feedback from many brave testers. It led us to better understanding your needs - and allowed us to create a more suitable and practical knowable: The one that is taking shape right now.

With #NewKnowable we are focusing our efforts around one core observation:

Building a hardware product - be it open source or not - means participating in an ever evolving process.

You have an idea, you tell the world about it, you get input and feedback, you start building, you refine, you iterate and somewhere down the line you produce a version that you’ll finally release - just to start the process all over again.

With this observation in mind, we moved away from the rigid structure of step-by-step guides and towards a more open and inclusive way of showcasing, documenting and collaboratively building hardware projects.

Today you can start a project on #NewKnowable with just an idea, search for people who have the skills you need in order to get feedback - or even to join your team. You’ve made some progress? Well, now it’s super easy for you to just grab your phone and upload a shot of project, tagged as a work-in-progress picture. You reached a critical milestone? Easily create and save a new version (or “snapshot”) of your whole project with the push of a button. Your idea is growing too big? Break it down into manageable components and tackle one aspect of your project at the time (or, assign it your team mates).

Showcase your projects with Work-In-Progress images

Split your project into manageable components

Show your skills and projects

But it’s not only that. #NewKnowable is also more open and inclusive when it comes to the tools that you already use in order to create you products. Uploading and storing all you different files - from circuit layouts to CADs - in our components is just the beginning. We aim to embed your files, code and instructions from various places around the web since we know how tedious it can be to repeat the work you’ve already done - and we don’t want to put you in that position.

It has been really quiet on our blog over the last weeks – but this is about to change, big time! I am very excited to let you all know that we just released the first beta version of #NewKnowable! It is a brand new take on collaborative ideation, tinkering and making. One that we've been diligently working on for the last weeks and are now super eager to finally show it to you.

Unfortunately we cannot make the #NewKnowable beta available for everybody right from the get-go. There are a bunch of things we have to test and try out with smaller batches of people before we are able to scale to, well, everybody.

But fear not: There will be invites and we make sure to increase the number of beta testers significantly over the coming weeks.

If you want to try out knowable as one of our first users, make sure to sign up on our brand new landing page. And for those of you who joined us during the last beta test: There is no need to sign up again - you will be automatically invited!

We'll make sure to keep you all posted on all things concerning invites, our progress and on the occasional "look behind the scenes" here on this blog, as well as on Twitter and on Facebook.