Nathan has spent the past decade working on problems at the intersection of open-source hardware, disaster response, and supply chain logistics. A former welder, electrician, and installation artist, he has been a contributor to Make Magazine, co-founded the Internet of Production Alliance, and spent most of 2020 coordinating open source medical supply projects across several maker communities with Helpful Engineering.
Building Supply Chain Mesh Networks: Open Infrastructure for Resilient Manufacturing
May 23, 2026 @ 12:40 PM - 1:00 PM GMT+2 Add to Calendar
When COVID-19 shattered supply chains, makers produced ~48M units of open-source medical supplies, but wound up spending the majority of their effort manually coordinating and match-making across ad hoc supply chains instead of actual production. This talk explores the open-source infrastructure we are building to solve this, in anticipation of the next crisis that affects our brittle supply chains: machine-readable, universal open-hardware data standards (OKH/OKW); automated matching engines; supply tree generation; and off-grid comms networks. We’ll demonstrate how these tools enable supply chain mesh networks—resilient alternatives to fragile just-in-time systems.
Nathan Parker