[Discuss] OSHW Best Practices / Layers of Openness

[Marco Perry]

Tom,
IDSA is old (from 1960s), and today they have a full time staff (~10
people) with offices in Washington, and huge group of volunteers, starting
with an all volunteer: Board of Directors, regional VPs, Chapter chairs and
their committees, conference planners and their committees, and section
chairs and their committees, and student chapter chairs and their
committees. To run this many groups takes staff - ops, marketing,
membership management, sales (sponsorship, conference attendance, award
entries), web master, content manager (blogger, photos, video).
Even without a large paid staff, any operations takes money, and it has to
come from somewhere. Typically conferences are break even or money losers.
I tend to think that paying for the logo will be hard a hard sell - what's
the added value today? Low adoption rates means lower value as well. But,
you can't just let anyone use it willy nilly, that means you have no
control over who is using it. What if they are acting against the community
values?
Just like products and services, you want to align your core values and
benefits with a payment for those benefits. It feels counter intuitive to
pay for a logo because you're being open and giving - now you have to pay
up.  That being said, you should not be able to use a logo of a community
unless you are officially part of that community, therefore I would charge
for membership to OSHWA. One of the benefits of membership, is you can use
the logo on your projects, and other benefits will be there too (conference
price breaks, discussion groups, access to content, advice, forums, etc.),
most importantly is the benefit of being part of it all.
It just like saying you can't put your biker gang badge on your jacket
unless you are actually part of the biker gang. The badge patch is free,
promote it as much as you can. By the way...if you act poorly, your out of
the club - community rules.

Marco



On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 1:40 PM, Tom Igoe <tom.igoe at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks, Chris, that's a useful clarification, and it begs the next
> question:
>
> Is it okay that OSHWA just focuses on the electronics?  Maybe we have no
> desire to serve an industrial design audience, say, or a mechanical
> engineering audience.  Maybe it's specifically about the electronics
> industry. If so, then your rationale makes perfect sense.  If not, then
> what are best practices for opening mechanical, structural, etc. designs?
>
> t.
>
> On Feb 28, 2013, at 1:35 PM, Chris Church wrote:
>
> >
> > On Feb 28, 2013, at 11:58 AM, Tom Igoe wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Contrary to Chris' POV, I don't think enclosures are simply protective
> or decorative.  The physical interface of a device  is part of the
> enclosure: the buttons, the screen if there is one, the speaker, the
> connectors -- all of those are functional elements of a finished product.
>  If we want to see more OSHW finished products, that means giving
> mechanical engineers and industrial designers more examples of how to
> functionally open their work.  So how do we describe what's open about a
> product with multiple manufacturing steps? It doesn't have to be a layered
> description; anyone want to propose an alternative?
> >>
> >
> > Hi Tom,
> >
> > I guess I should clarify where my POV comes from here, and it starts at
> our design: we don't make any of the HMI part of the enclosure.  All of our
> inputs, screens, etc. are on PCBs which we open-source, and the enclosure
> really is nothing more than a "plastic protector for the interior
> components."  This is largely because we do all of our assembly in-house,
> and its far cheaper to stuff boards than to have people hand-wire buttons,
> etc.
> >
> > I suppose for those that use primarily panel-mount buttons, etc. that's
> a different story.  For the few cases where we've had panel-mount equipment
> (for example a joystick), we put them in the BOM and even provided in-house
> design 3d models of the parts that we used for placing the holes in the
> plastic enclosure.  We even include full 3d files of the stuffed boards to
> make it easier for people to make their own enclosures.
> >
> > I have some tangential words to say on the subject based on my
> real-world experience with cloners that have shaped our policy of not
> sharing enclosure machining files, but I think it's better saved for a
> different conversation on a different day.  But, I'd be happy to share our
> experiences if anyone wants to know.
> >
> > Chris
> > _______________________________________________
> > discuss mailing list
> > discuss at lists.oshwa.org
> > http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
>
> _______________________________________________
> discuss mailing list
> discuss at lists.oshwa.org
> http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
>



-- 
marco perry . principal, pensa
20 jay st., suite 800, brooklyn, ny 11201
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www.pensanyc.com . @thinkpensa
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