This would be a hackerspace movement where physical manifestations of the halfbakery are located in public library space around the world and provide space and resources for people to get together, share, document, implement, market, and develop their halfbaked ideas. Accessibility could be baked in at the ground level to make sure that the spaces and resources are accessible to people who use adaptive technologies, so that the especially crazy and innovative ideas that come out of this community can be baked back into the development process. Products, weird art projects etc could be used to market and measure the library's "functionality". This network of hackspaces could eventually virtualize when fabrication becomes ubiquitous and at the speed of thought, and become an "halfbakesphere", just beyond the noosphere.-- JesusHChrist, Sep 14 2011 Maker Faire http://makerfaire.com/ [JesusHChrist, Sep 18 2011] would there be pointed sticks?-- bungston, Sep 15 2011 Toronto's supposed business genius mayor has the amazing business idea of shutting down a bunch of libraries to save money. I was under the impression business was about making money through innovation, not just pushing the orange protestantism. This is the type of innovation that is needed.-- rcarty, Sep 15 2011 So, it's a Starbucks with a Wi-fi connection, then?-- RayfordSteele, Sep 15 2011 ...and a tablesaw.
Public workshops for all - bring your own materials, book in a 30 minute session, made your cuts, or flash your PCBs, or feed in your blueprints into the 3d prototyper, if libraries lend out learning tools, then an extended library should lend out time on more practical tools as well.
Trouble is, it's expensive - in a time when public funding is being cut, and libraries are being shut down, asking for an additional (and more costly) service to be added to the library remit seems to suffer from being badly timed.-- zen_tom, Sep 15 2011 The screen area on an e-reader is smaller than a paperback book; how are you going to read the instructions on how to operate the CNC machines ?-- FlyingToaster, Sep 16 2011 I was under the impression that it was during economic downturn public spending was supposed to increase. People realized that after the first notable time the market system utterly failed at the end of the 1920s. It keeps utterly failing but some dearth of reasoning keeps people deregulating banking systems, forcing poor people to pay for private health insurance, bailing-out billionaires, and cutting social services when the economy is in decline. This post is an example of something public libraries can do right now to transform society. It will help reverse the alarming deskilling trend that postindustrialism has ushered in.-- rcarty, Sep 16 2011 Technology is making the traditional model of libraries obsolete. Libraries should re-cast themselves as not just a place to borrow books from, but a public venue for spreading knowledge. If libraries could adapt to the changing needs of citizens, they may be able to escape a likely decline in public funding.
I'm not sure if this idea is the best way to answer this challenge, but it looks like a step in the right direction. [+]-- xaviergisz, Sep 16 2011 //I was under the impression that it was during economic downturn public spending was supposed to increase.// Aha - a Keynsian! Not many of them left these days - You may well be right (I couldn't possibly comment)-- zen_tom, Sep 16 2011 The only problem with this is that they'd be filled with Halfbakers. Fire suppression would have to be state-of- the-art, especially if [8th] and yours truly were in close proximity.-- Alterother, Sep 16 2011 If the two of you would kindly step into these meatgrinders, we can test whether the resulting slurries work as a hypergolic rocket fuel.-- mouseposture, Sep 17 2011 random, halfbakery