Inspirations from Open Hardware Summit 2011

Here is a selection of presentations that I found really really inspiring from the recent  Open Hardware Summit. I have also included brief notes highlighting the key points that inspired me.

My apologies to those presenters not singled out below – this does not mean your talk was not inspiring! It just means that I focussed on the key content that really inspired me and changed my thinking. It also means that I have only read the static document, and not seen and heard your presentation, which makes a huge difference!

  • Gabriella Levine, Protei: Open Oceans and Open Hardware: Protei, a proliferating fleet of DIY sailboat drones to clean up oil spills
    • Collaborative:People and professionals from all over the world  creating Protei
    • Already talking about reuse “Reappropriated for other purposes”
    • Even though it is very complex involving physical and electronic design, it is not about the tec/hacking, it is about large scale practical use in remote and hostile locations!
    • very well documented – a key to enable others to build and enhance
    • the speed with which the community created, built and deployed

Major use of open source by the scientific community – you want need to follow back to their main sites to see what they are doing – moodular PCI-e cards, major extensions to KiCad, …..

 

These drove home to me that open source is NOT ONLY about electronics – steam engines to yurts!

 

Yet another leap in a different direction – I read the title, but it did not really sink about the scale of what we can all be invloved in until I read the presentation.

 

I would encourage you strongly to read or watch the presentations yourself, as your interests will be different to mine!

You might also want to check out the 2010 summit – it also had some very inspiring talks, and of course keep an eye out here as I have more inpiration posts coming.

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