Week 14

Invention, intellectual property and income

Dessemination plan

A dissemination plan is a plan for disseminating research findings or products to those who will use the information in practice and is something that you should be thinking about early on. It is what will help you get the message out whether it is results of research or a successful intervention.

The portable water turbine

I have a little fishing hut by a river in a rural part of south Iceland. This hut is quite primitive with no running water and almost no electricity. When I say almost, its because I have solar cells on the rooftop to engine a few lights to help over the darkest hour.

That said, of course here are some aspect of my hut that I would like to adjust. The solar cell for example does not function as it could due to scars sunlight in the winter time in Iceland. That, combined with the long dark days, makes it hard to rely on solely.

Like I said before, the hut is situated by a river. In Iceland we have a long history of harvesting rivers and streams for electricity. Iceland gets about 71% of its electricity this way and another 22% from geothermal harvesting. These facts are part of the Icelandic culture and shape the way we think about our nature. Therefore, it was a natural step to try to harvest the river by my hut to make my own electricity with some kind of a water turbine.

But I didn’t want to stop there. As much as I love my hut, I also enjoy traveling through the wilderness of Iceland, by cars, horses and on my feet. And as much as I enjoy the peace and quiet, I also know that the weather in Iceland can change rapidly and you should always have a fully charged phone or an emergency locator of any kind. This, as well as the fact that the Icelandic wilderness is full of rivers and water streams got me to the idea to find a way to make a small, portable water turbine, efficient enough to charge a phone, a radio or similar.

That is why I think my water turbine could work for others traveling throught the wildernes of Iceland in need of electricity

Licensing

Part of this weeks assignment was to study licensing. My Final Project will be released under the Creative Commons open-source licenses.

What is Creative Commons and what do you do?

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright but are based upon it. They replace individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, which are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management, with a "some rights reserved" management employing standardized licenses for re-use cases where no commercial compensation is sought by the copyright owner. The result is an agile, low-overhead, and low-cost copyright-management regime, benefiting both copyright owners and licensees.

I found this scematic of Creative Commons online.

After studying Creative Commons I decided to use this CC for my Final Project

https://chooser-beta.creativecommons.org/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

What this means is that you are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format; Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material. Under the following terms:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use; NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes; ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.