Open pathways

Congratulations, open hardware maker! You’ve done a lot of work in a short amount of time to level up your open, inclusive and sustainable hardware skills. As you take what you’ve learned and built into the future, we wanted to share with you some of the visions that the open science hardware community has for the future.

We invite you to look back into the first draft of your project vision. Do you still relate to it? Would you change anything? How would that impact your roadmap to get there? Are you able to envision not only the progress of your design, but the growth of your community?

There are multiple pathways available in the open hardware ecosystem.

• Maybe you are inclined to turn your prototype into a product you can commercialise.
• Or your goal may be to grow a community of practice around your project, where everyone can contribute to each others’ designs, without commercialisation as an end.
• Open hardware is a powerful tool for social innovation, with even international agencies engaging with it for humanitarian and educational purposes.
• At university, you can use open hardware to teach in a more efficient way and pursue research that you were not able to with proprietary tools.

The options are there, you choose! Whether you take what you learned to launch another project or join a team working open, it’s now your role to spread the word and help others realise what we can accomplish when working open, together.

Stay in touch

As you continue to develop your open hardware skills and take on new projects, we hope you’ll let us know how it goes, as well as how to improve this curriculum.

We hope you’ll grow our community! Come back as a mentor or expert, start your own version of the program at work, drop us an email and we will love to chat about it. Let’s keep supporting each other in the quest to make knowledge open and accessible to all.

Remember you can always contact us at ohwmakers@gmail.com, or by leaving a message in Open Hardware Makers, at the GOSH Forum.

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