Reopening this as we are preparing to be more active with outreach in our space. It’s been an interesting discussion and I’d like share a few thoughts and distill a few rules of thumb for the organizer’s point of view. Disclaimer: I’m active as both a maker and an organizer, with a focus on the latter lately as our situation requires it.
In my experience, the understanding must go in every direction. Developing an open source centrifuge is valuable, enabling schools/non-DIYscientists to widely use it equally adds value. They’re both hard and expensive in their own way.
Frustration can come from the development value not resulting in monetary return, as this is currently a bug in the open way we work. This opposed to the money that is often involved in spreading or implementing it, which doesn’t reach the developers. Organizers thus often externalise development costs. Not okay.
Possible solution: internalise the development costs. Pay people to develop open source content. How to do that? Not sure, some thoughts below.
Rules of thumb I gather so far:
- Pay people fairly for hosting workshops
- Pay makers/developers/artists fairly for when you use/recreate objects/installations/designs that they made
- Attribution, attribution, attribution. And it’s better to do it too often than not enough.
- Keep an open conversation, be transparant in communication, finances, …
- Pay people for work, not for surrogate intellectual property
What does ‘fair’ mean? Pointless question I think, establish it case by case in conversation with those concerned.
I personally think the last bullet point is conducive of a more resilient way of working. An example: as an organizer, say that I want to set up a way of bringing an open source centrifuge to a general audience (selling it, workshops, whatever). I would rather pay the developer for hard work (eg. build us a flat pack version of the centrifuge or develop a printable pipette tip) than to pay a fee for the use of his past work (the development of the centrifuge). The latter, seems to me, is a surrogate for IP and a symptom of an underlying factor: the developer was not paid for his work to begin with.
Ultimately over time, everyone involved is paid for their hours of work. Afterall, the same is true at the organizer’s side: reaching people, logistics etc. are hours of hard work.
I’d like to experiment with this over the coming months.
Curious to read thoughts!