Our friend Tia Carr Williams attented the afternoon session at NESTA on “Collaborative Strategies and Challenges of Making Things the Open Source Way“.
Here’s her report:
“This event was organized by 40Fires in partnership with Nesta.
The 40Fires Foundation seeks to develop energy-efficient cars, and other sustainable products, using an open source approach. The Foundation is currently led by a small team of people, funded by Riversimple. These include Hugo Spowers, Patrick Andrews, Roland Whitehead, Nicolas Sergent and Christian Ahlert. The events aim was to inform participants about Open Hardware, to create a space to discuss,learn and explore practical solutions, forging potential collaborations to facilitate Open Hardware development, with the aim of ‘a better world’. Speakers included Christian Alhert of Minibar and Open Business, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino of Tinker.it and Francesco D’Orazio of FACE, Adrian Bowyer talked about the RepRap Project and its Community, and Andrew Katz discussed a framework for open licensing of hardware.
Patrick Andrews and Hugo Spowers of Riversimple/40 Fires, whose intention is to eliminate the environmental impact of personal mobility, presented The Hyrban Hydrogen powered Open Source car, a highly energy-efficient vehicle built to last and cheap to maintain. Their objective is to consistently improve the design of the car through a core team and with the co operation of communities of interest in an open space environment. The open-source approach also means that entrepreneurs around the world could download the designs and manufacture the two-seater prototypelocally for free. An intention to break the monopoly model factors too. If such a model were to successfully land a new product, it could demonstrate a collective intelligentsia hybrid that would revolutionise creative production, business development and reduce costs in an extraordinary leap forward in the way that cars are designed including the user from the earliest of stages. The benefits of such were apparent across a variety of dimensions, financial, useability, customer satisfaction et al.
The issues discussed regarding the potential and challenges of were centred around how best to enfranchise, motivate, manage and extrapolate valuable ideas from participants to the virtual space with boundaries and clear guidelines.
Some great ideas came from the assembled forum; how best to accord qualitative collaborators the ability to access more developed elements of the project; how to evidence great ideas with good moderation drawn from trusted contributors; ways to obviate saboteurs by community/peer policing; building relationship capital as a ‘whats in it for me’ bragging rights opportunity; ensuring the ‘wisdom of crowds’ is operant by providing productive pathways to navigate as developments emerge; giving frequent and consistent updates progress reports.
Certainly there was concern regarding licensing issues regarding Open Hardware which needed to find resolution, IP being a highly sensitive issue. How to give someone the ability to own their design as well as share it. Alarm regarding the practice of ringfencing was highlighted and exploration on how to distribute knowledge in order to protect the project from this unpleasant practice. How to protect from reverse engineering was tabled and several people proferred ideas that could assist in prohibiting those with the intention.
A desire to encourage more women to participate was refreshing. I would welcome the opportunity to participate further on the foundations laid at this event. Both panellists and attendees felt that much had been shared and learned from the day and were keen to follow it up with further similar style meetings.