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The Internet of Production is a global alliance of organisations that regard distributed manufacturing as the foundation of a fairer society in the future. The alliance is pushing for a more efficient future where instead of shipping products across the globe, hardware designs and knowledge are shared over the internet and products are made locally from locally available materials.

On the 5th of March the Alliance council met in Hamburg, in parallel to our Hackathon. The council brings together numerous organisations from design sharing platforms, to disaster relief charities, to companies producing spare parts for machinery in the Global South. The Open Toolchain Foundation is not yet a member of the council as we only had our official launch the day before this meeting! However, we were delighted to be involved in their meeting and to explore our shared goals.

The Internet of Production is not specifically focused on Open Hardware or on Open Source Software, but its goal of distributed production relies on enabling data exchange and design collaboration. Enabling data exchange and design collaboration is also a key goal of the Open Toolchain Foundation; we believe that a toolchain of open source software is essential if we are to enable distributed production.

We look forward to working more closely with the Internet of Production Alliance. Working together for a fairer, more sustainable, efficient, and open future.

The image above was adapted from the home page of the Internet of Production website (CC-BY Internet of Production).