Thank you, it's a hard act to follow, but I will try.
I'm Michael Weinberg.
I am here to talk about a certified open-source hardware, and we're in two different paths
today.
One is, I work at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU Law.
We do what it sounds like we would do with a name like that.
Super relevant to this audience is we do a lot of research on open-source hardware and
kind of how the community works and how it works.
So I mean, if you're in this room, you're probably into open-source hardware, but there's
nice entry points if you're looking for more information, especially from a kind of
operational standpoint.
I'm also a longtime board member of OSHA, the open-source hardware association, which
I hope many people in this room are already familiar with.
If not, OSHA was the community organization for open-source hardware.
We do a whole bunch of different things, one thing that is highly relevant, if you're
loving today, OSHA is the host of the open hardware summit every year.
This year, and here's, it's a nods, like it.
This year, the summit is in Edinburgh, in May, so if you want two days of this, come
on up, I guess, to Edinburgh and hang out this May.
We also do the open hardware certification, but I'm going to talk about today.
We host open hardware month in October.
We do a monthly show in tell.
We also are the stewards of the community definition for open-source hardware, which is also
going to be relevant in this talk.
So before talking about the lessons learned from 10 years of certified open hardware, I might
answer the question, why do we certify open hardware at all?
Why are we bothering to do this?
And about 10 years ago, we had some problems emerging in the community.
One problem, and these are problems in the narrow context.
One problem was that nobody owns the term open-source hardware.
A related problem was that OSHA helped to steward the creation of the open year logo that
many of you are probably very familiar with.
Also, no one kind of owns or controls that logo in a meaningful sense.
So generally, that's cool.
Like, go beyond anyone can use it totally fine.
But we were starting to get a problem where someone who was creating open-source hardware
would say, this is open-source hardware.
And someone who was receiving or using open-source hardware would hear, this is open-source
hardware, and the kind of good faith version of the problem is they would have different
expectations.
And so we were getting a little bit of conflict.
There are bad faith versions of that, where there were people just kind of running around
saying open-source hardware with no intention to hurt at least any of it, but we'll set
that aside.
So we had no shared understanding, and it's a little bit harder to kind of quickly verify
the openness of hardware as compared to verifying the open-source software, just because
there are more components, there are more things, it's just sort of harder to do a quick
check.
So we had a little bit of problem with no share understanding, conflicts in the community.
And we had a kind of related problem where we had people, organizations, companies coming
in and saying, open hardware, this sounds great.
We want to do this, but we're a little bit afraid that if we make a misstep along the way,
the community is going to get really mad at us.
And even if we come in with good faith, we're just like a little bit worried that if we
don't do it right, we're going to get in trouble.
So we're going to kind of not do it at all.
And so we're looking for a way to kind of be more consistent in gatekeeping and giving
new entrants, new people in the community a better way in.
So the goodness is we had this definition of open-source hardware, so we had a good starting
point for everyone.
This is very helpful.
And so we thought, well, maybe we can build a certification.
And the certification would be nice, right, because we have a new logo, it'd be an easy way
to kind of quickly check shared terms.
If somebody says, I'm doing open-source hardware, they gave me the any number of things.
If they say, I have certified open-source hardware, then you're like, okay, that means
that they are using the definition that I understand of open hardware, right?
The logo is controlled by a party that can control use, that's OSHWA.
So if someone is saying they're open-source hardware and running around with this logo,
but not compliant with the definition, OSHWA can actually tell them you have to stop.
So you can trust when you see the logo.
Also it allowed OSHWA to be a kind of ally to new entrants, right, if somebody came in and went
through the certification process, and then something went wrong later.
They could say, well, I was doing this in good faith in OSHWA for a reasons I'll talk
about in a second, it was kind of well positioned to help them.
And finally, there's sort of limited downside risk, right?
There's nothing magic about a certification.
If you see a certification, and you don't know what it is, and you don't care about it,
but nothing happens.
But if the community aside for the certification means something, then it can really grow
and be really useful.
So there's a lot of upside benefit and a lot, and basically no downside risk.
So we went through a year-long, basically community consultation process to develop it.
I'm going to have to talk about that process later on.
But the upshot is we made a couple of key design decisions.
So the application is free, right?
You can just sort of do it.
There's no tiers of openness.
There's no open bronze or open gold.
You're either certified open or you're not.
We don't do subject area expert reviews, I'm going to talk about this more in a minute.
But if you come in with a microcontroller, we have someone who's an expert in open hardware
look at it, but we don't have an expert in designing microcontrollers look at it or an expert
in camping equipment look at it or an expert in musical instruments looking at it.
We're looking at it.
We're looking at it from just an open hardware standpoint.
And all that means that it's actually pretty lightweight to run.
Right?
Ash was a great organization.
We do amazing things.
We punch above our weights, but we aren't a huge organization.
We can't have a kind of stable of people constantly engaging in every area of expertise.
And so this basically is working, where it's to how does it work for those of you who
haven't gone through the process yet, you go to certification.ossword.org, you fill out
an application form, it's pretty straightforward.
You can do it in sort of five minutes or less.
At that point, it gets kicked to the review team.
And if everything is cool, then like it moves on to the next step.
But if something is missing, right?
If your documentation is missing something or your licensing is incorrect, the review team
will reach out and say, hey, it looks like your documentation is missing, your licensing
is wrong, and you can go back and forth with the review team.
And so this makes it a really nice entry point for new people to the community to kind of
learn what it means to have documentation, licensing, other elements that need to definition.
So you go to that process, you do kind of jump back and forth, then you get a license
to use the certification logo on your hardware.
You also get a unique identifier that allows people to find your documentation in the certification
directory.
And the directory really is just a directory.
We're not a repository of documentation, but we're a directory of pointers for where people
put their documentation, because as you can imagine, documentation takes many forms and lives
in many places.
So that's what we do.
We've been doing it for about 10 years, what have we learned?
So first, open source hardware is everywhere.
We've got, we're coming up on 3,000 certifications, piece certified pieces of hardware.
In 65 countries, I always say this on every continent, except Antarctica.
One day I will be in a room with someone who is like, I'm in Antarctica, and I'm in
to open hardware.
I'm going to solve this problem, so Michael doesn't have to say this anymore, but it's
really all over.
It's a global community, which is I think a real sign of a real kind of robust approach to
what's going on.
And as you would expect from a global community, hardware is an incredibly broad category.
Right, if you're coming to open source hardware from open source software, you might
think like microcontrollers, electronics, you'd be right, right?
There's a lot of microcontrollers, electronics, 3D printers in the certification directory,
but there's a whole universe of stuff, right?
There's environmental sensors, there's musical instruments, there's camping equipment,
there's things that are crocheted, like the definition of hardware is incredibly expansive,
which I think is also a really, a sign of a really robust community, and there's so
many different entry points for people into the space.
Right, if you are someone who is like, I just love that presentation about like the
next versions of keycad, great, we're here for you.
If you're someone who's like, I do not care about anything that requires a battery or
be plugged in.
All I care about is like crocheting something interesting, also welcome into the community.
Another thing that we've learned is this sort of non-expert review, community feedback
system that I alluded to earlier, seems to work.
So when an application comes in, we look to make sure that it kind of meets the definition,
but we don't have a specialist review it, I mean, for the reasons that you'd expect, right?
You need a lot of different specialists to be able to do that.
Once something is in the directory, people then find in the directory, and they try and
use that documentation.
They are experts.
And those people will sometimes come back to us and say, hey, Ashwa, I saw this thing.
It's cool.
I'm trying to build on it, but it's missing some piece.
And at that point, that's when we bring in an expert and say, okay, we have a user who
says something is missing from the documentation.
If it seems like that's probably right, we go to the creator and say, hey, if someone's
trying to use your documentation, they think that it's missing this piece.
And the creator can respond in a lot of ways.
They can say, you're right, I've already fixed it, moving on.
They can say you're right, but I don't want to fix it.
And so let's just revoke the certification and I'll move on.
Or they can say, you're wrong.
It doesn't need that.
And that's a point where Ashwa then can be in a position where we can kind of mediate
a dispute between two members of the community, but we can do it in a kind of civil and
productive way, right, sometimes we end up siding with the user, sometimes we end up
siding with the creators, sometimes we end up sort of siding somewhere in the middle,
but it's a, it's a, it's a kind of much more socially productive way to mediate a dispute
that could have gone, I mean, we, we're all, everyone's been in communities enough
to know that there are other ways that that conflicts can, can be resolved in communities.
So this works, it definitely has resulted in improved documentation across the board.
It also has resulted in revocation of certification, which is a sign of strength, because
it means that when you see that certification, you see that logo, it means something.
And it's okay that every couple, you know, a couple times a year, we have to revoke something.
It's a, it's a, it's a living certification.
Another thing that we have learned, you know, there are a lot of people who are talking
about building various GitHub's for hardware, because GitHub obviously is, is, it does
not have a lot of features that you might want for hardware.
Those, those platforms are great, but in practice, GitHub is GitHub for hardware.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't take these numbers to the bank, this is kind of a quick pull on everything.
But for the 3000 pieces of certified hardware, the vast majority of it, the documentation
is on GitHub.
So GitHub is good enough for a lot of people to be hosting their documentation.
This is a super long tale.
People host their documentation on their own website, on their own self hosted version
of, you know, whatever, like, everything you could imagine exists somewhere in the directory,
but there's clearly a clustering for GitHub as a kind of primary place for documentation.
There's another feature of the certification that is sort of working, gish.
One of the things that I mentioned earlier is that it can be hard to kind of quickly evaluate
claims of openness in hardware, because there's a lot of pieces to it, right?
There's the, there's the hardware, there's the software, there's the documentation.
It's just that it may, it may not be easy to kind of one quick look to see.
And so one of the roles of the certification is to kind of allow other people to offload
that review to Auschwitz, so they can focus on other things.
And that's working kind of okay.
Hardware X is a great example.
They're a journal that they basically say, we're a journal, academic journal for open hardware.
If you get certified, we're going to assume you're open hardware, I'm not going to worry too
much about it, which is great.
We've been working with the DIN spec folks who are kind of, obviously we have a similar
kind of relationship.
Can we build off of that?
We also actually, we're in the middle of our own process, where we're using the certification
as the first step, Auschwitz actually just kicked off a review of open source medical devices.
And one way that may end up working is kind of the certification X as step 1, and then
there's a second layer for a medical device, specific certification that kind of assumes
that you've made it through the independence hardware certification.
So this works, okay, but don't have 40 logos up on this slide of people who've built
this into their process yet.
Another thing that works is, we've built citations into the certification directory process.
So you can say, I have this hardware, it's built on other hardware, and people use it,
people use it especially when they're doing new versions of their own work, but they also
use it to cite other people's work.
So people who use it, but I would say the vast majority of stuff in the directory does
not have citations.
So that goes in the kind of works-ish category.
We have this super robust API, it's great, it's a read-write API, so if you want to learn
more about the directory, you can use it, use it to generate that map or get a hardware
slide, people use it a little bit, not a whole lot, it's also a write API, so if you
want it to build sending an application into your like standard workflow and just sort
of automate it, you could do that.
We do have one of two people who are using it right now, but you know, like, API, we thought
it was going to be more popular than we built it, sometimes that happens, and the last
thing is just like static site frameworks are amazing.
We, the version of the site that's up right now is version two.
We launched it in 2018, I haven't even talked about, there's a whole other section that
has a bunch of educational materials about licensing, about documentation, about how all
that works, we're obviously updating the search case directory all the time, and we launched
in 2018 and basically haven't had to touch it since then, it just sort of keeps it running,
which is amazing and we're very grateful for.
So these are the things that we have learned running this, you know, first 10 years have
worked pretty well, we're looking to 10 more years, if you're in this audience and you
have not yet certified, I would suggest checking out certification.osho.org, I'm going to
put you through, give questions, I'll be in the back afterwards, I look a lot like this.
You can send me an email, I'm mostly on Blue Sky these days, although it's a dynamic
social media landscape who knows.
Thank you to all the images that we used, I just part of this deck, and yeah, that's where
things are.
So thank you all for your attention.
So we have time for one question, well, Christopher, sit up.
If you have a design and you only want to certify some of it, let's say you have some
electronics, some enclosures, but you only want to certify some of the enclosures, the front
panel for example.
Is that possible?
Yeah, this is a great question, so if you have a kind of component, the way that we
think about this is you have to certify the version that exists as a kind of complete
in your application, and what that means can vary significantly, but if someone had the
certified piece and couldn't do the minimum thing you expect, then that's not enough,
it needs to be enough so someone can actually do what they're going to do what they
want to do.
There's a pre-release certification process, if you want to put something on a product you're
going to roll out, you can reach out, we can kind of give you provisional numbers for that,
but thank you all again.