Welcome to the Open Hardware Roadmap

What is the OH Roadmap

The Open Hardware Roadmap is an attempt to document, as a public wiki, some of the following topics:

  • Current technologies & trends in open source hardware
  • Current technology gaps in open source hardware
  • Open hardware areas for needed research in the next 2-5 years
  • Open hardware industry targets (sectors for adoption)
  • Forecast of new technologies over the next 2-5 years
  • Evolution of open systems engineering

An initial skeleton has been created, and will be fleshed out with content over the next several months. All are invited to contribute to this public wiki roadmap.

How to Contribute

We have provided an initial skeleton of chapters and subsections that people can edit and discuss, but feel free to add your own chapter or subsection as well. If you don't have time to do sophisticated wiki editing but you do have a comment, question, gripe, or idea: please put it into our dumping ground page and the wiki owners will clean up and integrate the content into the main body, as well as respond to the author if necessary.

If you do contribute, feel free to add your name to the contributors page!

Editing and Discussing Chapters and Subsections

This wiki is open to editing by anyone, but you must sign up for an account or authenticate with OpenID.

To contribute to a chapter or subsection, simply find the page via the table of contents page, and enter the page. Chapters are top level list elements and subsections are second level list elements.

No specific style guidelines other than typical wiki guidelines are required, but please take care to discuss items before making rash sets of changes. If there is something that is questionable, or you're not sure where it goes, please put it in our dumping ground page and the wiki owners will clean up and integrate the content into the main body, as well as respond to the author if necessary.

Creating a New Chapter or Subsection

Feel free to add or re-order chapters or subsections. To add a new chapter or subsection, simply edit the table of contents page and create a new top level list element (for a new chapter) or list item in an existing list (for a new subsection).

Dumping Ground

We have provided a dumping ground page for any and all raw comments that don't belong elsewhere or need editorial/contextual work to be integrated into the site. Anything placed in the dumping ground area will be cleaned up by the wiki owners and integrated into the main body of content when and where necessary. If necessary, the author will be contacted with follow-up information.

Everything placed into the dumping ground will be actively reviewed within 48 hours!

Open Hardware

The current and complete version of the Open Source Hardware definition can be found at http://freedomdefined.org/OSHW.

Open Source Hardware (OSHW) is a term for tangible artifacts — machines, devices, or other physical things — whose design has been released to the public in such a way that anyone can make, modify, distribute, and use those things. This definition is intended to help provide guidelines for the development and evaluation of licenses for Open Source Hardware.

It is important to note that hardware is different from software in that physical resources must always be committed for the creation of physical goods. Accordingly, persons or companies producing items ("products") under an OSHW license have an obligation not to imply that such products are manufactured, sold, warrantied, or otherwise sanctioned by the original designer and also not to make use of any trademarks owned by the original designer.

The distribution terms of Open Source Hardware must comply with certain criteria. See http://freedomdefined.org/OSHW for more information.

Technology Roadmap

A technology roadmap is a plan that matches short-term and long-term goals with specific technology solutions to help meet those goals.[1] It is a plan that applies to a new product or process, or to an emerging technology. Developing a roadmap has three major uses: It helps reach a consensus about a set of needs and the technologies required to satisfy those needs; it provides a mechanism to help forecast technology developments; it provides a framework to help plan and coordinate technology developments.

This technology roadmap is being developed as an open and collaborative effort by any and all willing participants.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License