[Discuss] Proposal: Open Source Hardware Score/Index

[Tiberius Brastaviceanu]

If you need a palace to test this concept you can contact www.sensorica.co
I would support such initiative.
On Feb 24, 2015 11:58 AM, "Mario Gómez" <mxgxw.alpha at gmail.com> 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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>
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