The Open Hardware Observatory (OHO)

CLAIM

OHO is a search engine for open hardware, open design and maker projects. We crawl the web and make its content searchable for you. Start searching and build a better tomorrow.

 

PROBLEM AND CHALLENGES

According to the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), open source hardware is defined as “[…] hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design.” (See the Open Source Hardware (OSHW) Definition 1.0 here.) Open source hardware is an alternative IP management strategy, which transfers the logic of open source development from software to physical products. It opens up new avenues for individuals, businesses and non-profits to co-create products and related services.

However, its distributed nature and the fact that, unlike software, hardware production requires physical handling, have made this emerging field virtually invisible for the public. Did you know that hundreds and thousands of projects for sharing and developing complex open source hardware have been created around the world since the middle of the last decade?

Despite the fact that this is well known for practitioners in the field, only few isolated initiatives such as the following have purposely contributed to making examples of open source hardware more visible:

• The Certified Projects Directory of the OSHWA, see here
• List of open-source hardware projects on Wikipedia, see here
• Listed medical equipment projects by The Open Source Imaging Initiative (OSI²), see here

Apart from the first example with a strong focus on licensing aspects, these initiatives do not provide the required information for people to build, produce, use, modify, upgrade or disseminate the wide variety of existing open source hardware products. It remains unclear even for practitioners in the field what kind of documentation for products and components are out there or even how open they actually are.

In today’s world, knowledge is the key to success. However, when it comes to studying, modifying, distributing, making, and selling open hardware, people need to be able to easily find and promote technical documentation.

 

GOALS

OHO seeks to strike a new path for the future of OSH by serving as a meta source for complex open hardware products. It follows three main objectives:

1. Create a crawler-based search engine to find and disseminate complex OSH products
2. Provide and curate a wide-ranging directory for complex OSH products
3. Create a strong and diverse open hardware community that supports the further development of OHO

 

PRODUCTS

This results in the following three products that have been integrated so far as part of OHO:

1. Search engine

Using an automatic crawler-based search technique, publicly available products with a particular focus on sustainability are searched for throughout the web, entered into an (expandable) category system and displayed as search results together with preview photos and a short description. Products published under free licenses or where their original developer are in contact with us will be documented in more details especially when construction plans and part lists are available.

2. Product directory

An extensive collection of relevant complex OSH products is available on the product directory of the platform. The directory consists of:

1. Crawled data sets for complex open hardware productsimproving searchability of the projects and their documentation
2. Manually entered and curated data sets for complex open hardware products reporting on their openness according to product- and process-related criteria

In addition, the directory will create an important database for research on the field of OSH. Currently, anyone interested can already upload data such as photos, videos, texts, comments, CAD drawings, parts lists, etc. and thus add new products or documents for existing products. Please register here.

3. Open source hardware community

As a basis for gathering free technical knowledge and (further) developing open products, it is essential to create, organize and support a broad community of interested parties and participants (organizations, companies and individuals). For this reason, the website itself is an open project, which means that anyone interested is welcome to contribute as follows:

• Provide information on interesting products more
• Supplement existing information, uploading new information more
• Give general feedback on this platform, ideas and suggestions more (tbd)
• Extend the platform with your own solutions more (tbd)

 

TARGET GROUPS

1. Individuals

Developers, makers, engineers, designers, users and other individuals with the following interests:

• Build/produce
• Use
• Modify and upgrade
• Disseminate

…new product designs, instructions.

2. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)

Start-ups, manufacturers, producers, service providers, business founders looking for the following opportunities:

• Seeking ideas, instructions and construction plans for open hardware and sustainable products
• Initiating or participating in OSH communities
• Sharing developed solutions with the public to support the reciprocal nature of OSH

3. Non-profit organizations from the fields of

• OSH (development communities)
• Do-it-yourself (DIY) (fab labs, makerspaces)
• Startup promotion (incubators, accelerators)
• Sustainable product creation (interest groups and initiatives promoting renewable energies, circular economy, etc.)
• Science and education (research institutes, non-governmental organizations supporting open science, open access and open knowledge, etc.)

 

SUSTAINABILITY AND OSH

Through the creation of a joint platform, this project is linking the sustainability concept with the principles of open development. Open source design (OSD) as an alternative to classical product development can support more sustainable production and consumption in industrialized countries.

By sustainable products, we refer to products that pursue the three aspects of ecological, economic and social sustainability as equal goals. Specifically, we are currently working on the following categories: see here.

 

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Search Technology

The search engine is based on an automatic crawler and indexing software, which searches the Internet for specific search terms, filters the links found, categorizes them and creates thumbs and short descriptions. In the beta version, the search engine will be available in three languages: English, German and Spanish. More languages will be added later.

Platform Technology

This platform is based on the software MediaWiki, which is also used for all Wikipedia versions worldwide and for many other Wiki projects. The use of MediaWiki for Wikipedia offers the following advantages:

• Automatic versioning of all uploaded files
• Automatic documentation and versioning of all changes
• Facilitation of collaborative work in smaller or larger teams
• Discussion pages to clarify questions and problems
• Uncomplicated setup of new language versions
• Runs fast and stable even with large data volumes and user numbers
• Various extensions for important functions available

 

THE PARTNERS

OHO was founded as a collaboration between the following partners:

• The non-profit association Open Source Ecology Germany e.V. (OSEG)
• The French-German research project OPEN! Methods and tools for community-based product development
• The project carrier Open Circularity

The collaboration aims to support the sharing of publicly available technical knowledge.