WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:12.560 Thank you, it's a hard act to follow, but I will try. 00:12.560 --> 00:13.560 I'm Michael Weinberg. 00:13.560 --> 00:19.360 I am here to talk about a certified open-source hardware, and we're in two different paths 00:19.360 --> 00:20.360 today. 00:20.360 --> 00:25.640 One is, I work at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU Law. 00:25.640 --> 00:29.160 We do what it sounds like we would do with a name like that. 00:29.240 --> 00:33.880 Super relevant to this audience is we do a lot of research on open-source hardware and 00:33.880 --> 00:36.720 kind of how the community works and how it works. 00:36.720 --> 00:41.160 So I mean, if you're in this room, you're probably into open-source hardware, but there's 00:41.160 --> 00:45.840 nice entry points if you're looking for more information, especially from a kind of 00:45.840 --> 00:48.600 operational standpoint. 00:48.600 --> 00:55.040 I'm also a longtime board member of OSHA, the open-source hardware association, which 00:55.040 --> 00:59.840 I hope many people in this room are already familiar with. 00:59.840 --> 01:04.840 If not, OSHA was the community organization for open-source hardware. 01:04.840 --> 01:09.360 We do a whole bunch of different things, one thing that is highly relevant, if you're 01:09.360 --> 01:16.160 loving today, OSHA is the host of the open hardware summit every year. 01:16.160 --> 01:18.800 This year, and here's, it's a nods, like it. 01:18.800 --> 01:24.960 This year, the summit is in Edinburgh, in May, so if you want two days of this, come 01:24.960 --> 01:29.760 on up, I guess, to Edinburgh and hang out this May. 01:29.760 --> 01:34.520 We also do the open hardware certification, but I'm going to talk about today. 01:34.520 --> 01:37.960 We host open hardware month in October. 01:37.960 --> 01:39.680 We do a monthly show in tell. 01:39.680 --> 01:44.720 We also are the stewards of the community definition for open-source hardware, which is also 01:44.720 --> 01:48.000 going to be relevant in this talk. 01:48.000 --> 01:54.800 So before talking about the lessons learned from 10 years of certified open hardware, I might 01:54.800 --> 01:59.240 answer the question, why do we certify open hardware at all? 01:59.240 --> 02:02.240 Why are we bothering to do this? 02:02.240 --> 02:10.360 And about 10 years ago, we had some problems emerging in the community. 02:10.360 --> 02:13.960 One problem, and these are problems in the narrow context. 02:13.960 --> 02:20.760 One problem was that nobody owns the term open-source hardware. 02:20.800 --> 02:27.640 A related problem was that OSHA helped to steward the creation of the open year logo that 02:27.640 --> 02:30.600 many of you are probably very familiar with. 02:30.600 --> 02:36.120 Also, no one kind of owns or controls that logo in a meaningful sense. 02:36.120 --> 02:37.480 So generally, that's cool. 02:37.480 --> 02:41.280 Like, go beyond anyone can use it totally fine. 02:41.280 --> 02:46.880 But we were starting to get a problem where someone who was creating open-source hardware 02:46.880 --> 02:49.280 would say, this is open-source hardware. 02:49.320 --> 02:54.280 And someone who was receiving or using open-source hardware would hear, this is open-source 02:54.280 --> 02:59.920 hardware, and the kind of good faith version of the problem is they would have different 02:59.920 --> 03:02.000 expectations. 03:02.000 --> 03:04.800 And so we were getting a little bit of conflict. 03:04.800 --> 03:09.040 There are bad faith versions of that, where there were people just kind of running around 03:09.040 --> 03:13.200 saying open-source hardware with no intention to hurt at least any of it, but we'll set 03:13.200 --> 03:14.200 that aside. 03:14.200 --> 03:19.680 So we had no shared understanding, and it's a little bit harder to kind of quickly verify 03:19.680 --> 03:24.040 the openness of hardware as compared to verifying the open-source software, just because 03:24.040 --> 03:27.080 there are more components, there are more things, it's just sort of harder to do a quick 03:27.080 --> 03:28.080 check. 03:28.080 --> 03:34.360 So we had a little bit of problem with no share understanding, conflicts in the community. 03:34.360 --> 03:40.000 And we had a kind of related problem where we had people, organizations, companies coming 03:40.000 --> 03:43.320 in and saying, open hardware, this sounds great. 03:43.320 --> 03:52.840 We want to do this, but we're a little bit afraid that if we make a misstep along the way, 03:52.840 --> 03:55.040 the community is going to get really mad at us. 03:55.040 --> 03:59.480 And even if we come in with good faith, we're just like a little bit worried that if we 03:59.480 --> 04:01.560 don't do it right, we're going to get in trouble. 04:01.560 --> 04:04.520 So we're going to kind of not do it at all. 04:04.520 --> 04:09.160 And so we're looking for a way to kind of be more consistent in gatekeeping and giving 04:09.160 --> 04:15.680 new entrants, new people in the community a better way in. 04:15.680 --> 04:20.520 So the goodness is we had this definition of open-source hardware, so we had a good starting 04:20.520 --> 04:22.200 point for everyone. 04:22.200 --> 04:23.920 This is very helpful. 04:23.920 --> 04:27.280 And so we thought, well, maybe we can build a certification. 04:27.280 --> 04:34.560 And the certification would be nice, right, because we have a new logo, it'd be an easy way 04:34.560 --> 04:36.600 to kind of quickly check shared terms. 04:36.600 --> 04:41.480 If somebody says, I'm doing open-source hardware, they gave me the any number of things. 04:41.480 --> 04:46.240 If they say, I have certified open-source hardware, then you're like, okay, that means 04:46.240 --> 04:51.160 that they are using the definition that I understand of open hardware, right? 04:51.160 --> 04:55.760 The logo is controlled by a party that can control use, that's OSHWA. 04:55.760 --> 05:00.120 So if someone is saying they're open-source hardware and running around with this logo, 05:00.120 --> 05:05.640 but not compliant with the definition, OSHWA can actually tell them you have to stop. 05:05.640 --> 05:09.040 So you can trust when you see the logo. 05:09.040 --> 05:13.840 Also it allowed OSHWA to be a kind of ally to new entrants, right, if somebody came in and went 05:13.840 --> 05:18.520 through the certification process, and then something went wrong later. 05:18.520 --> 05:21.520 They could say, well, I was doing this in good faith in OSHWA for a reasons I'll talk 05:21.520 --> 05:25.440 about in a second, it was kind of well positioned to help them. 05:25.440 --> 05:28.400 And finally, there's sort of limited downside risk, right? 05:28.400 --> 05:31.080 There's nothing magic about a certification. 05:31.120 --> 05:35.600 If you see a certification, and you don't know what it is, and you don't care about it, 05:35.600 --> 05:38.200 but nothing happens. 05:38.200 --> 05:42.480 But if the community aside for the certification means something, then it can really grow 05:42.480 --> 05:43.640 and be really useful. 05:43.640 --> 05:49.440 So there's a lot of upside benefit and a lot, and basically no downside risk. 05:49.440 --> 05:54.440 So we went through a year-long, basically community consultation process to develop it. 05:54.440 --> 05:57.280 I'm going to have to talk about that process later on. 05:57.280 --> 06:00.880 But the upshot is we made a couple of key design decisions. 06:00.880 --> 06:02.760 So the application is free, right? 06:02.760 --> 06:04.880 You can just sort of do it. 06:04.880 --> 06:07.920 There's no tiers of openness. 06:07.920 --> 06:11.040 There's no open bronze or open gold. 06:11.040 --> 06:14.720 You're either certified open or you're not. 06:14.720 --> 06:20.520 We don't do subject area expert reviews, I'm going to talk about this more in a minute. 06:20.520 --> 06:25.360 But if you come in with a microcontroller, we have someone who's an expert in open hardware 06:25.360 --> 06:30.680 look at it, but we don't have an expert in designing microcontrollers look at it or an expert 06:30.680 --> 06:35.800 in camping equipment look at it or an expert in musical instruments looking at it. 06:35.800 --> 06:36.800 We're looking at it. 06:36.800 --> 06:39.000 We're looking at it from just an open hardware standpoint. 06:39.000 --> 06:42.240 And all that means that it's actually pretty lightweight to run. 06:42.240 --> 06:43.240 Right? 06:43.240 --> 06:44.240 Ash was a great organization. 06:44.240 --> 06:45.240 We do amazing things. 06:45.240 --> 06:48.160 We punch above our weights, but we aren't a huge organization. 06:48.160 --> 06:55.640 We can't have a kind of stable of people constantly engaging in every area of expertise. 06:55.640 --> 06:58.920 And so this basically is working, where it's to how does it work for those of you who 06:58.920 --> 07:04.040 haven't gone through the process yet, you go to certification.ossword.org, you fill out 07:04.040 --> 07:06.440 an application form, it's pretty straightforward. 07:06.440 --> 07:09.440 You can do it in sort of five minutes or less. 07:09.440 --> 07:13.320 At that point, it gets kicked to the review team. 07:13.320 --> 07:16.480 And if everything is cool, then like it moves on to the next step. 07:16.480 --> 07:17.720 But if something is missing, right? 07:17.720 --> 07:22.680 If your documentation is missing something or your licensing is incorrect, the review team 07:22.680 --> 07:26.640 will reach out and say, hey, it looks like your documentation is missing, your licensing 07:26.640 --> 07:30.880 is wrong, and you can go back and forth with the review team. 07:30.880 --> 07:35.080 And so this makes it a really nice entry point for new people to the community to kind of 07:35.080 --> 07:42.720 learn what it means to have documentation, licensing, other elements that need to definition. 07:42.720 --> 07:47.320 So you go to that process, you do kind of jump back and forth, then you get a license 07:47.320 --> 07:51.120 to use the certification logo on your hardware. 07:51.120 --> 07:58.880 You also get a unique identifier that allows people to find your documentation in the certification 07:58.880 --> 08:00.360 directory. 08:00.360 --> 08:02.320 And the directory really is just a directory. 08:02.320 --> 08:08.000 We're not a repository of documentation, but we're a directory of pointers for where people 08:08.000 --> 08:13.200 put their documentation, because as you can imagine, documentation takes many forms and lives 08:13.200 --> 08:15.840 in many places. 08:15.880 --> 08:18.240 So that's what we do. 08:18.240 --> 08:23.240 We've been doing it for about 10 years, what have we learned? 08:23.240 --> 08:27.440 So first, open source hardware is everywhere. 08:27.440 --> 08:33.240 We've got, we're coming up on 3,000 certifications, piece certified pieces of hardware. 08:33.240 --> 08:39.720 In 65 countries, I always say this on every continent, except Antarctica. 08:39.720 --> 08:44.600 One day I will be in a room with someone who is like, I'm in Antarctica, and I'm in 08:44.600 --> 08:45.600 to open hardware. 08:45.600 --> 08:50.960 I'm going to solve this problem, so Michael doesn't have to say this anymore, but it's 08:50.960 --> 08:51.960 really all over. 08:51.960 --> 08:58.720 It's a global community, which is I think a real sign of a real kind of robust approach to 08:58.720 --> 09:00.800 what's going on. 09:00.800 --> 09:08.040 And as you would expect from a global community, hardware is an incredibly broad category. 09:08.040 --> 09:12.600 Right, if you're coming to open source hardware from open source software, you might 09:12.600 --> 09:16.960 think like microcontrollers, electronics, you'd be right, right? 09:16.960 --> 09:22.480 There's a lot of microcontrollers, electronics, 3D printers in the certification directory, 09:22.480 --> 09:24.400 but there's a whole universe of stuff, right? 09:24.400 --> 09:29.160 There's environmental sensors, there's musical instruments, there's camping equipment, 09:29.160 --> 09:35.400 there's things that are crocheted, like the definition of hardware is incredibly expansive, 09:35.400 --> 09:41.400 which I think is also a really, a sign of a really robust community, and there's so 09:41.400 --> 09:45.120 many different entry points for people into the space. 09:45.120 --> 09:49.040 Right, if you are someone who is like, I just love that presentation about like the 09:49.040 --> 09:52.120 next versions of keycad, great, we're here for you. 09:52.120 --> 09:56.880 If you're someone who's like, I do not care about anything that requires a battery or 09:56.880 --> 09:57.880 be plugged in. 09:57.880 --> 10:03.880 All I care about is like crocheting something interesting, also welcome into the community. 10:03.880 --> 10:09.560 Another thing that we've learned is this sort of non-expert review, community feedback 10:09.560 --> 10:13.240 system that I alluded to earlier, seems to work. 10:13.240 --> 10:18.680 So when an application comes in, we look to make sure that it kind of meets the definition, 10:18.680 --> 10:23.040 but we don't have a specialist review it, I mean, for the reasons that you'd expect, right? 10:23.040 --> 10:26.040 You need a lot of different specialists to be able to do that. 10:26.040 --> 10:30.320 Once something is in the directory, people then find in the directory, and they try and 10:30.320 --> 10:31.760 use that documentation. 10:31.760 --> 10:33.960 They are experts. 10:33.960 --> 10:38.480 And those people will sometimes come back to us and say, hey, Ashwa, I saw this thing. 10:38.480 --> 10:39.480 It's cool. 10:39.480 --> 10:43.760 I'm trying to build on it, but it's missing some piece. 10:43.760 --> 10:47.000 And at that point, that's when we bring in an expert and say, okay, we have a user who 10:47.000 --> 10:50.960 says something is missing from the documentation. 10:50.960 --> 10:55.320 If it seems like that's probably right, we go to the creator and say, hey, if someone's 10:55.320 --> 11:00.080 trying to use your documentation, they think that it's missing this piece. 11:00.080 --> 11:01.920 And the creator can respond in a lot of ways. 11:01.920 --> 11:06.840 They can say, you're right, I've already fixed it, moving on. 11:06.840 --> 11:10.480 They can say you're right, but I don't want to fix it. 11:10.480 --> 11:14.520 And so let's just revoke the certification and I'll move on. 11:14.520 --> 11:16.760 Or they can say, you're wrong. 11:16.760 --> 11:18.920 It doesn't need that. 11:18.920 --> 11:22.800 And that's a point where Ashwa then can be in a position where we can kind of mediate 11:22.800 --> 11:28.920 a dispute between two members of the community, but we can do it in a kind of civil and 11:28.920 --> 11:34.760 productive way, right, sometimes we end up siding with the user, sometimes we end up 11:34.760 --> 11:37.960 siding with the creators, sometimes we end up sort of siding somewhere in the middle, 11:37.960 --> 11:42.680 but it's a, it's a, it's a kind of much more socially productive way to mediate a dispute 11:42.680 --> 11:47.160 that could have gone, I mean, we, we're all, everyone's been in communities enough 11:47.160 --> 11:51.480 to know that there are other ways that that conflicts can, can be resolved in communities. 11:51.480 --> 11:58.560 So this works, it definitely has resulted in improved documentation across the board. 11:58.560 --> 12:04.760 It also has resulted in revocation of certification, which is a sign of strength, because 12:04.760 --> 12:10.240 it means that when you see that certification, you see that logo, it means something. 12:10.240 --> 12:14.360 And it's okay that every couple, you know, a couple times a year, we have to revoke something. 12:14.360 --> 12:18.240 It's a, it's a, it's a living certification. 12:18.240 --> 12:20.960 Another thing that we have learned, you know, there are a lot of people who are talking 12:20.960 --> 12:25.960 about building various GitHub's for hardware, because GitHub obviously is, is, it does 12:25.960 --> 12:29.280 not have a lot of features that you might want for hardware. 12:29.280 --> 12:34.200 Those, those platforms are great, but in practice, GitHub is GitHub for hardware. 12:34.200 --> 12:39.040 I wouldn't, I wouldn't take these numbers to the bank, this is kind of a quick pull on everything. 12:39.040 --> 12:45.120 But for the 3000 pieces of certified hardware, the vast majority of it, the documentation 12:45.120 --> 12:46.120 is on GitHub. 12:46.120 --> 12:51.560 So GitHub is good enough for a lot of people to be hosting their documentation. 12:51.640 --> 12:54.280 This is a super long tale. 12:54.280 --> 12:58.880 People host their documentation on their own website, on their own self hosted version 12:58.880 --> 13:04.600 of, you know, whatever, like, everything you could imagine exists somewhere in the directory, 13:04.600 --> 13:14.720 but there's clearly a clustering for GitHub as a kind of primary place for documentation. 13:14.720 --> 13:21.680 There's another feature of the certification that is sort of working, gish. 13:21.680 --> 13:25.480 One of the things that I mentioned earlier is that it can be hard to kind of quickly evaluate 13:25.480 --> 13:29.160 claims of openness in hardware, because there's a lot of pieces to it, right? 13:29.160 --> 13:32.560 There's the, there's the hardware, there's the software, there's the documentation. 13:32.560 --> 13:37.320 It's just that it may, it may not be easy to kind of one quick look to see. 13:37.320 --> 13:42.760 And so one of the roles of the certification is to kind of allow other people to offload 13:42.760 --> 13:46.600 that review to Auschwitz, so they can focus on other things. 13:46.600 --> 13:48.960 And that's working kind of okay. 13:48.960 --> 13:50.200 Hardware X is a great example. 13:50.200 --> 13:55.720 They're a journal that they basically say, we're a journal, academic journal for open hardware. 13:55.720 --> 13:59.800 If you get certified, we're going to assume you're open hardware, I'm not going to worry too 13:59.800 --> 14:02.440 much about it, which is great. 14:02.440 --> 14:05.800 We've been working with the DIN spec folks who are kind of, obviously we have a similar 14:05.800 --> 14:06.800 kind of relationship. 14:06.800 --> 14:09.480 Can we build off of that? 14:09.480 --> 14:14.960 We also actually, we're in the middle of our own process, where we're using the certification 14:14.960 --> 14:21.280 as the first step, Auschwitz actually just kicked off a review of open source medical devices. 14:21.280 --> 14:27.480 And one way that may end up working is kind of the certification X as step 1, and then 14:27.480 --> 14:33.040 there's a second layer for a medical device, specific certification that kind of assumes 14:33.040 --> 14:37.560 that you've made it through the independence hardware certification. 14:37.560 --> 14:43.760 So this works, okay, but don't have 40 logos up on this slide of people who've built 14:43.760 --> 14:47.600 this into their process yet. 14:47.600 --> 14:55.120 Another thing that works is, we've built citations into the certification directory process. 14:55.120 --> 15:00.440 So you can say, I have this hardware, it's built on other hardware, and people use it, 15:00.440 --> 15:05.080 people use it especially when they're doing new versions of their own work, but they also 15:05.080 --> 15:07.360 use it to cite other people's work. 15:07.360 --> 15:13.280 So people who use it, but I would say the vast majority of stuff in the directory does 15:13.280 --> 15:14.880 not have citations. 15:14.880 --> 15:20.440 So that goes in the kind of works-ish category. 15:20.440 --> 15:26.800 We have this super robust API, it's great, it's a read-write API, so if you want to learn 15:26.800 --> 15:33.440 more about the directory, you can use it, use it to generate that map or get a hardware 15:33.440 --> 15:40.440 slide, people use it a little bit, not a whole lot, it's also a write API, so if you 15:40.440 --> 15:46.000 want it to build sending an application into your like standard workflow and just sort 15:46.000 --> 15:48.360 of automate it, you could do that. 15:48.360 --> 15:54.280 We do have one of two people who are using it right now, but you know, like, API, we thought 15:54.280 --> 16:00.360 it was going to be more popular than we built it, sometimes that happens, and the last 16:00.360 --> 16:04.480 thing is just like static site frameworks are amazing. 16:04.480 --> 16:09.480 We, the version of the site that's up right now is version two. 16:09.480 --> 16:14.720 We launched it in 2018, I haven't even talked about, there's a whole other section that 16:14.720 --> 16:21.320 has a bunch of educational materials about licensing, about documentation, about how all 16:21.320 --> 16:27.560 that works, we're obviously updating the search case directory all the time, and we launched 16:27.560 --> 16:34.280 in 2018 and basically haven't had to touch it since then, it just sort of keeps it running, 16:34.280 --> 16:37.800 which is amazing and we're very grateful for. 16:37.800 --> 16:42.800 So these are the things that we have learned running this, you know, first 10 years have 16:42.800 --> 16:46.880 worked pretty well, we're looking to 10 more years, if you're in this audience and you 16:46.880 --> 16:52.280 have not yet certified, I would suggest checking out certification.osho.org, I'm going to 16:52.360 --> 16:58.880 put you through, give questions, I'll be in the back afterwards, I look a lot like this. 16:58.880 --> 17:03.480 You can send me an email, I'm mostly on Blue Sky these days, although it's a dynamic 17:03.480 --> 17:06.440 social media landscape who knows. 17:06.440 --> 17:12.120 Thank you to all the images that we used, I just part of this deck, and yeah, that's where 17:12.120 --> 17:13.120 things are. 17:13.120 --> 17:15.320 So thank you all for your attention. 17:15.320 --> 17:31.640 So we have time for one question, well, Christopher, sit up. 17:31.640 --> 17:35.760 If you have a design and you only want to certify some of it, let's say you have some 17:35.760 --> 17:41.280 electronics, some enclosures, but you only want to certify some of the enclosures, the front 17:41.280 --> 17:42.280 panel for example. 17:42.280 --> 17:43.280 Is that possible? 17:43.360 --> 17:47.480 Yeah, this is a great question, so if you have a kind of component, the way that we 17:47.480 --> 17:55.280 think about this is you have to certify the version that exists as a kind of complete 17:55.280 --> 18:02.400 in your application, and what that means can vary significantly, but if someone had the 18:02.400 --> 18:07.160 certified piece and couldn't do the minimum thing you expect, then that's not enough, 18:07.160 --> 18:10.320 it needs to be enough so someone can actually do what they're going to do what they 18:10.320 --> 18:11.320 want to do. 18:11.320 --> 18:17.240 There's a pre-release certification process, if you want to put something on a product you're 18:17.240 --> 18:21.240 going to roll out, you can reach out, we can kind of give you provisional numbers for that, 18:21.240 --> 18:22.560 but thank you all again.