NAMII Crowdsourcing Demo

NAMII, the national additive manufacturing innovation institute, wants you to help demo crowdsourced 3d printing at the First Robotics Competition Championship. They put out a call to action asking for companies and individuals to mail them 3d prints of a flying disc model they provide. They’ll be handing the discs out as swag for competitors and attendees at the championship. The top producers will get name recognition, and logos are allowed on the discs, so it’s low cost advertising for any 3d printing companies or individuals that decide to participate.

But to call this a crowdsourcing experiment is inaccurate. NAMII, with at least $69 million in funding, could run an actual crowdsourced manufacturing demo by using makexyz or other crowdsourcing 3d services that actually pay the producers. This is a measure of how much free work they can get out of the 3d printing ecosystem. By calling it a fun “demonstration” to hobbyists and 3d printing companies, they may get many free discs, but asking for free 3d prints is more a demonstration of how much goodwill NAMII has than an actual display of cloud manufacturing.