Bolivian Fab Lab Network 1st Green Fab Lab in Latinamerica

1. Green Fab Lab Bolivia
The FabLabs are cause and consequence of the new industrial revolution that will bring
changes in our paradigms of innovation, production, intellectual property, business models,
etc while demanding new management models. They form a P2P cooperative and even
open participation and integration of all institutions linked to innovation and technological
and social development networks.
Originating with the Center For Bits and Atoms of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, in the last 10 years it has expanded across the 5 continents: from downtown
Boston to rural India, from South Africa to northern Europe.
In our country the Green FabLab (Verde) Bolivia (FLVB) was founded on December 10, 2010,
by Marco Zubieta, its current director, as a social enterprise whose purpose is to incubate
inclusive and sustainable technology-based projects. He has developed nodes in La Paz,
Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, installing offices and first facilities in the city of Cochabamba.
Simultaneously it has been a FabLab Civil Association Bolivia as an instance of coordination
between regional enterprises and universities, NGOs, foundations, businesses and anyone
interested.
The FLBV (FabLab Bolivia Verde) is an environmental project under construction and a
barefoot initiative which focuses on self-management and Open P2P cooperatives.
It puts forward to people a radical approach to empowerment, from actual transfers of
appropriate technology based on self-sufficiency. Personal fabrication is an opportunity to
build a new production model, compared with the changes introduced in the contemporary
world by personal computers and the Internet, brings significant changes in flexibility,
networking, autonomy, mobility and access and is considered to be the third industrial
revolution. FabLabs network around the world area based on real accelerators of this
dynamic.
Since Congress FabLabs 7 has emphasised the need to place these developments in a
context of socio-technical innovation emancipatory, relations with open source practices
and in relation to these, linking FabLabs with the emerging concept of the commons or free
licenses for use of knowledge and skills for social purposes. Since 2010 the FLVB has
followed a process of self-definition and search for identity within the ecosystem FabLabs;
finding their own role within this global network.
"Our aim is to make real contributions to the advancement of knowledge and practices that
are shaping this third digital revolution, but also strong emphasis on emancipatory networks
and the development of interfaces between production equipment (technical partners) and
allowing organic new synergies and solutions with high social impact, "says founder Marco
Zubieta.
Most FabLabs have an industrial or architectural guidance and are able to produce
everything from handcrafted pieces to complex modular structures. FLVB is a step towards
not only the production of objects but also food and energy consumption.

2. Thus in addition to redefining the current practice or models, it is redefining habitat and
joint local / community development and social innovation.
Among its main programs is ICT, which includes teachers, educational materials and
implementation of technology for technical baccalaureate depending on STEMA (Science,
Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Art) classrooms.
Its purpose is to improve the training of human resources in these areas from early
education to enable an ‘ecosystem’ of best practices and effective convergence between
educational processes and new technologies.
This ecosystem will soon be implemented in FLVB and Technology classrooms, Multipurpose
Community ‘Telecentres’ and over the internet. The current generation of digital natives,
both creators and consumers of content, enjoy building ideas and projects of great
technological innovation, endless creativity, new and advanced cognitive structures and
social forms that allow them to create their contemporary world and its future measure.
While FabLabs were originally designed as a prototyping platform for innovation and
invention, to provide the necessary stimulus for local entrepreneurship, they are now
increasingly being adopted by colleges and universities as project-based platforms and with
a strong emphasis on STEMA.
Users learn while designing and creating objects of use and personal importance,
empowered by the experience of doing things for themselves, learning from one another
and teaching each other, building a deep and meaningful knowledge of machines, materials,
design process and the subsequent engineering that comes from these processes of
invention and innovation.
The ICT program rather than being locked into a fixed curriculum and / or being static,
enables an ‘ecosystem’ where learning happens in a real involvement and depending on the
personal context, where students pass through a complete cycle of imagination, design,
prototyping, creative thinking, and iterations until achieving the concretions solutions that
allow them to put ideas into a tangible reality. In a new society empowered by best ideas,
teams formed early in this free culture and the FabLabs own production technologies and is
no longer exclusive to factories.
The FabLabs are democratising access for anyone to do the unthinkable.
A Green FabLab
If we are in the 3rd Industrial Revolution, as argued by many experts, then FLVB is the
transformation of human industry through ecologically intelligent design and an approach in
biomimicry, thus mimicking the design and operation of systemic nature.
Along these lines is a program called Permabits, originally designed and conceived by
Zubieta and is now in its final design stage involving an interdisciplinary team of experts.
"Our concept of Green FabLab refers to the convergence of software, information and bits

3. on one side and hardware, manufactured and atoms on the other, in the context of an
ecological resort, agro-bio-industrial, comprehensive and self-sufficiently."
Zubieta notes, "Applying digital manufacturing from an ecological basis, based on a systemic
approach to circular economy and biomimicry, we design our prototype".
The project includes the construction of several buildings conventionally called FabLabs.
Permabits is an Integrated Farm Self-Sufficient connected to two bio-refineries (bioplastics
and micro algae); the residence of the Fabbers and the Center for Training and Events ".
While humans synthesise a concrete solution to every need, nature, does somethingnature,
by highly specialized compositions of a few generic materials,gets perfect solutions for each
problem. For Fabbers, biomimicry is no longer an exotic language and becomes an ethical
mandate: back to mother earth.
It is certainly an ambitious project since its objective is to trigger and coordinate a
participatory process globally and immediate local application for change of productive
matrix towards "a society of common, open and self-knowledge, a network of independent
producers sharing productive assets."