The development of cheap single-board programmable systems in the recent period, has significantly facilitated the prototyping of electronic circuits. One of the first open electronic platforms was the Arduino. This hardware platform is compatible with open programming systems. The Arduino platform was based on a simple design and was created mainly for educational applications. The use of popular interfaces for communication with peripheral devices in the construction of the device meant that many projects in the field of control, automation and the Internet of Things were created on the basis of Arduino.  The Arduino platform was established in 2003 and is successfully used in modern projects. Another popular device for prototyping of control systems is Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is a mini-computer working under the control of the Raspbian OS. This operating system is based on Debian, a popular Linux distribution. In addition to the standard interfaces known from traditional PCs, this computer has a 40 pin GPIO connector, which allows designers to use devices connected with I2C, SPI or 1-Wire bus. Thanks to this device, it is possible to integrate the designed system with many peripheral sensors and automatic control modules. There are many other platforms on the market that have interfaces to integrate with popular sensors and controls, and allow programmers to create code in high-level programming languages. Due to their low cost, these devices can be a popular alternative to the most well-known and more expensive solutions. The most popular platforms of this type are:

• Orange Pi – Orange Pi is an open SoC computer. It has preinstalled operating system in Flash memory. This microcomputer has Allwinner H3 processor, it can run operating systems Android 4.4, Ubuntu, Raspbian. There is a version of this device equipped with a SIM card slot that allows data transmission in mobile networks.
• NodeMCU – A device with a WiFi module, based on the ESP8266 chip. It has 10 GPIO ports (serving PWM, I2C and 1-wire). The platform has been equipped with 4 MB of Flash memory. The system has a built-in single-channel 10-bit analogue ADC converter and USB-UART converter. The NodeMCU software is installed in the device’s memory, which allows you to create programs in the Lua script language. Developers can also use the popular C language.
• Onion Omega 2 – A single board platform for amateur use. One of the smallest IoT modules on the market that work with the Linux system. The device has a Mediatek MT7688 processor clocked at 580 MHz, has 64 MB of RAM and 16 MB of built-in Flash memory. The system has a built-in WiFi module and 15x GPIO, PWM, UART, I2C, and SPI interfaces. The module is controlled via a built-in web interface. The device manufacturer provides an account on its Cloud platform in the price of the device. This platform can be used for integration with other control systems and data sharing on the Internet.

These platforms are presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Platforms NodeMCU, Onion Omega 2 and Orange Pi.

These platforms can be used not only to create prototype systems, but also to build commercial data acquisition and control systems. An example of this type of solutions can be an agro-hydro-meteorological station, which was built on the basis of open hardware platforms. These platforms were used to integrate the IoT system with a professional meteorological station of the Vantage Pro company, and allowed to extend the functionality by measuring insolation, measuring evaporation and evapotranspiration, detecting the thickness of the snow cover, and measuring the water level. The constructed system is also used to generate alerts about dangerous weather events. The implemented system was installed in Krakow. It is currently used to transmit data and generate information about dangerous meteorological conditions. This system is fully autonomous due to power requirements. The physical installation of the system is shown in Figure 2. Pictures of installed stations were made available by InfoMet Katowice.

Figure 2. Meteo station based on open hardware platforms.

The relatively low price of the presented platforms allows their use also in educational projects. These platforms can be used in educational centers and schools that do not have large budget resources for their activities. One of the educational projects is a controlled robot platform based on the ESP8266 system, and a dedicated Motor Shield module. Thanks to these devices, it is possible to build an educational robot system. This system enables students to familiarize themselves with the basic problems of control, network communication and programming of embedded systems. This educational robot was also used in educational workshops as part of the ODM project. Despite the fact that the people participating in the workshop did not have any preparation in the field of computer science, they launched the presented robot platform. Participating in the workshop, he was able to familiarize himself with the methods of robot control, data transmission problems in Internet networks and programming of control systems in high level programming languages. The use of the robot in educational workshops as part of the ODM project is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Educational Robot Platform.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg8MelZsI2A&feature=youtu.be

The presented examples present the applications of popular single board platforms in education and commercial activities. Applications of open hardware solutions will continue to grow thanks to IoT systems. The dynamic development of independent projects such as DWeb or Ethereum will allow to create innovative solutions in the field of data processing based on open hardware and software platforms.

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The P2P Lab is happy to announce the launch of “Open source agriculture: Co-create with Tzoumakers” , celebrating the gathering of designers, makers and farmers who are adapting to the digitised world. The workshop will be hosted at the rural makerspace “Tzoumakers”, which is located in NW Greece.

 1. Introduction and background

The P2P Lab is a not-for-profit organisation based in Ioannina, Greece. It is dedicated to research around peer-to-peer dynamics in technology, society and economy. It works for the development and maintenance of a global knowledge commons, encompassing a global community of researchers and activists.

Currently, the P2P Lab aims to create awareness and promote an emerging collaborative productive model of agriculture, based on the conjunction of commons-based peer production with desktop manufacturing. Agriculture is a key activity in the peripheral and less-developed regions of the EU and a crucial productive sector. It is a field in which ready-to-apply open source hardware and software solutions have already been produced and, thus, can be implemented and improved. Considering the fragmentation of the existing abundant ​open source projects in relation to agriculture, the replication, sharing and improvement of solutions is hindered.

To facilitate interaction and create ​feedback loops among makers, designers and farmers, the P2P Lab is organising a 5-day workshop in Ioannina (NW Greece). The workshop will build upon our experience gained from the previous year, when makers around Europe gathered at a local makerspace for asylum seekers in Ioannina and co-created solutions with a local refugee community. The workshop will now take place at Tzoumakers, a rural makerspace situated in a small mountainous village called Kalentzi. The latter is part of the village cluster of Tzoumerka in Ioannina, a place abundant in cultural and natural wealth but scarce in the economic means of welfare.

The main aim of the workshop is to familiarise the local community with open source technologies developed within the EU and, ideally, connect hubs (e.g. Fab Labs) that provide technical infrastructures for development. This may create a network of open source software/hardware communities and local farmers that overcome barriers through knowledge diffusion and collaboration for their mutual benefit.

2. Invitation to apply

The P2P Lab is looking for 4 designers, makers or enthusiasts to join the workshop in Kaletzi (Ioannina). Selected designers will introduce their technological solution related to agriculture to the local community and manufacture it with their help, while keeping local biophysical conditions in mind.

Travel, accommodation and per diems of the grantees will be covered by the P2P Lab.

Ηere are the general requirements for applicants:

• The designers should be based in the EU, while the solution may originate elsewhere.
• The solutions must be available under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0).
• Each solution should be fully developed within 3 days or less.

Please find below the selection criteria and timeline for this call. If you would like to apply, we ask you to fill in the application form and send it to us no later than Friday, 8 March 2019 22:00 CET.

3. Selection criteria and conditions

The submitted applications will be reviewed and selected by the local community in light of the criteria and the conditions described below:

• Does the solution fit with the values and principles of small-scale farming systems?
• Is the solution developed according to expressed user needs?
• Is the solution easily reproduced and adaptable?

4. Procedure and timeline

To apply for this call, please fill in the application form via this link.

The deadline is 8 March 2019 22:00 CET. The decision will be announced at the P2P Foundation blog on Monday, 25 March 2019.

The workshop will take place in June 2019 (exact dates to be confirmed).

For queries, you may contact us at [email protected].

This event is organised in the context of the Distributed Design Market Platform Creative Europe project.

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CERN is home to some of the largest and most complex scientific equipment on the planet. Yet back in March, scientists gathered there for a conference about DIY laboratory tools. Scientists in poorly funded labs, particularly in the global south, have used DIY tools for many years. But well-resourced institutes are increasingly interested in the collaborative possibilities of open labware. Citizen scientists are also using it to build instruments for tasks like environmental monitoring, which can then be used to support community demands for justice from polluters.

It is not only scientists – citizen or professional – who are going DIY. An open hardware movement of hobbyists, activists, geeks, designers, engineers, students and social entrepreneurs is creating ingenious versions of all sorts of technologies, and freely sharing the know-how through social media. Open hardware is also encroaching upon centres of manufacturing. In August, for instance, the global gathering of FabLabs met in Shenzhen (already host to Maker Faires) to review how their network can help to decentralise design and manufacture.

The free software movement is cited as both an inspiration and a model for open hardware. Free software practices have transformed our culture by making it easier for people to become involved in producing things from magazines to music, movies to games, communities to services. With advances in digital fabrication making it easier to manipulate materials, some now anticipate an analogous opening up of manufacturing to mass participation.

One online community has been developing DIY book scanners. These enable you to build a machine for automatically photographing book pages; and then download free software to process the images into a file. Having digitized your books, you might go further by sharing the files online (taking care to post anonymously to a site relaxed about copyright law).

The list of open hardware available to people continues to grow. The Open Source Ecology group is even developing a Global Village Construction Kit of tools for self-sufficiency, from machine tools to housing to tractors and beyond. A ‘global commons’ of accessible tools is emerging.

Open hardware can be serious business too. Take RepRap: a 3D printer community whose open source practices enabled its rapid growth. Its evolution took a controversial turn when members of the Resistor hackerspace in New York decided to commercialize their version of the RepRap, and protected aspects of its design through intellectual property. Their Makerbot business was subsequently bought for $400 million by 3D printer manufacturer Stratosys; a move which provoked fierce criticism from open hardware advocates.

Hobbyists have always tinkered with technologies for their own purposes (in early personal computing, for example). And social activists have long advocated the power of giving tools to people. The Whole Earth Catalogue was an early proponent of the liberating potential of digital technology. Then there were the dog-eared Appropriate Technology manuals that a generation of aid workers carried into the developing world in the 1970s and 1980s. Other antecedents include Victor Papanek’s Nomadic Furniture and Walter Segal’s self-build housing. We can compare these with their digital heirs at Open Desk and WikiHouse. Open, community-based technology workshops are not so new either.

So is this just old wine in new bottles? We think not. Open hardware lowers the barriers to participation in rapid prototyping in ways that earlier activists would find astonishing. And with community-workshops popping up in many towns, and online sharing platforms proliferating, the possibilities for doing technology differently are genuinely exciting.

Nevertheless, older experiences hold important lessons for the new. Our research into grassroots innovation movements, old and new, brings insights that activists today would be wise to consider.

The immediacy and connectedness of open hardware does not nullify the need for real skills in technology development. There remains a craft element to even the fleetest of digitally enabled tools. Experienced designers, engineers and machinists know the importance in understanding not just the tools themselves, but also the materials they work with. Practices that respect materials across their whole life cycle become imperative. Sustainable open hardware shifts the focus to making sufficiently, design for repair and repurposing, upcycling objects, and valuing the craft therein. Just because we can make almost anything, doesn’t mean we should.

And the materials involved are not simply physical. They are social too. If open hardware is to be genuinely inclusive, then its practices must actively empower people to become involved. Notionally accessible tools need to become actually available, and people need to feel confident using them. This requires social skills in community participation, as well as technology skills.

FabLabs are fantastic at combining face-to-face developments with online networks. These hybrid spaces contribute important infrastructure for open hardware. But maintaining infrastructure needs investment. Existing institutions, such as schools, museums, local governments, universities, and corporations are helping fund open workshops.

These institutional links bring the political dilemmas of open hardware to the surface. Is it really transforming technology development, or simply a refreshing input for business as usual? Education institutions see cool ways to induct people into conventional science, technology and manufacturing jobs. Local governments get excited about the entrepreneurial possibilities. Corporations see a reservoir of design prototypes offered up by the free labour of enthusiasts.

It is important to keep sharp open hardware’s more transformational edges, on agendas such as dismantling intellectual property and releasing investment for alternative business models. Only through a mix of craft, politics, and the support of social movements, will open hardware fully realise its potential to democratise technology.

Adrian Smith is professor of technology and society at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) and a member of the ESRC STEPS Centre (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) at the University of Sussex. Dr Mariano Fressoli is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET, Argentina) and STEPS Latin America. Their new book, Grassroots Innovation Movements, includes chapters on social technology, fablabs, hackerspaces and makerspaces.

Originally published on theguardian.com

Photo by LarsZi

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How do people work together to design open-source hardware products? What is the level of openness, trust and collaboration within such projects? Do the communities share common goals and visions and how do they allocate workloads? These are some core questions related to demystifying open-source hardware projects that Robert Mies and Jérémy Bonvoisin try to answer in the research project entitled “OPEN! Methods and tools for community-based product development“.

As for the digital sphere, there is strong evidence that commons-based peer-to-peer dynamics harness social creativity, collaboration and information sharing in a regenerative way. The question is: can we also unleash the creative capabilities of P2P in the physical sphere?

Experimentation is in the vanguard of open-source hardware projects. Equally important is reflection, with the aim to understand the dynamics and patterns that can lead to constant improvement. Therefore, this survey is a useful tool to help us comprehend how the creative capabilities of commons-based peer production could be unleashed: https://opensourcedesign.cc/Limesurvey/index.php/561438

Please share the survey and, if you are part of an open-source hardware project, are invited to join by December 17th, 2017!

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Arduino was the brainchild of Italian Massimo Banzi and his colleagues David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino and David Mellis. Originally an educational project for students, the Arduino collaborators in 2005 expanded the venture as a way to make cheap but sophisticated computer boards more available to the open source community. It is also seen as a way to bring artists, engineers and creatives together to find new ways of using technologies for the greater good.

Since its founding, Arduino has become part of the larger worldwide movement of open innovation, technology and creativity. The reference designs for Arduino hardware are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, and the source code for its software is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). While Arduino technologies can be freely copied by anyone, Arduino has created its own line of self-produced “Arduino At Heart” branded products. The official product sales support the Arduino enterprise while still allowing competitors to make “clones” at cheaper prices.

Arduino is officially a business whose chief asset is its trademark, the name Arduino and its logo. Anyone can use the Arduino designs for free, but if they wish to sell them under the Arduino name, they must pay to use the trademark. Besides licensing the Arduino trademark, the firm produces its own line of Arduino-branded devices. Paradoxically, the ability of others to freely use Arduino designs does not undermine sales of the Arduino-branded products because this openness has merely enlarged the market for Arduino technology while boosting trust in the Arduino brand compared to cheap knockoffs. Massimo Banzi’s design firm also makes money creating customized Arduino-based products.

Besides computer boards, Arduino offers its own self-designed kits, materials for wearable technologies and 3D printers, tools, books, manuals and workshops. There is now a vast global community of Arduino users, with many regional networks and groups devoted to special types of microprocessing boards.

Arduino enthusiasts and companies see the open hardware platform as an important infrastructure for building a new economy based on collaboration and collective knowledge. While Arduino systems can perform familiar tasks such as remote control of a car or the doors of a house, they also have great potential as the core of cheap but powerful smartphones; systems to collect, purify and distribute water in marginal areas; and systems that can generate clean, renewable energies.

But achieving the full potential of Arduino-based open platforms will require more focused public education about its capabilities. In this regard, Arduino – and other open technologies – still have a long way to go. While many governments have created digital agendas to boost their economic and social development through information technologies, few public schools have recognized the great promise of open source principles by teaching students about open source coding or open hardware development.

Even in countries like Spain that require young people to take programming courses in school, the government and schools have ignored the open source revolution, preferring to make agreements with big companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP to teach students about (and buy) their proprietary software. The same blindness affects government procurement of information technology, where governments tend to buy technology from the big firms instead of encouraging or requiring open source technologies that could improve their domestic research and development.

There are some bright signs, however. There is now a global robotics competition for students called RoboCup, which hosts a number of competitions using Arduino kits in the creation and programming of machines. Some big companies like Intel and MediaTek with their own proprietary microprocessors have decided to design products that can communicate with Arduino platforms, thus expanding their usefulness and appeal.

The unmet challenge is for governments to put Arduino and other open source technology at the core of their development agenda and educational programs. The benefits would be especially significant for smaller, emerging economies which otherwise depend on expensive foreign technologies with restrictive intellectual property terms.

Arduino is that rare commons that has successfully combined stable social collaboration with market sales. As an open technology, it has significantly advanced innovation in computer hardware while enhancing economic opportunities for millions of people.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Julio Sanchez Onofre (Mexico) is a tech journalist for the newspaper El Economista in Mexico City.

Photo by dubiella

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“This project aims at:

• understanding open source product development, showing concrete evidence of this emerging practice and delivering detailed description of the phenomenon;

• modeling the open source product development process as an alternative to well-anchored industrial product development processes;

• providing concrete process support in the form of methods and IT-tools. It will particularly be focused on the concept of a open design platform.

The P2P Lab is a consulting partner to this research project.

Contents of the wiki

All along the project, we will use this wiki to share results and data with the open source hardware community. Check for example the following pages:

• The page “A guide to Open Source Hardware” summarizes the best practices of product-related data sharing we have observed so far;

• The page “List of open source hardware products” provides a large collection of products released under open source licences;

• The page “Open-O-meter” defines a scale for measuring the “openness” of open source hardware.

Research programme

The aim of the project is to characterize current practices of open source product development in order to develop concrete guidance to support design process efficiency of open source product development projects. This guidance shall particularly consider:

• the organizational and business environment of open design projects: What business models can be built based on open design? What are the motivational drivers of project contributors and what are the different roles they may play? How is governance implemented? Through what regulation mechanisms are decisions taken?

• the open source product development process: What can ensure an efficient distribution of design tasks in a loosely-coupled organization? What validation mechanisms ensure the approval or rejection of individuals` contributions? How to ensure that contributions converge and let emerge a sufficiently designed product?

• the supporting information systems: What structure of product data information is adapted to a decentralized organization of design tasks? What capabilities should offer an online collaborative design platform to support the efficient collaboration of distant designers? What is the typology of information and intermediary objects to be stored and edited online to ensure building a common understanding between project contributors?

This will be addressed through the development of:

• a formalized open source product development process for coordinating individual efforts of community members towards a finished product design;

• online tools enabling collaborative engineering, thus supporting simultaneously the three functional spaces of collaboration: communication (e.g. chat, wiki), cooperation (e.g. concurrent text editing) and coordination (e.g. task allocation through workflows).”

More information about this research project can be found here.

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“Members of the WoeLab community have invented the world’s first 3D printer made almost entirely from e-waste, built computers with discarded electronics inside plastic jerry cans, and are in the process of repurposing a discarded fridge to house a work station.

In 2012, Sénamé Agboginou founded Woelab whose concept is “to make ‘low’ high tech”. In other words, “to develop very high tech projects but with what we have in our hands. Projects which are not high cost and that every person can have and projects which are adapted for our culture.”

The architect has spent several years working on designing modern living spaces in rural settings inspired by traditional west African mud structures, and says he was keen to replicate the communal, environmental approach in an urban area.

“In traditional systems people work together and build together,” he added. “If someone in the village has to build his house all the village come and help—it is the same thing in the hackerspace. The waste and recycled material are very helpful for this. E-waste is a very frugal material because those materials have an old life but they have the aspects you can use.”

Lalle Nadjagou, who is part of the latest cohort at WoeLab, is working on his newest electronic creation: a miniature 3D printe. For him e-waste is an exciting material to use: “It is a very good thing to recycle, it grows up your spirit and your mind,” he said. “For my own printer it is the same principle as the other 3D printers we know, apart from printing rubber, I want to print circuit boards.” As he added, “for this product it is a test and with this I can produce little things and if I succeed I will be able to produce other things in the future,”.

Nadjagou is hoping his creations can follow in the footsteps of the W.Afate, the groundbreaking 3D printer WoeLab designed in 2013 by repurposing electronic waste.

After buying a Prusa 3D printer which the group put together on site, Agboginou said community members were inspired to design their own version.

“We built this 3D printer together which was brought from abroad and after this we began to think how can we build a new one based on what we have in our hands,” the 36-year-old said. “One of the members said I think we can do this with e-waste and everyone laughed. But he had this genius idea.”

Raising $4,000 via a crowdfunding campaign, WoeLab set to work on the 3D printer project, incorporating elements of computers, scanners and other electronics into its design, which resulted in the W.Afate printer, named after WoeLab member Kodjo Afate Gnikou.”

The full article can be found here.Photo by Engineering for Change

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1. Kostakis, V., Fountouklis, M. & Drechsler, W. (2013) Peer production and desktop manufacturing: The case of the Helix_T wind turbine project. Science, Technology & Human Values, 38(6): 773 – 800.

2.  Kostakis, V. & Papachristou, M. (2013). Commons-based peer production and digital fabrication: The case of a RepRap-based, Lego-built 3D printing-milling machine. Telematics & Informatics.

3. Kostakis, V. & Drechsler, W. (Forthcoming). Commons-based peer production and artistic expression: Two cases from Greece. New Media & Society.

4. Kostakis, V., Niaros, V. & Giotitsas, C. (Forthcoming). Open source 3d printing as a means of learning: An educational experiment in two high schools in Greece. Information, Communication & Society.

5. Kostakis, V. & Bauwens M. (contracted). Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy. Palgrave Macmillan Pivot.

6. Kostakis, V., Niaros, V. & Giotitsas, C. (Forthcoming). Production and governance in hackerspaces: A manifestation of Commons-based peer production in the physical realm?. International Journal of Cultural Studies.

7. Kostakis, V. & Stavroulakis, S. (2013). The parody of the Commons. TripleC: Cognition, Communication, Co-operation, 11 (2): 412-424.

8. Kostakis, V. & Giotitsas, C. (Forthcoming). Public information as a Commons: The case of ERT and the peer-to-peer prospect. International Journal of E-Governance.

9.  Kostakis, V. (2013). At the turning point of the current techno-economic paradigm: Commons-based peer production, desktop manufacturing and the role of civil society in the Perezian framework. TripleC: Cognition, Communication, Co-operation, 11(1): 173 – 190

10.  Bauwens, M. & Kostakis, V. (Forthcoming). The reconfiguration of time and place after the emergence of peer-to-peer infrastructures. Araya, D. (Ed.). Technopolis: Smart cities as democratic ecologies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

11. Kostakis, V., Giotitsas, C. & Papanikolaou, G. (Ed.) (Forthcoming). P2P and the Commons (in Gr). Ioannina: Voreiodytikes Publications.

12. Kostakis, V. (2013). The emergence of the P2P prospect (in Gr), Theseis, 123: 127 – 141.

13. Bauwens, M. & Kostakis, V. (2013). A note on four future scenarios on capitalism and the Commons (in Gr), Theseis 124: 101-108

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This is where the FreedomBox (Fbx) Project of NYU professor Eben Moglen takes its rationale. Existing Debian software packages are to be combined by a community of geeks, put into a cheap plug server and made easy to use for large numbers of users.

Another teacher at NYU, Douglas Rushkoff, will incorporate a track on the FreedomBox Project in his upcoming conference. (Participants are listed right on this same blog.) That conference is to have participants from all around the world. Many of them cannot be physically present on conference day in New York. Some of them will simply hold a spontaneous remote event, and announce that to the NY  organizers by email. Others will use the services of a separate company to connect that enjoys Rushkoff’s trust, Meetup.com . (Remote contactcon meetup groups are listed on this wiki)

Procedures for establishing a remote meetup group
The central event with Douglas Rushkoff in NY promises to be inspiring, so that remote groups should be able to follow up with their own on-going activities to help “retake the net”. If a few simple procedures are followed, it is easy for any small group to participate remotely in the central event using Meetup. Meetup’s rules require that someone at each of the remote locations takes on the role of organizer, and be embedded in a remote meetup group. This group can be set up in an ad hoc fashion, generates a mailing list compiled and held by Meetup and is best constituted separately from existing organizations, as shown in the attached diagram.

Existing organizations, of course, can sponsor the new organizations. Remote meetup groups are featured as parts of the Meetup.com Website, and can have their own Websites, if they want, as retake.net has done. The organizer, once embedded in a remote meetup group, pays a small fee to meetup.com for linking the group to the main event.

New peer production book
Both the Fbx initiative and the conference described above comprise parts of a larger movement to maintain the digital commons. The digital commons is one chapter, written by Felix Stalder, among the 30 compiled in a new book co-edited by Keith Hart et al. (already described on this same blog). Two threats, for example, are identified by Stalder: “Free software is threatened by a commercial move towards ‘software as a service’” (SaaS, ibid, page 322). “The digital commons is threatened … by the emergence of the social networking platforms of Web 2.0” (ibid, page 323). These threats are being dealt with by the Fbx. The Fbx is being designed 1) to bring control of one’s data back to the user from any SaaS running in the cloud, i.e. onto the user’s equipment, and 2) to provide decentralized social networking i.e. either right from the user’s equipment where open-source alternative services such as status.net are running , or via software links to data on that equipment from the major services.

Keith Hart offers the book through commercial channels for $13 and his chapter online for free in PDF at http://www.tinyurl.com/3k72zat

Thomas Ruddy can be reached at thomasATthomasruddy.org

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Richard Stallman shared one of the many reasons against proprietary software which I saw before but didn’t quite went into deeply. Proprietary software puts us in a moral dilemma. We are not allowed to redistribute copies of proprietary software and when a friend of ours asks us to give him the software then we are faced with a moral dilemma – should I give the software to my friend? This is very interesting! A proprietary software limits the moral development and moral actions of the people using it. He spoke also about free software not as a software that can be downloaded for free or that is open sourced, but about the software as a tool for enabling four freedoms to the people. The freedom to run it for any purpose (1), the freedom to study and change the source code (2), the freedom to redistribute copies of it (3) and the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions of it (4).

One interesting discussion was a private standard for Open Hardware. It will not be like a normal standard, but more like labeling which products are Open Hardware. And there isn’t supposed to be some central authority which will decide what will be labeled or what not, but somehow the Open Hardware Community should be involved in that decision. There are still a lot of open questions on the proposal that has to be cleared out. Few goals of the proposal were identified: to ensure openness, to protect common knowledge and to be a simple, generic and universal standard. The values of the standard are: sharing, accessibility, enablement of reproduction, collective ownership. OHANDA will continue with the further development.

Michel Bauwens shared if we need Open Knowledge, then we need to create Open Infrastructures. He suggested creating mission-oriented entities that will help creating the infrastructures on which common knowledge can thrive. You can watch his talk “No Open Society without Open Knowledge, no Open Knowledge without Open Infrastructures“.

Open source hardware and Milkymist

Sebastien Bourdeauducq presented the Milkymist, a comprehensive open source solution for the live synthesis of interactive visual effects for VJs (video performance artists). Its custom embedded processor has Verilog HDL design files that are entirely free and open source.

Open Source Ecology – the foundation of modern civilization

Nikolay Georgiev presented Open Source Ecology and the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts. He shared the qualities of the project and how open collaboration and documentation is done. Distributive Economics in the project is implemented by open access to a global repository of economically significant products, plus the creation of flexible fabrication facilities and open business models. Current work is on production run of tractors and CEB Presses and remote collaboration on the steam engine and industrial robot arm. OSE Europe is being developed.

Beyond DiY: Open Hardware and Renewable Energy

Javier Ruiz presented Onawi, a non-profit organization developing open source designs for medium size wind turbines. The designs are developed by open collaboration among all stakeholders. Very interesting work combining open design and industry!

Developing open & distributed tools for Fablab project documentation

Anu Määttä from the Utrecht FabLab shared how they are helping people in the FabLab to document their work. On entry in the FabLab everyone register quickly themselves and on exit they document what they have done. The documentation then is converted into an RSS XML feed which is displayed visually by an ongoing prototype website. They also printed a QR Code to a product developed in the FabLab which you could scan and find various information about it, e.g. its documentation and where is the nearest FabLab where you can produce it.

Repairable machines: lessons learned developing open hardware

Lieven Standaert compared the 3D printers RepRap and MakerBot in very important way – replicability. If you want to replicate or build a RepRap it would take you about a month, but for the MakerBot few days! To build a 3D printer curtain qualities of the construction are needed which in the case of RepRap the user himself has to take care of them, but in the case of MakerBot these qualities are embedded in the printer parts because they are laser-cut with high precision. He presented afterwards the miniCNC milling machine which can be built by a novice builder for 14 hours!

Final Words

The Open Knowledge Conference was great! All people were engaged in opening important information. Open Hardware is gathering speed since few years and now it gets more and more attention!

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