Taller ‘Getting Real: Collaborative Design of Open Source Products’

In the workshop, Marcin Jakubowski will involve an audience in an exploration of applying open source principles to the design of real, economically significant products. Open source has so far dominated the world of software, and in this workshop, we will explore the limits of open source in hardware - ie - the collaborative design of open source products that are otherwise currently designed in a proprietary framework by corporations. We will ask what are the barriers to, and the requirements for - a methodology where product design effort is socialized for the benefit of everyone? What supporting institutions are required? What cultural change is needed? How can we create an incentive structure that selects  for collaboration, that incentivizes large numbers of people to participate, and generates quality results - to benefit the world significantly more than if the design if privatized. T

he workshop explores builds upon a decade of OSE experience in building open hardware projects and the challenges involved. The intended audience is people who are interested in collaborating with Open Source Ecology in open source product development, and who are passionate about developing business models based on open source hardware. We are setting up a new initiative of open source incentive challenges for developing products to commercial product release - but open source.  We are currently in the design phase of the launch, and are planning on a large incentive prize to make this happen - with an explicit goal of designing a distributed enterprise with 100-200 participants starting real businesses as a result. If successful with the first product - a professional-grade cordless drill - we will build on the learnings to transform products from proprietary to open source as a generally accepted way of doing business. We are looking for collaborators to contribute to the design of the incentive challenge as design challenge reviewers, judges, and funders. (We can spend the time during the workshop to work on designing the incentive challenge - or designing the actual cordless drill. Both are interesting from the standpoint of collaboration) The ideal outcome would be that someone in the Medialab/REHOGAR community pursues the incentive challenge and starts an open source enterprise producing professional grade cordless drills.