Let’s Collaborate On Open Source Hardware Design

I met with Marcin Jakubowski, founder of Open Source Ecology, and Catarina Mota, founder of Open Materials and co-chair of the Open Hardware Summit, in Lisbon a few months ago. We visited Altlab, the oldest Hackerspace in Lisbon, and spent a couple of days together talking about how we could create new foundations for more collaboration on Open Hardware design and documentation.

In fact, our eventual objective--an open source hardware ecosystem based on shared practices--is still not here, and many hardware developers in the world are now experimenting with different ways to create and share their projects. Experimentation is a great means to find new solutions; however collaboration, reuse and modularity suffer from this diversity of approaches, in terms of design and documentation of open hardware ecosystems.

Marcin, Catarina, and I first envisioned, organized, and dubbed the Open Source Hardware DocJam event to arrive at a shared process for open hardware design and, especially, documentation.