“The government needs to think of creative ways to provide resources to the innovators … across the country”
Lujan advocated for establishing maker-spaces in public libraries, potentially outfitting them with small-scale manufacturing equipment such as 3-D printers, that are accessible to businesses, researchers and the nearby community.
Because public libraries already exist across America, “including the rural parts, where we still don’t have bandwidth capacity,” they could become hubs for technological development outside Silicon Valley, he said.
This sounds a bit like multipurpose facilities like PSA’s proposed “Multitask DeVille”. But why stop at Libraries, when in many communities schools are under-utilized during weekends, and evenings. Also in the future, schools could become even more involved in their neighborhoods as centers for all age group learning using online tools, apprenticeship, trainings, internships in small businesses leasing space, access to video production tools, and even forms of DIY healthcare using remote diagnosis AI robots.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Lawmaker-Public-Libraries-Can-Boost-American-Innovation-Nextgov.com_.pdf”]