Imagine just finishing a great dish at a restaurant and wishing you could make that at home. Well at the Instructables Restaurant you can do just that. In fact not only can you get the "source code" of the dish you ate, but you can download the plans to the furniture and fixtures as well.
The Instructables Restaurant is an outgrowth of Instructionables.com which
"is a web-based documentation platform where passionate people share what they do and how they do it, and learn from and collaborate with others. The seeds of Instructables germinated at the MIT Media Lab as the future founders of Squid Labs built places to share their projects and help others."
In line with the Instructables philosophy, everything at the restaurant is either based on recipes posted to
Instructables or plans and designs from there. If anything was needed not already on Instructables, it was completed by the restaurant organizers and then put on Instructables.com
Everything is licensed under a creative commons license. I guess that is taking creative to a whole new level.
If you are looking to run right out to the Instructables Restaurant you might be disappointed. After announcing their plans to open a restaurant based on this concept back in 2008, the restaurant was finally opened on December 16th the historic Theatrum Anatomicum of the Waag in Amsterdam. However, the restaurant was only a pop up event and from what I have been able to find out is no longer open there. Such is the story with pop up events which come and go quickly.
But now that the ice has been broken, there is no reason we won't see open source concept restaurants popping up all over. So the next time you really like a dish when you go out to eat, you may just be able to take the recipe home with you (and the design of how to make the actual plate as well).

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More blog posts from Alan Shimel:
- Bang, Zoom, Is Open Source The Right Way To The Moon?
- Are You Ready For An Open Source Car?
- Open Source: Why You Care
- Open Source Friday Focus: Pidgin
- Apple and Microsoft As Underdog? I Don't Think So
- Welcome to the Personal Cloud, Thanks to Open Source and Pogoplug
- Smartphones, the Next Great Open Source Battleground
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As co-founder and Managing Partner at The CISO Group, Alan Shimel is responsible for driving the vision and mission of the company. The CISO Group offers security consulting and PCI compliance management for the payment card industry. Prior to The CISO Group, Alan was the Chief Strategy Officer at StillSecure. Shimel was the public persona of StillSecure as it grew from start up to helping defend some of the largest and most sensitive networks in the world.
Shimel is an often-cited personality in the technology community and is a sought-after speaker at industry and government conferences and events. His commentary about the state of security, open source and life is followed closely by many industry insiders via his blog and podcast, "Ashimmy, After All These Years" (www.ashimmy.com). Alan is now also a regular contributor to The CISO Group’s security.exe blog and podcast.
Alan has helped build several successful technology companies by combining a strong business background with a deep knowledge of technology. His legal background, long experience in the field, and New York street smarts combine to form a unique personality.
Disclosure: The CISO Group sells a software-as-a-service PCI compliance application called SAQPro. The company is independent and does not represent any other vendor's products as a reseller.
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