A community of making is something I like as an idea. Making has slightly trapped itself in the ideal of the Maker - 1/2 artisanal expert, 1/2 hyper-personal consumer. The link to communities and shared capactity is similar to how unions grew out of the knowledge developed in 19C worker-owned subscription libraries.

I'm also reminded of need to understand the inefficiencies of mass manufacture shown in articles like this https://t.co/Wjf0vBN9SW. How local making could be a way of balancing the repair and reuse of manufactured goods. The Circular Economy mediated thru a cycle of manufacture and making, global and local.

There's definitely a tendency to focus on the individual maker in a lot of what gets shared from the community. More space for celebrating the communities enabling the making would be good (I've got a blog post brewing about trying to make some of that behind-the-scenes community work more visible, but I don't know when I'll get that out of my head and into text... :-)

It feels to me as though the circular economy stuff is a natural progression from the "if you can't open it, you don't own it" ethos. But maybe it needs to be more explicit.

For me, the right to open things up and amend them - both to improve the item, and to fix a broken part - are part of "democratizing production", but now you've highlighted it...