Welcome — Our New Tool for Community Collaboration

Having built seven cigar box guitars over the past couple years (see my how-to in MAKE Volume 21), I wanted to try building a battery-powered cigar box amplifier.

Naturally, I referred to our Cracker Box Amplifier project in MAKE Volume 09. And when I visited makezine.com to read the comments about the project, I discovered that several readers had posted additional instructions and clarifications that really helped me understand how to build the amp.

This experience drove home our belief that MAKE’s readers are our most important resource. In addition to writing our how-to articles, our readers often improve on those projects after we print them. But there hasn’t been a well-defined place online to document these modified instructions, so readers tended to post them on their own blogs or other non-obvious places.

That’s why we’re so excited about Make: Projects (makeprojects.com), our brand new beta library of project instructions written by you, the readers. We’re developing Make: Projects in partnership with the folks behind ifixit.com, a powerful, easy-to-use system for writing online repair manuals. The iFixiteers helped us adapt the platform for use as a project website.

Make: Projects is collaborative, not only in the sense that individuals can create and improve on how-to instructions, but also in the sense that communities (hackerspaces, collectives, educators, and so on) can share their own projects and contribute to the creation of the ultimate makers’ manual.

We invite you try Make: Projects. Start by taking a look at the dozens of great projects we’ve already seeded there, such as a green surfboard, a spy microphone, and a wind turbine. You can make changes to any of the articles by clicking the Edit button. Or click Make A New Project, and start writing instructions for something entirely new.

Make: Projects is currently in beta, a work in progress, which means we need your help and your ideas to maximize its potential. Please send your feedback to us at projects@makezine.com.

We’re looking forward to your contributions!