Formed in September 2008, this group is an initiative to bring together people interested in creating and sharing freely available open source hardware.
So why is this important? And what are the benefits? Read what Richard Stallman has written on why software should be free and relate it to hardware where possible. And there is a related video as well. Another idea to tie it all together would be to search the open manufacturing mailing list for the term "post-scarcity". I would like to go into the social benefits in this description, but wow, I'm feeling lazy atm.