On 23rd April 2019

Standard and Guideline on Open Source Hardware

At the DIN e.V. headquarters in Berlin, Germany for our DIN SPEC kick-off meeting on Open Source Hardware. The inscription translates to “Norms and standards have a stronger influence on economic growth than patents and licenses.”

 

On 17th of April we started our kick-off meeting on a DIN SPEC standard and guideline on Open Source Hardware. The consortium consist of many international experts developing, researching and selling open source hardware and open source software. In this community effort, the first draft will be sent out to the community in September 2019 asking for feedback. The final documents, consisting of a standard and guideline, will be published by the end of this year (in English and German) and can be downloaded for free (in contrast to other standards). These efforts are an import precursor to build the necessary infrastructure supporting open source hardware development, reproducibility and businesses in order to boost investment in and dissemination of open source hardware e.g. in science and medical technology.

Within these efforts, we are applying for Googles Season of Docs programme, which connects technical writers with an open source community. Our project ideas list within this program is:

  • improving and creating documentation of an affordable open source MRI scanner
  • improving and creating documentation blueprints for open source scientific hardware based on an example project of a robotic field scanner
  • conceptualizing a documentation strategy/blueprint for open source hardware medical devices
  • refactoring the drafted/published guideline document on open source hardware documentation connected to the DIN SPEC standard mentioned above
  • improving the communication structure and design of our soon (May 2019) to launch Wiki