19. Invention, intellectual property and income¶
My final project will be open source and free to use for non commercial applications. The goal for this project would to have as many people using it as possible. I read about some non commercial licensing requirements. Copywriting it as free for non commercial use with attribution seems like the most realistic means of inexpensively licensing it.
Distribution¶
I would like to distribute my documentation as widely as possible. One community I would like to send this documentation is the forums for Odrive. Since odrive is a small open source project I would like to add my documentation to the available resources of completed projects. I would also be interesting in adding my project documentation to Hack a day or instructables I particularly like the idea of having interesting projects with a political elements to them. Having a good video will be key for distributing on these mediums.
For realistic mass distribution it will likely take more than just an open license. I would like this machine to be used for social movement groups, which are typically underfunded. One group I would like to work with is Decapital, a grant for social movement projects that I have received funds from and worked with in the past. There are two ways I could incorporate this into the distribution plan. I could set up an inquiry page and point interested groups for funding via decapital. Alternatively I could offer the services or a loan of the machine via the grant, for example if a group is applying for funds for large scale printing, we could offer to lend them the machine or print something and send it. I teach printmaking workshops for several activist groups and could incorporate that into the curriculum. Key to all of this is to keep the material cost as minimal as possible.
Prior Work¶
I’m particularly inspired by the work of the instuite of applied autonomy. They have several projects I found interesting.
The Graffiti bot is a dot matrix graffiti machine that can be remote controlled.
Their project Street Writer is a scaled up version of their graffiti bot that can be pulled behind a car
Though different in design I also really liked their LittleBrother, a robot that would hand out pamphlets in public. According to a ‘study’ they preformed “people are more likely to accept literature from a robot than a human activist. “
Mechanically I hope that my bannerbot will inhabit a space between the GraffitiBot and StreetWriter. As a more compact machine that retains the larger format of the StreetWriter. I also hope to get some of the social and visual aspects that I liked about LittleBrother. Often the media around social movements is far more important than the actual act of printing or hanging a banner. I hope that the banner printing machine can serve as an interesting and accessible tool for social movement
Slide¶
