Open Source Hardware has the power to democratize technology — but without shared standards, we risk wasting time, effort, and potential. In this article, we explore how open standards can transform fragmented innovation into collective progress.
Besides our general interest in furthering Free Technology (free as in speech, not beer), we also have a more concrete reason to write this article now:
For the last 9 months, we worked on software tooling around the Open Know-How Standard and more generic meta-data standards within an NGI Search grant. Details about this endeavors outcome can be found on its website.
We already wrote an article introducing this project, and would now like to go into the reasoning behind focusing on standards. In a later article, we will show why we chose LinkedData technology as the technological base for these standards.
Intro
We are dreaming of the following:
Technology by the people, for the people; at scale!
Working on this general matter feels empowering and meaningful, but how can the above dream become a reality; how can it … materialize?
In software we have already succeeded to quite some degree: whole ecosystems of open source software exist that run vital parts of the infrastructure we are all used to.
For hardware and products, the situation is more complicated but also more interesting, because it requires knowledge from many different disciplines. Examples are mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, machine-shoppers, shoe-makers, you name it! However, this also offers a unique opportunity, because although in software, predominantly only software engineers and user interface designers can participate, for hardware and products, anyone with an interest and skill of some kind can make a positive difference in the world.
We want to see an economy flourish that is based on goods made from Open Source designs and that is inclusive to anyone with any skill they are willing to contribute with.
Luckily, many Open Source Hardware designs already exist, and in decent numbers, but we will argue in this blog post, that a crucial, basic part is missing to scale up the ecosystem of hardware and products based on open designs: Standards.
Where we are coming from
Roughly at the start of the century, the key patents for 3D printing expired, which sparked a revolution of DIY kits, bought and built by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. The overall quality of these printers was not good, so after assembly and initial testing, basically everyone had to fix and tweak their printer. This meant in essence, that a hundred thousand people did the same work in parallel. While many makers copied from others to some extent, and many would say that they learned a lot in the process, we would argue that it was actually utterly inefficient from the point of view of the community and even the society at large.
We are a group of people who believe that it is essential to support societal developments like this one, so they can run much smoother, more efficiently, and with higher quality outcomes in less time.
In our opinion, the fun part of trying, failing and learning can be so much more directed and efficient if the ones participating have a way to share their findings and know about each others progress. We argue that by means of standards for this purpose we can enable a community of participants that join forces for a shared goal.
Open Source Hardware (OSH) aka the public’s technology
Open Source is a concept well known in the software development world. The general public will know it indirectly as software like Linux, Ubuntu, FireFox and LibreOffice. The most simple way of thinking of it, is that it is the people’s software. It is a public good.
There are explicit, legal rights in place to make it fully available to the public at large, be it for using, changing, or inspecting how it works in detail.
Open Source is often compared to a bazar where free agents roam, learn, help, inquire, suggest, discuss, and agree. This leads to the agency – or say, the intelligence – of all the players involved being combined in a near optimal way.
This interesting process guides a community in two directions: On the more obvious side, slowly but surely, it leads to better and better software. As a “side-effect” though, it also teaches self-worth, grows social skills – including healthy leadership – and forms community.
It also effectively prevents (for the most part) that previous work gets lost for humanity, and in a similar frame of thoughts, prevents people from having to do the same work in parallel, quite contrary to company internal, proprietary development.
Inspired by the success of Open Source Software, we envision to create a similar culture for Open Source Designs for Hardware products. We are thoroughly convinced that such exchange of ideas, learnings and designs in a seamless way is only possible with commonly accepted standards.
Why Standards?
To really bring home the value of the invention in its maximum potential to society, one has to communicate it back to the people in a way they can make use of it. Standards play an essential part in this.
Let us have a closer look at what a shift from the “wild, wild, west” style to a more standardized style of doing things means for the project maintainers and the users.
To compare tech. projects or open source designs with each other, and to ultimately choose a specific one to build or base ones own project on, one needs to deal with a lot of details about each project, to evaluate the capabilities of each tech. project. To get there, each potential user of a project requires all these details in an easily comparable form.
Such info includes properties like:
- What software do I need to edit the technical drawings?
- → Do I have the skill to use that software?
- → Do I need to buy it?
- What materials do I need to build it?
- → Do I have those already?
- → How much do they cost?
- → What is the environmental impact of procuring them?
- Which physical machines/tools do I need to build it?
- How thorough is the documentation?
- → Are all required files available?
- How well tested is the design?
- → Is it safe to use?
- → How long is it expected to last?
- → How well does it fulfill its task?
The difference between the “www” style and the standardized one, is the following:
- “www” aka Unstandardized – The project developers do what they do, how they please. Each user looking for an OSH product has to try to assemble this information for each potential candidate tech. project, from the heap of info available online about that project. Often, some of this info will not be available. The user has to come up with their own way to store and compare this data, likely using some kind of spread-sheet editor. They may have to repeat that process relatively often, because the projects change over time, and so do the users needs. This process will likely take them hours, or up to days, and will leave them with the feeling of probably having missed some candidate projects that are out there. It may also create problems of information asymmetry, if newer versions of the same design are available, but they use the previously collected, local data.
- Standardized – Project developers – if they choose to be conformant – have a little more work to do here. They have to learn about the standard(s), and assemble their projects info according to them. They should also store it in a prominent, predetermined place, and follow the best-practices for keeping the data. Once per project, they may have to register their project with some registry. All of this, in exchange for potentially gaining more traction and reach due to the increased accessibility of the information. Potential users, on the other hand, have a much easier time in this scenario. They can hit up a search engine and end up with the optimal project for them in a matter of seconds to minutes.
Now, reading the first scenario … did it remind you of something? Doesn’t that sound like the 3D-printing scenario we looked at in the beginning of the article? If so, you might now imagine, how standards could have changed that. While you do so, let me give you a simplified scenario using numbers that could be representative:
- Number of OSH 3D printer projects: 10
- Number of people wanting to build a 3D printer: 10’000
- We assume, it takes a project developer 5 times the amount of time to assemble the projects info than it takes a user, because they have to learn about standards first, gather all info every user might be interested in, and keep it up-to-date. A User requires 10 minutes per project, a project maintainer 50 minutes.
- In the “www” style, The total amount society has to spend for all the users to choose their 3D printer project are:
10min * 10 (projects) * 10'000 (people) = 1'000'000 minutes - In the standardized way:
50min * 10(projects)= 500 minutes
This does not only improve efficiency and freedom, but it also allows a much wider audience to take part; in the abstract, the core benefit of standardization in this case, is that it allows a market to come into existence in the first place.
Standards are creating the basis for interconnectivity.
Craig N. Murphy
You can’t do innovative work, if you don’t have the standards to build on.
JoAnne Yates & Craig N. Murphy
Conclusion
We hope we convinced you that establishing Standards for Open Source Designs is an aim worth pursing.
We started this blog post with our dream scenario of “Technology by the people, for the people; at scale”, and touched up on how it worked in the past with the example of 3D printing. Then we took a short look at the role of Open Source for our dream, followed by a closer look at why Standards are the real deal-breaker that is still being mostly overlooked and how they can further accelerate the democratization of knowledge.
We hope you enjoyed this little write-up journey with us, and … let’s keep in touch!
