Week 18: Invention, intellectual property, and income

This week we followed the invention, intellectual property, and income class (see video here)

This page is about the individual assignment and exploring licensing and a dissemination plan for my final project.

Dissemination plan

Thinking about how to make my project more visible it came to mind that… I need a logo! :D

So before doing that I did a quick search…

Screenshot_6.1_Search_inspiration_logo.png

…which inspired a sketch based on those inspirations

IMG_6.2_Logo_sketch.jpg

So while I was starting inkscape to make a digital version of it… I suddenlty realised I could reuse the KiCAD board desing for my heart sensor to easily build it!

Screenshot_3.1_heart_sensor_simplified

Screenshot_6.3_KiCAD_logo_design.png

And was extremely easy to do so and have it exported to .svg for modifications.

Building a slide presentation

For this I used inkscape and here the final result!

Digita_Heartbeat_Tree_Presentation_Slide

Building a short video

I used for editing my video Final Cut Pro. I was hoping to try Kdenlive but had no time in the end.

Many of th images and short video fragments are just pictures taken with my phone during this last weeks.
I added as sound background the heartbeat sound effect from Patobottos on Freesound - (CC-0 license)

After a first cut I decided to re-edit the video reducing the title and making faster transitions.

Next steps and improvements are:

  • Adding final credits
  • Improving logo quality
  • Create a separate video for participant users (not makers)
  • Shoot and add better quality footage
  • Record reactions from participants
  • Future versions will be shared on social media sites

Where to exhibit it?

I plan to bring my installation to public spaces and art&technology conferences where it could be used exhibited:

  1. Makerfarie Barcelona: the event is on 16-17 June… too soon! O_O …I made a submission but I plan to use that mainly for bringing a beta small size version and get feedback.
  2. FAB14 in Tolouse: the event is in July, by then I should be able to have a “big” size version but I have to plan the transport of the structure.
  3. Other events that might be interested: THK (August, Tarnac), CCC (December, Leipzig), Internet Freedom Festival (March, Valencia), IAM (April, Barcelona).

There are also possible permanent locations for the tree to be hosted where I already have connections: ThoughtWorks, IAAC/FabLab …and other art and tech spaces in Barcelona that I could reach out to.

How to make it viral?

In these event if necessary is useful to build a bit of PR around the installation and add elements that sould make it shareable on social media: eg. create unique URLs of your personal interaction visualization, hastags, invite funny ways for people to share, etc…

A second option is about focusing on the aspect of creating a simple visual way to aggregate random data coming from different sources on a common service.
This would be more of a visual experiment and allow to others that want to create a random number generator that is seeded by intimate data of human interactions to publish it on the same platform.
A cool common name and an attractive visualization would be the trigger to expand its reachability…
Think something like like: wouldn’t you love to have on your screensaver a random visualization based on the heartbeat or random strangers around the world!

Finally I’ve been thinking to insert this installation in a “meta-ribbon-tree” lager project. In this context to create a link with the Climate Ribbon project and start a series of multiple ribbon trees projects touching different social justice issues.
The “ribbons tree” could also become a module to contribute to the Beautiful Trouble toolbox of creative artivism tactics.
This could encourage other designers, artists and activists to “remix” the idea to bring visibility to their causes.

Licensing

Licensing should allow remix of the work for future adaptations that are described above.

Code:

  • GPL:
    In line with Debian and Linux codebase. This would be necessary in case I decide to reuse part in the RNG implementation from the linux kernel. It still I don’t have a final solution on this aspect but I believe is unlikely. Adopting this license will force people to publish future changes back to the community when the software is distributed (which is also unlikely).
  • AGPL:
    The variant of AGPL over the GPL is interesting in the case I’m going to build an external service that aggregates data coming from multiple tree developed by others. AGPL is similar to GPL but designed for the case of network server software. The ensures that in case code is modified and deployed as a public service, the modified source code becomes available to the community.
  • MIT:
    This would require my code to be distributed separately from any dependency on the linux RNG or the Raspberry Pi distribution which is the most likely and simple case anyway. The advantage is to leave more ample and simple possibility of reuse of my code. Who wants to use it has probably to setup and download their Raspbian version independently.

For other digital artifacts:

  • CC-BY-SA:
    This would be in line with the adoption of the [A]GPL above. BTW is already how I initially decided to license the this documentation site content. This requires people to keep the licence if they do derivative works.
    For the heart object anyway I have to use this license to be compatible with the original CC-BY-SA file used by the initial author.
  • CC-BY: Less restrictive and in line with the adoption of the MIT above. Usually a good starting point if you want to just be credited for the work.

Why not the CC NonCommercial? The NonCommercial clause hase been in various cases a debated interpretation and at times reduced the possibility of a piece or work to be disseminated and reused.
At the moment I don’t plan to make any money out of this but I don’t care if others do.