A rede pública de laboratórios de fabricação digital da cidade de São Paulo: as contribuições sociais dos espaços maker para a perspectiva do conhecimento como um comum

Abstract

This doctoral research seeks to bring social contributions from the Fab Lab Livre SP laboratory network, under the perspective of knowledge as a common good. Fab Lab Livre SP is a public policy implemented in São Paulo / SP, in 2015/2016, which has been running until nowadays, supported by equipment called digital manufacturing laboratories. The concepts taken as assumptions in this thesis are: maker culture; the knowledge¿s principles as a common good; and access to open information, in face of neoliberalism and its counter-conduct. The objective is to critically examine the maker spaces as a public policy, usually tensioned by the increasing of neoliberalism¿s contradictions effects, which restricts or strives to eliminate the State¿s participation in the supply and management of public facilities. This study qualitative character was based on the information¿s analysis of the public policy itself, mostly the people who somehow were acting in the lab, characterizing them as users, or communities¿ representatives, laboratory technicians and managers of the public policy, including the Secretary of Services of the São Paulo city who was in charge when that Fab Lab facility was implanted. All those subjects were interviewed during the period between 2018 and 2020. The cooperation dynamics among individuals and the proper knowledge management way in the maker spaces suggest the hypothesis that such manner of knowledge production demands in this case a need to look for alternatives to offer public and democratically managed open spaces, through processes linked to the use of opensource technology. From the perspective of knowledge as a common good, the analyzes point to possibilities that go beyond the precepts of public policy, indicating a very productive way of maker culture application both in knowledge generation and in staff training for improve the subjects¿ relationship in social communities. All of this, however, finds limits in the barriers imposed by the neoliberal bias, given that the restricting State participation prevents the expression of full, democratic and political citizen participation as well, which is the basis of the proposal called maker culture.