About Make: Projects
Make: Projects is a new way to share DIY projects online for a growing maker community that can build, create, hack, discover, share, and connect with each other. Make: Projects was seeded with a collection of projects from MAKE magazine, but it will grow from the participation of the community. Makers can improve an existing project or share a cool new project that nobody has ever seen.
Just like in the pages of MAKE magazine, you can find all kinds of cool DIY projects, great and small. These projects are not only fun to do but they also share the skills and knowledge of making things, based on the experience of many people. We want more people of all ages and backgrounds to enjoy making things.
Make: Projects is a structured wiki for DIY projects. A wiki such as Wikipedia enables collaboration around the creation of useful information. Make: Projects is a collaborative resource for people who like to make things. It’s enhanced for creating projects that are visually rich and organized as step-by-step procedures with listings for tools and materials. Anyone can create a project demonstrating how to make something. (Like any wiki, you can create unstructured wiki pages as well.)
Most importantly, anyone can edit any project in Make: Projects. While anyone can edit, only approved edits become public. That approval process depends upon the person’s reputation in the system, which is gained over time. Soon, your participation in Make: Projects will be recognized by earning badges.
Make: Projects is curated because we want to provide the best DIY projects. Also, we want to avoid having numerous projects that duplicate other people’s work. That’s why we will encourage the community to collaborate on revisions to improve existing projects instead of creating many versions of the same project with minor variations.
The beauty of how-to projects is that they are evergreen. Their value lasts a long time. We’re excited to re-introduce projects from the earliest issue of MAKE and know they can be as relevant as projects from the current issue. We also know that already published projects can be improved by new insights or by new techniques. In other words, even the instructions for projects can be revised and tweaked and hacked.
The Make: Projects platform is open to reflect the energy and expertise of all of the maker community. We hope you will take part in this community by sharing your own ideas, knowledge and passion. Contribute your own techniques or projects so that others can learn from you, as you no doubt have learned from them. By hosting this resource, we hope to grow the community of makers.
The Make: Projects Platform ¶
The Make: Projects platform was developed by iFixit, Inc. iFixit uses this structured wiki to create interactive DIY repair manuals. We partnered with them to create a platform for interactive DIY project guides. Thanks to Kyle and Luke and the rest of the team for their vision and their development expertise.
This platform is still under development. We’d love to hear your ideas on how to tweak and hack it. We plan to build a parts database that’s shared by Make: Projects as well as iFixit, and perhaps other sites. Stay tuned as there’s more to come.
While we are working on getting all of our site logins to play well together, for the time being, the login for Make: Projects is separate, though you can use your Google or Yahoo account to sign in. Please also note that Search applies just to Make: Projects and currently doesn't include http://www.makezine.com or http://www.craftzine.com.
Become a Maker! ¶
Here’s how you can become part of the community on Make: Projects
Watch this great video about how to get started
1) Register for your own account and create a profile to connect with other makers.
2) Search or browse to find projects that fit your interests.
3) Edit projects if you see a need to improve a procedure or technique.
4) Help improve the organization of projects.
5) Share a technique or a project that you don’t already see in Make: Projects.
Here are some links to learn more about Make: Projects
We hope you will roll up your sleeves and get hands-on with Make: Projects. Please share your feedback with us at webmaster@makep