The Global Entrepreneurship and Maker Space Initiative (GEMSI)

The Global Entrepreneurship and Maker Space Initiative (GEMSI) is a project which focuses on encouraging the development of democratic maker communities to stimulate and support entrepreneurial endeavors. GEMSI’s first project is proposed to take place in Cairo Egypt starting October 2011. The political revolutions of the Arab Spring has initiated change to the Egyptian political landscape and laid bare the troubled economy that was underneath. The many years of authoritarian regimes has taken it’s toll on the entrepreneurial climate of the region.

GEMSI believes in the power of the Maker movement and in particular the empowering concept of Hacker Spaces. These spaces are community workshops that are democratizing innovation throughout the world. By providing their members the tools, collaborators, and access to a global pool of knowledge they are prototyping spaces of the future.

Hacker Spaces / Maker Spaces have recently experienced a dramatic growth throughout the world, going from a set of 50 which identified themselves on hackerspaces.org to over 1000 today. Sadly the developing world has not seen the same growth. It is this problem that GEMSI attempts to address.