You have been working hard on designing and building your open project, including how you want people to interact with it and build a community around it. Documentation is probably one of the most unattended and important aspects of this process, it’s the cooking recipe that will let others replicate and tweak your ideas. Furthermore, choosing the appropriate open licenses will turn this interaction and the future perspectives into a smooth process or a nightmare, in terms of the hardware but also software and content you are producing.
Goal of the week: acquire best practices for hardware documentation and understand the different open licensing options available.
Assignments:
- Check up on documentation
- Choose a license for your project
- If you have new hypothesis and ideas update your canvas. What would you do to validate these ideas, what experiments would you design?
| Tools | Use it for | Examples & tutorials |
| Open licenses | Make explicit how to reuse your work | https://choosealicense.com/ |
| Open hardware licenses | Review of specific licenses for hardware | A Survey of Open Processor Core Licensing (see pages 3,4,5 for summary) |
| Documentation checklist for hardware | Review the best practices for hardware docs | Measuring Openness in Open Source Hardware with the Open-o-Meter |
| Static site generators for projects and documentation | A quick way to have your docs controlled and communicated | https://www.mkdocs.org/ |
| Open Know-How | Increase the findability of your repo | Open Know-how |