2026-11-03 –, Lightning Stage
How did a community makerspace coordinate more than a million face shields in 49 days during India’s 2020 lockdown, without a factory or a central command? This lightning talk unpacks the M19 Initiative as a case study in decentralized open hardware, leaving attendees with practical patterns for coordinating local production networks under pressure, and the failure modes to design around.
In 2020, with supply chains frozen by India’s lockdown, Maker’s Asylum’s M19 Initiative produced over 1 million face shields in 49 days. Not from one factory, but through a network of independent makers and small fabricators building from an open design. This talk is a field report on what made that scale possible: a design simple enough to reproduce anywhere, local nodes free to fork and adapt it, lightweight quality checks without central control, and coordination with almost no formal structure. I’ll also share where it strained and what we’d design differently. These lessons speak directly to questions the Ethereum community is facing now: how decentralized networks coordinate under pressure, how public goods get funded and sustained, and why local resilience depends on hardware being open too.
Vaibhav Chhabra is a Mechanical Engineer turned Carpenter and Educator. With a degree from Boston University, Vaibhav spent his early career at EyeNetra, a startup from MIT Media Labs, building portable Virtual Reality-based eye diagnostic devices. During his time in India for the eye diagnostic prototype, he recognized the need for accessible makerspaces and founded Makers Asylum in 2013 out of a small garage in Mumbai. Maker's Asylum is India's first community Makerspace in India, equipped with various co-located labs that facilitate prototyping of interdisciplinary ideas. The key focus of this space is to share the joy of making, empowering community members to develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and creative skills.
Through Makers Asylum, Vaibhav has been driving open innovation and hands-on education. He is also a visiting faculty at IDC - IIT Bombay, Judge school at Cambridge university, Advisor to the Museum of Solutions, Chair for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Young Indians – Confederation of Indian Industries, a Global Shaper at the World Economic Forum, and a member of the French President's Young Leaders Club. These roles have allowed him to contribute to driving innovation, education, and community development globally.