[Discuss] Proposal: Open Source Hardware Score/Index

[Pablo Kulbaba]

Hi there.
Great idea on the OSHI and agree on the items. The peer validation would 
lower the barrier to certification.
Standing on the maker side, there's a lot of work and effort to be done 
on documentation that piles up to the development itself. This can be a 
great burden on solo projects.

Proposals:
-A piece of code that could be embedded in the site of the project (as 
the blue box that counts the FB likes in real time).
-Perhaps there can be an arrangement or prioritization on the index's 
items to solve this. Or give different items a different value to weight 
up (ponderar in spanish).
-Make a pool to match volunteers and 
documenting-volunteers-needing-projects, so as to differentiate the 
deliberately low OSHI projects from the under-resourced ones.

On 24/02/2015 01:58 p.m., Mario Gómez wrote:
> Hi everybody!
>
> I have been on this list for at least a year from now and I have seen 
> a couple of recurrent topics on this list:
>
> The first is the question if a project is truly OSHW and the second 
> asking for a mechanism to validate/certify the compliance of the OSHW 
> definition.
>
> I currently work in data analysis and in the last year I promoted a 
> independent mechanism to crowd-validate the election results in my 
> country (I believe that community-based validation approachs are great 
> to evaluate compliance if they are well designed). So I was thinking 
> that it could be possible to construct a simple indicator that helps 
> you to determine if your project meets the basic premises for being 
> classified as a truly Open-Source-Hardware Project. So I borrowed this 
> idea from the "online personality tests" were you fill a survey and 
> the result automatically classify your personality on different traits.
>
> Also, I was thinking that this indicator needs to be easy to calculate 
> in a way that you can automate it in a platform that allows the 
> community to validate your answers.
>
> So I came with the idea of an Open Source Hardware Index (or Score but 
> I think that OSHI sounds better than OSHS). It works asking questions 
> that try to identify practices that prevent your project to be truly 
> open source hardware and also tries to identify good practices.  The 
> idea is that if you fill the expected answers you gain points and when 
> you meet all the required points your project can proudly say that is 
> OSHW.
>
> However the truly beauty of an index like this is that it could be 
> validated by the community. My idea is that it could be possible to 
> build a crowd-validation system in a way that other members of the 
> OSHWA can review if your answers are true checking the evidence (links 
> to your documentation, sources, etc.) that you can attach to each of 
> the answers.
>
> The idea is that the community validates if you are telling the truth. 
> To prevent abuse a meta-validation system could be implemented were 
> you can "evaluate the evaluators" to see if their are being fair on 
> their evaluations.
>
> The added value of the index is that you can take the answers and 
> generate a profile or action path of things that your project must do 
> or improve to fully meet the OSHW definition. Also, it doesn't prevent 
> startups with small budgets to be validated (like other proposed 
> mechanisms), however the OSHWA could sell some kind of "OSHWA 
> certification" and certificacion services (like adapting bussiness 
> process/practices to meet OSHW definition and good practices) to 
> companies that want to put some kind of "marketing badge" on their 
> products considering that they also need to comply with the minimum 
> required score.
>
> But well, I think that I have written too much. So is the link to the 
> index and the proposed questions, this is the first draft so any 
> suggestions are welcome.
>
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PhDjiJIw6obQHZdK1bnozZMHUc3cUIjLUvL713kK4qo/edit#gid=1768287352
>
> I think that the next step could be to evaluate the performance of the 
> index, taking popular OSHW projects and other projects and see how 
> they score against the score or if we need to include/modify the 
> existing questions.
>
> Regards,
> Mario.
>
>
>
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-- 
PabloK

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