Welcome to our GitHub organization!
Ready to roll up your sleeves?
Our mission is to create open and accessible educational experiences, as well as, providing material support to Hard Tech development in Detroit.
Hard tech, also known as Deep Tech, is a category of technology that combines science and engineering to create extremely complex, breakthrough physical products and systems.
✅ Designing new forms of factories and production methods which unlock new flexibilities, efficiencies and industrial/environment safety.
✅ Developing new forms of automation and robotics - both traditional and exotic - that improve accessibility and adoption by industry and consumers.
✅ Developing low-cost, but highly-competitive end-to-end transit infrastructure for cash-strapped municipalities - including physical infrastructure and the automated equipment to build it.
✅ Identifying and exploiting hard technology verticals that are entrenched in other regions and establishing (re-homing) them in Detroit. Things like designing and building computers, cloud infrastructure, microchips, lithography equipment, heavy cranes, batteries, advanced rail and precision machine tools in Detroit.
You!
Yep, you! :)
Building Hard Tech is not easy - from from it - but the journey will be rewarding for those interested.
A formal education in engineering or science is helpful and in some cases necessary, but highly-creative people without a formal education were building all kinds of Hard Tech in Detroit long ago.
And Detroit can again. Detroit has the right bones.
Students in high-school and up should be able to actively participate and learn from our events, workshops and other educational content.
We believe that solving big problems come from practical, hands-on and creative opportunities and projects along with mutual support and investment.
We want to be pervasive in Detroit.
We want to constantly challenge Detroit.
Oftentimes, when encountering a difficult problem, some do not know where to begin or what the possibilities are. That is where we hope to come in!
📆 Hosting pop-up events and hands-on workshops all around Detroit.
📚 Publishing highly-engaging, visual content that complements workshops and events.
💻 Building open-source alternatives for foundational and difficult engineering and manufacturing technologies.
🏛️ Maintaining freely-accessible, open technical standards that compete with non-free standards.
🤝 Supporting other nonprofits, professional technical organizations and open-source efforts in Detroit that overlap with our mission in any way.
💪 We are passionate about helping create the next generation of creators, engineers, builders and manufacturers working in Hard Tech.
And the future of Detroit depends on it.
Fundamentally, we feel that too much engineering and industrial knowledge is locked away behind expensive paywalls, walled gardens and segregationist education policies.
Questions, comments or suggestions? Reach out to us here!
Detroit Hard Tech sees the potential in EVERYONE and we hope to build a diverse and welcoming community to contribute, share and grow.
Recent re-segregationist policies from the US federal government are detestable and are an anathema to the future of Detroit - a city that is ~77% Black and where 1/3 live in poverty.
Segregationist policies and those that support them are not welcome in our spaces or in our work.
Please review our current Code of Conduct.