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:
- Free Redistribution, meaning that other parties will have the option to sell or give away the methodology without a required royalty.
- Source Code, in the case of programming this criteria means that the code needs to be publicly published and accompanying the program to be easily edited. In the case of my methodology, this is seen where the users could request, freely, the booklet that contains the full methodology along with all the resources that were used to design it so that they are able to edit and evolve it to their needs.
- Derived Works, it must allow modifications and derived works to be republished with the same terms of the original.
- Integrity of The Author's Source Code , meaning that the license must permid redistribution of whatever is built from the modified 'source code'. In my project website, you will see a strong encouragement to adopt and adapt the original methodology to the needs of the users and to share it.
- No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups, the main point of the methodology is to allow for social inclusion, ethnic equality, and cultural intelligence within the context of Maker Spaces and FabLabs.
- No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor, we strongly recommend to use the methodology in the context of the users work, and the project urges the use to be for the benefit of the community.
- Distribution of License, this is an interesting criteria as it says that the rights that accompany the original need to be transfered with the redistribution without having to execute another license to it.
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:
- All previous authors of the work must be attributed.
- All changes to the work must be logged.
- All derivative works must be licensed under the same license.
- The full text of the license, unmodified invariant sections as defined by the author if any, and any other added warranty disclaimers (such as a general disclaimer alerting readers that the document may not be accurate for example) and copyright notices from previous versions must be maintained.
- Technical measures such as DRM may not be used to control or obstruct distribution or editing of the document.
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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