Invention, intellectual property and income

The main goal for this week is to define a dissemination plan for my project.

When writing dissemination plans for my previous research projects I usually covered the following:

• identification of a target audience for the project
• brand creation
• dissemination of project results to relevant stakeholders
• organization and participation to events
• use of social and media channels
• define an "exploitation" plan, as business model definition, licensing, creation of user panels and extensive evaluation of market opportunities.

What would be different for a project like PACO? Well, in the first instance it's a project built by a single person rather than a consortium of 20+ universities and research centers. Also there is no foreseen commercial explotation for it, as I built it for personal interest rather than expecting some other outcome.

But doesn't this apply to many successful commercial projects born to fullfil one persons needs? So let's take the time to try to investigate the points in the outline and see what could be done.

Identification of a target audience

PACO could be useful to computer science and engineering students trying to build AI bots, giving an easy start for creating an inexpensive autonomous robot, for example developing software combining computer vision and ultrasonic sensing to map the physical world.

Another possible target could be those interested in learning Python programming for physical computing, as the PACO API and features would allow them to quickly experiment with simple algorithms i.e. for syncronizing light with speech and sensors.

Finally, researchers like me working on the concept of the "Emotional Internet of Things" could use PACO to develop and study emotional models and how they could affect the daily life of people.

To summarise I can identify the following customer targets:

• tinkerers
• students
• researchers

From all of these categories I expect to receive improvements and new requirements for PACO.

Brand creation

The logo concept is already defined, I believe to have followed some golden rules in its creation:

• short easy to remember name
• friendly graphics, two colors, easy to identify
• long techy acronomous for appealing researchers (Platform for Affective COmputing)

I'll be using the PACO logo extensively in the box, showing the graphic in the OLED display at boot, and possibly in a packaging if I ever plan to build a ready to use version of it.

Dissemination of project results

The main channel I plan to use for distributing project results is a project on github, since all of the target user groups make extensive use of it.

I also plan to create a tutorial on the Instructables site, where as I already experienced with previous project, a very vibrant user community is available, and is quite easy to attract lots of interaction.

Finally I will consider to participate to contests as those organized by the Arduino community and similar initiatives, in order to showcase the project and attrach new people interested in working on the project.

Participation to events

I plan to disseminate and present the project at the following upcoming events:

• FAB10 Conference
• European Maker Camp
• Rome Maker Faire
• and in general to all the events where my FabLab Cascina is going to attend in the near future

Use of social and media channels

Nowday social networks are a great way to promote and publish project results.

I already started this kind of promotion by creating some teaser posts on Facebook containing a tiny laser cut version of the PACO logo:

I also created a short video with the same demo shown at the Final Project presentation, which is available on both of Youtube and Vimeo.

Finally I plan to create a Google group for PACO which could serve as support and community building group for people interested in the project.

Licensing and Exploitation

Honestly I believe that adopting openess as the first mechanism for disseminating the project, so I'm going to provide a Creative Commons license allowing any kind of derivative work provided attribution is given for the project model files.

The software side is built on top of different parts with GPL, BSD, and MIT licenses, for this reason I'm going to adopt the one of the most permissive license among them namely the BSD one.

The reason for having two different licensing schemes is thay I believe the software licenses don't apply very well on the hardware products. Still both allow derivative works while giving attribution to the author.

Business plan

As mentioned above I don't have a strict business plan for the project. On the other side I would love to see it improved, and benefit from other people work on it.

The kind of commercial benefit that could be coming from the project are anyway evident:

• spreading my name and increasing reputation in the emotions research and open hardware community
• marketing my skills to companies and universities willing to build similar projects
• possibly allowing me to provide assistance and support to those willing to build this kind of objects