OSEwatch

German partner: INSTITUT FUER LAENDLICHE STRUKTURFORSCHUNG AN DER JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE UNIVERSITAET, FRANKFURT AM MAIN

German partner: "GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ UNIVERSITAET HANNOVER"

CORE ORGANIC II
Coordination of European Transnational Research in Organic Food and Farming Systems

"Objective This horizontal ERA-NET proposal is cutting across several themes in the Cooperation Programme: Theme 2 (Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, and Biotechnology), Theme 3 (Information and Communication Technologies) and Theme 6 (Environment including Climate Change). The overall strategic objective - also beyond the time frame of the ERA-NET proposal - is a contribution to increase quality, effectiveness and efficiency of national research programmes within Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Robotics for a competitive, sustainable and environmentally friendly agriculture." German partner: BUNDESMINISTERIUM FÜR ERNÄHRUNG, LANDWIRTSCHAFT UND VERBRAUCHERSCHUTZ

FUTUREFARM
Integration of farm management information systems to support real-time management decisions and compliance of management standards

"Prospects for Farmers Support: Advisory Services in European AKIS"

"We offer design and support services for optimizing and scaling Solar Fire Concentration to your needs. To be cost-effective it's important to know exactly how big and how many Solar Fire Concentrators will meet your requirement. Likewise, it's important to adapt the design to the cost and availability of materials and to optimize the design for the intended application. By working with us you can go faster and farther for less cost."

US based, setting standards and micro-formats for compatibility...

Here is 10 Free and useful computer-aided design software. Computer-aided design (CAD) is a combination of computer programs and systems that allow engineers and architects to design detailed two- or three-dimensional models of physical objects, such as mechanical parts, buildings, and molecules. It specially used to design curves and figures in two-dimensional ("2D") space; or curves, surfaces, and solids in three-dimensional ("3D") objects. There are so many "free" CAD programs out there but only a handful are either really free or useful. 

"From Kostas: Hi Marcin, I see there is now some active discussion on CAD/CAM so I would like to give you some hints about the status of FreeCAD: 1. after my work on the sketcher mostly been finished, we can draw all parts of a 3D printer: https://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/free-cad/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1867 2. jriegel (project founder/manager) is actively working on the assembly module, multidocument support: http://free-cad.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=free-cad/free-cad;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/jriegel/dev-assembly after this step FreeCAD will be ready for real applications. 3. Collaborative modelling, a revision system and an online parts library are further objectives of the project. e.g. https://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/free-cad/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1378 "

"OSHW Draft Definition 1.0 has been endorsed by the following persons and/or organization as of 2012/09/6. Please feel free to add (your own names) to this section. Listing your affiliation is optional for personal endorsements, and endorsements are presumed to be personal unless the organization name is listed separately. Please join the conversation about the definition here Aaron Clarke, [1] EmbeddedCoding.com Aaron Harper, Lobo Savvy Technologies and Ahead Research Corporation Abhimanyu Singh Udawat, Explore Labs Adam Mayer, Makerbot Industries" etc.... very useful list to identify potential partners

connected to OSE

"Even without considering radical projects like all the Open Money and Metacurrency initiatives that proposes new forms of currencies, we can think more about further joining existing currencies with microcredit certificates like the Open Source Hardware Reserve Bank ones. There is the need of accurate, portable and shareable tools of reputation ranking, able to interconnect different local contexts and attached to existing currencies. The Open Hardware still needs proper open-content licenses, since with current licenses we can protect the design but not the manufactured product or forks. And Open Hardware projects will have the need of warranties and conformance marks about the proper function of the manufactured product. Why don't we use the microcredit certificates for these tasks as well? We could design microcredit certificates to act as a conformance mark, warranty and license certificates as well: only the community can issue them and use them for its own self-organization." (http://www.openp2pdesign.org/2011/open-design/business-models-for-open-hardware/) "

"Open source hardware has a set of business models that include the following: Design distribution - Companies can pack sets of designs and sell the distribution just like Linux distributions. The OpenTech CD-ROM is an example of this method. Design technical support - Experts can give support for Open designs. Asics.ws is a company that follows this model by releasing IP cores and charging customers for technical support. Design implementation - Companies can implement the designs, sell them and pay royalties to original designers, according to their release license. Releasing - The release of open designs under the control of GPL-compatible licenses can occur whenever a silicon implementation is considered commercially." "

"Furthermore, there are three more business models for Open Hardware already implemented: 1. Free service for building a greater user base: Adafruit created Adafruit Jobs Board as a marketplace for designers, makers, programmers, artists, engineers and companies who want to meet and work together. This is a free service, but in order to use the job boards users must be Adafruit customers. 2. Partnership between Long Tail Open and Fabbing businesses: Ponoko has teamed up with SparkFun Electronics to enable its users to build custom electronics products combining Ponoko's laser cutting technology with a 1500+ strong electronics catalog from open source electronics supplier SparkFun. 3. Funding Open Hardware projects for getting good Open documentation: In August 2010, Bildr offered to fund original user projects in return for good documentation: in this way it would have promoted a bildr user by showcasing his/her work and paying for the parts to construct it. In return, Bildr would have got more information for its wiki, blog and community under the MIT software license.""

"The Forty Percent Model This model is based on a simple rule: transparency about costs and a choice between paying us to make the product or doing it yourself. The basic process is that we list all the components and other costs of our product (an autonomous blimp in this case) and links to where you can buy them yourself, along with instructions on how to put them together. If you want to do it yourself, or perhaps already have some of the parts and don't need ours, go for it!"