Goals
The goal of this assignment is to develop a plan for dissemination of our final project. Whict it means asking yourself the following questions:
- How many units am I going to be able to produce? What is my scale?
- Am I going to share the project -open source- or am I going to patent it?
- Do I want it to sell it to others?
- Is it going to have a license?
- Can I start a business out of this project?
Invention
My final project, Fab Sailor, contains hardware and software implementations. Both of them will be freely available after Fab Academy and I will host them in Github.
The manufacturing will be made locally at the Beach Lab of Sitges but anyone in their houses or in any lab will make it easily. T
he point is sharing it as much as possible and distribute it.
Intellectual Property
I was thinking to license the project under the MIT license. There are some reasons to do that, but specially one: safety.
I don't want that other people hurts by trying to make this simple project. It is simple yes, but you need to solder, you need to mill PCB's, you need to power circuit boards, you need to make some laser cutting etc. These things are not specially dangerous if you have some knowledge on themselves but I don't want anything or anyone getting damaged or injured by doing this. So safety is important to me. I don't want any responsibility on others.
It is also very important warranty. I'm just doing some research on this project, I can not assure anyone that this is going to work as I described. I hope it works, of course, but I can not give any warranty.
The project will be Open Source and I will freely give the code to anyone. Open Source is a good way of developing projects and it's a fact that is more than a trend. Little by little this kind of projects are getting more notorious into society.
Motivation
The biggest motivation to disseminate this project and continue its development after Fab Academy is educational and entertainment. Due to this project, some students will learn and understand concepts of music applied into digital fabrication. I would like that people could understand that is possible to compose or create music due to acquiring techniques and experience on digital fabrication.
Company
For the moment I am not thinking on creating a company for this project. It doesn't have any sense to me. But in the other hand, I wouldn't mind to start a studio of Digital Fabrication that we could design and make Open Source Projects.
Incomes
There is no incomes expected for his project at the moment. It is bascily a researcj project without a market objectives in a short time period.
Nevertheless, there exists some possibilities to get some incomes due to support service given to other people. It is not contemplated at this stage at all but in the future it would be on eoption.
My project is simple and open source; I would like everyone to download for free and play with it.
If the project continues after Fab Academy then there will be possibilities to make a business pan. In theory I would improve lots of parts and I would design the whole project more robust. If that moment arrives then it would exist the possibility that people would like to buy the product already made and built. People would have only to mount it. Or without mounting. Here is opening a wide range of possibilities to make a business plan.
For example I could create an internet platform or a community to earn some revenues due to give user specific needs. Some users would require more services or specifically technical support. Every time there is is an specific need that requires “re-thinking”, “re-design” the hardware or the software I would charge them a certain amount. For that reason is very important to take care of all the developing services of the project.
Funding
At this moment I don't need any kind of funding for this project. It is a very early solutions what I made and once I have developed it more then it could be correct to start a Crowd-sourcing campaign.
Nowadays there is a lot of Crowd-sourcing companies and platforms an it is a good idea that you learn from them. You really have to Know when is the correct time for crow funding a campaign, how long it will take (this is very important); how you have to answer your backers and when you have to give them information. The process is not complicated but needs time an effort. Is not about “starting a campaign and that's all”. It's time to get some nice incomes for your projecte and you have to work it out.
What I learned
This is noyt my case at all but right now scaling production will become crucial for me and everyone involved in Digital Fabrication. And when that day arrives, you got to be prepared. The Niels class was very interesting and as far as my projectone day It should take caret, it's better to be prepared.