Makerville : Building a hardware community in India

In 2019, a few of us came together to address a gap left by the dissolution of the IHSN community. Driven by our passion for hardware, we decided to start something new—Makerville—a grassroots community for hardware practitioners across India. Our approach was simple: start small, learn as we go, and build a supportive ecosystem for makers and hardware enthusiasts. One thing that we were thinking of - what would the Homebrew Club where Apple demo'd their first computer look like if it was in India, and in the 21st century?

Since then, Makerville has grown steadily. We’ve organized two physical conferences and one virtual event, with another gathering on the horizon. As a community, we’ve launched and maintained collaborative projects, such as our comprehensive list of hardware vendors, and we’re now working on open hardware projects like the Makerville Badge to help newcomers start somewhere and for seasoned developers to have a good boilerplate.

This talk will share our journey so far—what’s worked, what hasn’t, and the lessons we’ve learned along the way. More importantly, I’ll discuss where Makerville is heading next: our vision for open hardware in India, fostering collaboration, and having a place to find niche hardware experts. While much is said online about global manufacturing, supply chains, and policy, this talk will focus on the real, on-the-ground work of hardware community building.

What started as a simple Telegram channel, has resulted in people collaborating with each other on all kinds of projects - big and small.

• What makes hardware communities different from software ones?

• How relevant is open source hardware to our day jobs?

• Stereotypes and assumptions

• What does the future hold? What are we doing to be a part of that?