Fab Academy 2018

Week 19: Invention, Intellectual Property, and Income

This week's tasks:

  • Developing a plan for dissemination of my final project
  • Prepare drafts of my summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB) and putting them in my root directory

Dissemination Plan

My product is useful for those spaces that there are some making projects going on. For example in schools. It enables the connection, the socialization, the collaboration and making expertise distribution among different groups or classrooms. Considering these possibilities, I could hope that this product is highly potential for the schools having some making projects going on. Another possibility is using the product for research as a source of data regarding major making skills (3D, 2D, Electronics and Programming). Becuase makers go through some questions in the app and rate each other's skills. So when there is some data and some feedback somewhere, it is always possible to find a way to analyze and interpret it and to efficently use the data. So those researchers, who are involved in the making activity with children, could benefit using the generated data by children through the application.
I do not have a plan to sell the product to the schools or researchers for now. The product has lots of potentials to be more developed. If I have time in future I might continue with further development of the product and I might start thinking about representing it to making projects and even maybe selling it. But for now, I would be happy if some people recognize the potentials of this product and take the opportunity and use it as it is or even develop it more considering its originality and purpose of use and the creator of the product. Thereby, I disseminate the product by sharing my fab academy webpage address to related places such as Linkedin, twitter and Facebook, where I could reach out to the target community, which are researchers interested in maker movement or teachers involved with making activities with children or fab lab's facilitators. I was also thinking about writing a research paper about it and get it published.

Licenses

I would like to freely share my product with other people and let them to freely use it. The only thing that matters to me is to maintain the credit as the creator of this product and idea. And I would expect people to mention my name, when they use my work or idea.
Therefore now it is time to choose a license that meets my requirements. So to acheive this, I went through the licenses in Neil's page, I got myself familiar with the terms of different licenses listed there, I explain some of them here:
  • Creative Commons (CC): is free and easy to use license for sharing creative (design) works, which is comprised of 6 main licenses with specific conditions listed bellow:
    • Attribution (by), ShareAlike (sa), NonCommercial (nc), NoDerivatives (nd)
    • More information regarding each condition could be found in this page.
    Therefore considering Attribution (by) condition, it requires that others who use my work in any way must give me credit the way I request.
  • MIT: applies for software and is free of charge and without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software.
  • Apache is a license for software, which is somehow similar to MIT license. It provides one to freely use, modify, distribute and sell a software licensed under the Apache License without worrying about the use of software: personal, internal or commercial. But the explicit reason that differs Apache from MIT license is that in Apache any change to the code should be clearly identified. If one redistribute software with any Apache licensed components, the person must include a copy of the license, provide a clear Apache License attribution, and add modification notices to all the files that he/she modify.
    Therefore, I find working with MIT license easier compared to Apache.
  • Fab: This work may be reproduced, modified, distributed, performed, and displayed for any purpose, but must acknowledge "project name". Copyright is retained and must be preserved. The work is provided as is; no warranty is provided, and users accept all liability.
Considering different options and comparing different licenses, I made my mind to choose the CC license, which I believe meets my requirements. And I would choose MIT license for the software part of my project.

I am pleased that I am able to share my work with other people and keep the credit as the creator of the work for myself :-)