Our article on the demographics & motivations of an Open Source Hardware community, the Finnish eCars – Now! -community, has now been published in First Monday.
The main findings are that the OSH community members are mostly volunteers and “altruistically” motivated. However, they are significantly older than typical “altruistic” volunteers in Open Source Software communities. We believe this is due to the relatively early stage of the project and, maybe more intrestingly, because an OSH project like this demands a wider variety of areas of expertise compared to typical OSS projects. The article also discusses some bottlenecks of OSH projects compared to OSS projects, as revealed by our survey.
We believe this is one of the first empirical studies of OSH communities, so all feedback & comments are very welcome.
2 Comments
Olisi hauskaa, jos alkuperäinen data olisi saatavilla uteliaille.
It would be neat, if the survey data would be available for all to see.
I think that can be arranged … give me a few moments, maybe some days.
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