Thank you to each and every one of you for making the decision to share your designs, and be a part of the open hardware ecosystem. We appreciate your hard work and dedication to open source hardware. OSHWA relies on donations from our community to run our organization and push open hardware forward.
2023 brought the in person aspect back to our Open Hardware Summit in NYC, and as always, is still viewable online. Our 2024 Summit will be in Montreal, with talks at Concordia University on May 3 & 4, 2024 with our workshop day on the 4th hosted by lespacemakers! October was Open Hardware Month, we had 1,000 views on our video series for certification, and over 70 new certifications. We have a new shiny logo, which is the first step in our entire website redesign process. Our website redesign will roll out in 2024.
This year we have been collaborating on a policy sprint through the Wilson Center and Federation of American Scientists asking the USPTO to search the OSHWA Certification database for prior art. We also joined forces with GOSH and IOP to cross-post announcements on all of our forums.
This past year has been an enormous lift for us, as our first round of academic grantees comes to an end. We have published their work on our newly minted Open Hardware Creators in Academia (OHCA) webpage, and there’s more to come including a collaborative document of Enabling Practices for Open Hardware in Academia. The Sloan Foundation has called this program a wild success. We’ll be looking for more funders to enhance Sloan’s support for another round in 2024. If you or someone you know is interested in funding a fellow at the $50,000 level, please email alicia@oshwa.
OSHWA published a new licensing guide for open hardware on our website, to incorporate CERN’s v2 OHL. And speaking of CERN, our Executive Director, Alicia Seidle, was honored to be a keynote speaker at CERN’s inaugural event officially opening their Open Source Program Office (OSPO).
If you would like to support initiatives like these and vote on who is on the OSHWA board, please consider getting an OSHWA membership. We have a wide range of membership levels, from a discounted level to a lifetime membership. Membership not for you? That’s ok! We also welcome, and greatly appreciate, donations and Open Hardware Summit sponsorships.
In addition, OSHWA is looking for grants or donations of $25,000 in support of broadening our Summit Fellowships, and impacting more fellows. If you are interested in giving that level of support, please contact alicia@oshwa.org.
Thank you.