Commons-based Peer Production of Physical Gods — Is There Room for a Hybrid Innovation Ecology?

I’ll be addressing how Fab Labs are positioned around ‘open sourcing’ hardware, a territory hardly ever explored in research, maybe apart from the open design people such as Ronen Kadushin and the people around Kerstin Balka. The paper will then report a number of case studies where ‘open source’ in hardware really has happened. From this, I’ll try to identify what really the difficulties are to translate the FLOSS model to non-software products (very much in line with my service innovation chapter) and how this in practice has been and can be achieved.

The paper will be presented at the 3rd Free Culture Research conference in Berlin, 8/9 October 2010 — it is now available for download here (use the One-Click download).