These are some of the things we've been up to at Appropedia Foundation:

Global Surgical Training Challenge Grand Prize Winner

We're thrilled to announce the winner of the Grand Prize Award for the Challenge. Congratulations to team ALL-SAFE, based in Ethiopia with members in Cameroon, Kenya, and the United States. Their program, "Building Surgical Self-Training Modules for Laparoscopic Skills" is an innovative and low-cost solution to address the lack of access to minimally invasive, laparoscopic interventions in sub-Saharan Africa. Their focus on laparoscopic treatment for ectopic pregnancy, the leading cause of maternal death, has the potential to save many lives.

We also want to introduce the launch of SELF: The Surgical Education Learners Forum, a program that will use Appropedia as a platform to enable access to surgical training in low and middle income countries. SELF will empower clinicians to learn and self-assess skills using open source training modules, in partnership with Appropedia, to develop low-cost surgical skill training and simulators. These materials will be accessible to anyone for free, enabling learning outside of the traditional education pathways. Together, we aim to revolutionize surgical training and make it more accessible to all.

Open Climate Fellowship

Exciting news! The Open Climate Fellowship, supported by the Wikimedia Alliances Fund, just started its first cohort. This program brings together seven mid-career professionals from different backgrounds to develop their projects in the open, as they engage with their peers, activists, and other emerging leaders working at the intersection of the open movement and the climate crisis. We're proud to mention the support of Appropedia in this initiative which aims to advance climate justice with an open lens and contribute to the knowledge commons. Meet the 2023 Open Climate fellows and stay tuned for updates on their work!

Teaching Innovators How to Document

Appropedia is working on a new project to support the Global Innovation Gathering community. We have recently engaged with this community to teach them how to use Appropedia as a tool for sharing their projects with others and supporting the spread of innovative ideas and technologies. We look forward to sharing more news about this project in the upcoming weeks. To highlight Appropedia's commitment, our ED also participated in a recent Community Call to discuss how to use Appropedia, including best practices for open hardware documentation and open science. 

Solution Mapping

Appropedia collaborated with the UNDP Accelerator Lab in El Salvador to offer a useful resource that we'd like to point you towards. The "Guía para productos de conocimiento y mapeo de soluciones" (currently in Spanish) provides a comprehensive framework for developing and mapping grassroots innovations. Whether you are part of an organization, a researcher, practitioner, or community member, this guide can help you take your work to the next level. You can read more about our shared experience told by Rodrigo Morán at the UNDP Accelerator Labs’ blog (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

Recently, Appropedia's Executive Director participated in a UNDP call to emphasize the importance of making solutions open and accessible while highlighting the need for documentarians to have access to the right technical and intellectual property tools to create quality knowledge products. This call promoted open knowledge sharing and collaboration towards developing innovative solutions to address global challenges.

Using the OSHWA hardware certification from Appropedia

Beyond the scope of a patent’s description, open prior art can be easily missed. This leads to unoriginal inventions getting patents.To address this issue, the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) has created a certification database that provides centralized prior art. To capture these technologies, a novel tool has been developed that provides a semi-automated way of applying for certification from MediaWiki websites. This tool has been tested through a case study using Appropedia and has shown that the transfer of information needed to obtain OSHWA certification could be completed on average in 62.5% less time than direct form filling. To learn more about this tool for open hardware certification, we invite you to read the recently published journal titled "Towards open source patents: Semi-automated open hardware certification from MediaWiki websites".

Finally, we would like to make an appeal for support for Appropedia. This invaluable resource for individuals and communities seeking sustainable and equitable solutions to various challenges around the world requires the support from the community. Your donation, no matter how big or small, can help ensure that this vital resource remains accessible to people everywhere.