The assignment
This week’s assignment was to create and document a license for the final project, develop a plan for dissemination of the final project and to prepare a summary slide (presentation.png, 1280x1024) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, less than 1 minute, less than 10 MB) in the root directory.
Final project license
After the lecture, I decided to look more into Copyright and Creative Commons (CC). I quite like CC… it is within the boundaries of Copyright, but allows for your work to be copied, distributed, edited, remixed and built upon, under certain conditions defined by the Copyright owner. Compared to the classic Copyright “all rights reserved”, CC this seemed a fair way of keeping my work open to others. One can write its own Copyright license as well, but what I liked about CC is that:
- it has a wide range of standard licenses;
- it seems like solid platform where you can read more about the license types;
- it’s well spread around the world, becoming more and more used over the past years;
- it has a framework to help you chose your license;
- it provides you the icons of the license you chose, ready to be integrated in your webpage, together with a hyperlink to CC webpage, where people can read more about the chosen license; this makes it easy and convenient to integrate in your projects/webpages.
So… I went to Creative Commons webpage > share your work > choose a license. I answered 2 questions, and from that CC suggested a license for my work. It was very simple.
I chose to protect my work with a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
By using Attribution and ShareAlike, I allow for it to be copied, distributed, remixed, built upon and motivate people to share back, allowing for the project to grow and develop in expected and unexpected directions and fostering a culture of collaboration and open design.
By using NonCommercial, I prevent others from taking advantage of my work.
Overall, the idea is to foster the project’s growth and development and provide the means for a fair dialogue, should the project generate economic revenue.
You can read more on about the different CC licenses here.
How will I inform people about my license?
I will show my licensing in my website, in the bottom. Most of the content in my webpage is created by me, but because I refer to other peoples ideas that inspired me, share photos of their work, etc, I opted to add a note to the CC license in the bottom of my webpage.
I have applied the same html to all pages, but for the group work, machine week, I added Ola and Birkir as copyright owners.
Then, I have decided to add my license to all files regarding the final project. Files are available for download, what makes it easy to be taken out of the webpage and distributed; a way of reinforcing people keeping informed about my licensing choice is by adding the license to the file itself.
I want to be fair to people who have inspired my work. All my C files are based on Neil’s C files. Therefore, I’ll add a CC license to my files that attributes and links people to Neil’s original C file.
Also, the modular textile modular system I’ve designed, it’s inspired by the work of Atelier Oï and Ece Tankal & Ilkim Er. Therefore, I’ll add a CC license on the parametric file, but attribute to them for the inspiration pictures.
Presentation slide and video
My understanding from the lecture was that the goal with making a presentation slide and video this week was to practise for the final presentation in two weeks. Since I have already practised during weeks 9 and 12, for the MTM group work, I have decided to prioritise my time this week developing the final project instead.
Dissemination plan
I’m developing a modular e-textile system. Due to time constraints, I would only be able to develop 4 modules (power, wire, 1 input and 1 output). I wish to extend my project beyond FabAcademy by:
- adding new modules, expanding kit;
- improving, refining the modules developed and the overall system;
- developing workshops for different user groups - school classes, FabLab absolute beginners, FabLab advanced users and designers/creative people -as a way of getting feedback and see how the project could evolve.
I see many possibilities. Before deciding on a more narrow way to go, I would like to test the project and get feedback from different users a bit more.
