Sharing the things we make

This weeks challenge: Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project.

Licensing and releasing a product into the world is an exciting part of any projects life cycle. The license allows the creator to share their work while still retaining some (legal) level of control. Dissemination is the actual act of releasing the product to the world and could be done via anything from a massive PR camping to a simple blog post. All depending on the goals of the project and its creators.

The key considerations I consider when choosing a licence:
Retaining ownership
The freedom to continue building on the work and using it or sections of it for future projects or further development.
Removing liability
Alot of projects aren’t fully resolved and even the better ones could still use additional polish. By ensuring that potential users are aware of this will give them a better expectation when using something that is still under development. In addition the waving of responsibility for others use or misuse of these designs means that the designer can share works at any stage of their design process.
Restricting usage
Often designers want to share their hard work with others but doing so could open them up to others trying to turn a profit of the latest novel design. By adding a restriction of use designers are able to legally constrain what their designs may be used for.
Enforcing conditions of use
Sometimes we might want to require others to release changes to our work in a particular way or prevent them altogether. Conditions of use make it possible to put these restrictions in place.

In my case I’ve elected to use a Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike licence. The reason being that I want other to have the option to use, build upon and alter the work I’ve started. The share alike constraint means that others will be able to do the same. I was asked why I didn’t also exclude commercial use. At this early stage there isn’t really anything commercially viable or sensitive about this project so it seems unnecessary and If a contributor did want to develop the project in a commercial direction they would be required to share their contributions also.

As far as actually getting my project out there at this stage its still just a proof of concept. I’ll be migrating all of the software over to git for continued development and to more easily be able to get feedback. The Fab academy archive will serve as a sketchbook for the work that got me to the proof of concept. With the final page helping to communicate the idea through a nice video at the end showing off how it works. One of the main goals for this project was to develop this proof of concept to be able to find other people interested in collaborating and continuing the project. It would be really fun to work with someone interested in expanding on the language interaction itself or the form of the design to make it more specific to the language it was teaching. To achieve this I’ll likely be directing particular groups or individuals to watch the video or play with the actual objects themselves. If you’re interested in building on this project please flick me an email, Id love to chat.

Invention, Intellectual Property, and Income - Weekly resources