The power of open source hardware lies in the ability to build upon others’ work and good documentation is the key to making this happen. We believe that documentation best practices can increase contributions to open source hardware projects significantly. For this reason, we are hosting a collaborative event to arrive at an open source hardware documentation platform based on a set of shared standards.
The open source hardware movement has come a long way in the last few years, but a number of outstanding issues is still slowing down its expansion and ability to become a new economic engine of efficiency, sustainability and collaboration. Documentation is a key factor. As the number of open source projects continues to grow, it’s important to generate clearly-findable, modular, remixable documentation that can not only improve the quality of projects – but also enhance cross-project collaboration. Quality documentation is essential to boosting the true spirit of open innovation.
We are confident that the growth of the open source hardware movement can be accelerated by a global knowledge sharing platform made of generic tools, specialized software, documentation templates and other blueprints and best practices. We believe that such a learning and exchange framework will eventually enable the birth of a globally-collaborative R&D community, cooperating by means of shared standards and platforms.
We foresee the birth of a global repository of hardware designs based on a shared information architecture and a shared approach to design. We advocate for a more interconnected global community built upon awareness, understanding of, and access to open design.
Only a shared approach to open source hardware design and documentation, will facilitate this transition and will encourage others to contribute to a common pool of human knowledge.
HOW (the process)
Being conscious of the wide scope of the challenges, we propose to host a 3-day event, that will be based on a mashup of well known co-design formats for group cooperation: Service Design Jams and Hackathons.
The event will be focused on:
- identifying and sharing outstanding problems concerning the diffusion of open source hardware documentation practices
- generating creative solutions and prototyping them collaboratively
- improving awareness, cooperation, and coordination betweeen open source hardware stakeholders
- drawing new talent to open source hardware by identifying a range of problems and challenges in development tasks
Without wishing to constrain the discussion too much, we performed a preliminary analysis and identified some problem domains that will be used as a basis for the discussion.
The event will be held on a weekend. A preliminary meetup on Friday afternoon will be used to identify challenges and form the groups on an interest-based choice. The groups will be then left to work, within an agenda that will encourage periodical coordination throughout the event for cross fertilization. The group will be asked to prototype all the work, in the form of documentation and soft deliverables, pieces of software, service or business ideas, animations, handbooks, guidelines, stencils and graphics sets, and so on so forth.
We will select participants to ensure balance between designers, hackers, developers, storytellers, facilitators, entrepreneurs, and others.
WHEN & WHERE
NYC – 26th to 28th of April
Venue: (to be determined)
THE ROAD HERE
So far the team behind this initiative developed a partial Problem Statement, an initial Taxonomy, and a draft Entity Relationship Diagram. Tools and software are central, and we decided to start with a public and cooperative event. We thought of a software hackathon (to modify and remix existing applications) but eventually realized that existing issues go beyond software. Thus, the event is meant to create not only software, but also relationships between open source hardware groups, and outreach to the greater community.
AFTER THE EVENT
We see this event as a step in sparking a global, shared approach to Open Source Hardware problem solving, technology transfer and community inclusion. We intend to come out with a minimum product. Next steps could be to develop specific components, to host other events worldwide, and to gather feedback – while drawing new contributors to the open source hardware community.
BACKING ORGANIZATIONS (open for joining)
