New York City – Open Hardware Summit 2011
The trip to New York City was amazing and inspired. We had a great time there, attending Open Hardware Summit 2011, Maker Faire, and meeting people. There’re already tons of information and pictures about the summit and Maker Faire out there. But I would like to show you some more and describe them a little bit from Seeed’s angle.
The summit spent much time to talk about the future of Open Hardware, and standard and regulation of the community.
As the presentation by Bunnie Huang, who is the lead engineer of the Chumby, says the best days of open hardware are yet to come. This vision talk indicates that the innovation power will shift gradually from those giant companies to individual creators. That’s actually what’s happening right now in open hardware community. You can check out the whole document on Bunnie’s blog.
However, people may have concerns about how to protect the individual creators and who’s going to do the protections as the community growing bigger and bigger. That’s a tricky question in terms of regulations and standards may restrict the development of open hardware. But on the other hand, things will go crazy if there’re no rules here.
Dr. Alison Powell introduces a possible solution to this question. OH&A standard is an open process that serves for open hardware design which includes a certification model and a registration. The slide can be found here.
To be honest, I don’t know whether this standard will be popularized and work for the individual creators. But one thing for sure is that Seeed Studio will obey the common rules in open hardware. No matter what standards and regulations finally work out, we’re going to respect and fit ourselves in it.
Eric Pan (Seeed Studio) and Ian Lesnet (Dangerous Prototypes) also gave a speech about Agile Open Hardware Manufacturing in breakout sessions latter at the summit. They shared the experience about how Seeed’s going to work with the co-designers.
Dangerous Prototypes is a very good example to demonstrate why we say innovation power is being shifted, and how Seeed is playing a role of open hardware facilitator in this case. The process from design to manufacture is getting much easier than before, and the enthusiasms in garage can become a real business now. That’s the future of open hardware we’re looking for.
By the way, thanks people for showing many loves to our scarf
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