Welcome to GOAT Notes!
Welcome to the newsletter for Grassroots Open Assistive Tech!
I don’t want this letter to be boring. Like my zines, it will be informal and have way too many exclamation points, because like open source tech and right to repair laws, open enthusiasm has liberatory power!
Cyborg-hood is Powerful,
Liz, GOAT director - liz@openassistivetech.org
GOAT activities
We had a fabulous hack session for wheelchair battery and motor controller tech at a downtown San Francisco hackerspace, General Lithium! Hard core electronics, battery teardowns, oscilloscopes scoping, digital microscopes, and last but not least, cocktails! Read more about it on the GOAT blog: Powerchair battery tinkering at General Lithium!
Another, more for beginner DIY (Do-It-Yourself) modification, was for Lights & Safety, held at the Independent Living Center SF. Liz, Vince, and Marisol helped people add lights, reflectors to their walkers, wheelchairs, scooters, and powerchairs. In other words, Blinky Lights. Read more here about that event: Be Seen on Halloween!
Dr. Alexandra Enders brought a donation of around 20 boxes of DIY assistive tech papers and books to me in San Francisco. Alexandra and I connected many years ago as I was giving talks about DIY assistive tech, and she was the person behind AbleData’s (former) DIY online archive and had been advocating, in her academic career and as an activist, for a greater awareness of DIY and open source/ open hardware potential for disability rights and justice. We were so happy to find each other back then, and I’m honored to host her carefully curated collection now. It’s amazing to find things in there that aren’t available anywhere else in the world; not in libraries, not online. GOAT is going to preserve this information and make it freely available to all.
Our helpful intern, Jack, has started scanning some of the Enders archival material, and adding metadata to their records. The physical materials will be housed at San Francisco’s Prelinger Library, once we have catalogued it, box by box. This important partnership means that the physical materials will also be preserved, and will be accessible to the public.
Earlier this year, Liz visited Julia Thompson’s class at the USF Innovation Hive and gave a short talk, then looked at student projects in progress as they worked to design assistive tech prototypes for wheelchair users who also use a white cane.
Coming up next
Board of Directors meeting – Our 2024 board meeting is coming up in early December, and the board will visit Karen Nakamura’s lab at UC Berkeley. (AKA, the RadMad Lab at Cal – “Making Better Crips” since 2018.) We will be discussing expanding the board and inviting more people to form an advisory board.
Disabled Inventors – A series of interviews with disabled inventors, makers, and hackers, will be coming in 2025!
Events and Workshops – More workshops, hack sessions, show-and-tell peer skill shares in various locations around the Bay Area! Look for us to work with the Center for Independent Living (CIL) in Berkeley, Spokeland in Oakland, the San Francisco Disability Cultural Center, the Common Tools Network, and area maker spaces.
Preservation – Scans of the Enders Archive materials will continue, and we will keep working to add metadata and make the online archive searchable and useful.
Connecting our people – With support from the Software Freedom Conservancy and the Center for Democracy and Technology, GOAT is starting an old-school public listserv for disability justice and technology related discussion. Watch for the coming announcement to join this mailing list!
Free repair kits – DIY repair kits with tools, materials, and information to pass out to wheelchair, scooter, and powerchair users. Our capacity to do this is highly dependent on our fundraising!
The future’s so GOAT, I’ve GOAT to have shades!
In the News
Fight to Repair is an organization working to advance Right to Repair policy and law. They have a great newsletter and blog. I highly recommend reading them, and supporting them, if you want to keep up with the latest Right to Repair news!
Disability Rights Are Technology Rights – Cory Doctorow wrote a great post for the Electronic Frontier Foundation Deeplinks blog, Disability Rights Are Technology Rights. I was happy to read an early draft to give feedback, and as always, had an interesting discussion with Cory about both tech stuff and disability justice.
When Prosthetics Break – Cory, Paul from Fight to Repair, Kyle from iFixit, and others connected over the situation of the guy whose prosthetic exoskeleton had a trivial failure that the manufacturer originally refused to fix. (BAAAA Humbug – says GOAT!) A lot of agitating and press coverage later, the manufacturer agreed to ship replacement parts, so Michael is able to get around again. While this activism is both necessary and effective, it doesn’t scale to help everyone – which is why we desperately need both Right to Repair law, enforcement mechanisms for it, and support to create wider ecosystems and networks of assistive tech repair shops, engineers, and repair information online.
Mel Chua’s passing – We sadly lost a good friend and colleague, GOAT board of directors member and secretary, Mel Chua. You can read more about Mel: on the Fedora software project’s site, from Sumana Harihareswara’s celebration of Mel and their dissertation completion, and on the archives of Mel’s own blog. Mel and I met 20 years ago at open source software conferences and immediately connected on many levels. I am missing them so much.
What we do
Grassroots Open Assistive Tech’s purpose is to document, curate, preserve, make accessible, and freely share assistive technology designs and information under open licenses, as well as providing coordination and education to affiliated communities.
We will support disabled people in making their designs and builds available for public good, and in having free to use designs available to them for their own use.
Please donate!
GOAT is a 501(c)(3) organization and your donations are tax deductible. EIN: 93-3313503.
You can donate via PayPal or via check.
PayPal donation email: liz@openassistivetech.org.
To avoid our paying transaction fees, you can send a physical check made out to Grassroots Open Assistive Tech, to GOAT, PO Box 720011, San Francisco, CA 94172.
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You are wonderful