Invention, Intellectualy Property, and Income




The Project

For this week, I wanted to apply the knowledge and hold the activity of designing the dissemination plan for my personal project, my Master thesis. I have been working on developing a methodology that allows Maker Spaces and FabLabs to be more inclusive by collaborating with local cultural organizations that empower parts of the community that are new or at risk. The project is called Ta'awon, an Arabic word meaning collaboration, more about te project can be seen on the project website, here. At the moment the project lives on the website where the methodology is outlined in steps with downloadable worksheets so as to allow the methodology to be open-sourced.

Open-Source

To better understand how this methodology could be open-sourced I looked up the criteria that it needed to have nad it included:

While looking through the criteria of the license, I found that the 'open source software' by the Open Source Initiative and the 'free software' by the Free Software Foundation refer to the same software license. Which might be part of the confusion behind some understanding that something open-sourced is automatically free. While looking for the comparison between open source and free softwares, I found this interesting comparison. A term that I had not encountered before was copyleft which refers to the type of legal protection that guarantees the 'right of any user to use, modify and redistribute a program or its derivatives, provided that these same conditions of use and dissemination are maintained'.



GNU Free Documentation License

Looking more deeply into licenses I believe the GNU Free Documentation License works best for the methodoogy. It is a copyleft license for free documentation and is designed for manuals, textbooks, other reference and instructional materials, and documentation. As well as it seems to fit better with the nature of the methodology, its criteria is also very similar to that of the open source:



Future Projection

After understanding a little more what the open source license is, I would like to continue using it for the methodology; however, it is very important to the vision of the project to be used for the benefit of the communities it is in.

The future projections of the project are that it will offer services to the community to teach them how to bring their strengths together to work towards a future of cities that follows the FabCity Global Initiative. This will be offered under the umbrella of the the hybrid organization that I hope to establish with the help of some investors or collaborators - producing both social value and commercial revenue. 'More important, the integration of social and commercial value creation enables a virtuous cycle of profit and reinvestment in the social mission that builds large-scale solutions to social problems.'

One struggle that might be faced while establishing this hybrid organization is the financing. A solution to it is to find profit-seeking investors for commercial activities and nonprofit fundraising and public subsidies for social activities.

Final Thoughts

For the future of my methodology and future organization, I would choose to establish a hybrid organizations; the for-profit reinvesting the money into the non-profit as my main goal is to work for the communities. As for the methodology, I would register a GNU Free Documentation License as it could be reused by others while still keeping it open to the public to benefit from.

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