Philosophical Foundation: Open-Source Hardware Approach
Philosophical Foundation: The NeuroGig OSH Open-Source Hardware Approach
At NeuroGig OSH, we champion an open-source hardware philosophy to unlock broader access and drive the adoption of open-source hardware (OSH) technology across the neuroscience community. Traditionally, only labs with a certain set of financial, infrastructure and skills resources could develop OSH in-house, excluding many from these advancements. Even those capable and motivated to build equipment usually focus on only a certain instrument type. Our goal is to offer a diverse suite of neurophysiology tools, staying true to the open-source ethos. By offering access to this range of tools, we aim to deliver value to users, makers, and tinkerers alike.
What is OSH and OSH culture? And how does the NeuroGig OSH culture differ?
Open-source has a certain underlying philosophy, with an almost cultural element attached, compared to conventional proprietary developments.
Some theorists and developers prefer constraining this philosophy to very specific technical methodologies and requirements. This group may even insist on the design software used to be open-source, and for all included components to be OSH as well. Others take a more open-ended approach, and treat aspects like licensing nuances, exact technical standards of documentation and the platform of distribution as secondary. Both approaches have their merits, but at its core, a project is a legitimate OSH project when the hardware design, schematics, and source files to be freely available for others to study, modify, distribute, and produce.
Considering our company’s aim, we categorize our OSH approach to be slightly more towards the more open-ended side of the spectrum.
And we strongly subscribe the following (interdependent) ideals of open-source hardware culture:
Decentralization: We emphasize decentralized development, distribution, and maintenance, collaborating with global partners.
Community involvement: We actively encourage participation from the neuroscience community, ensuring their input shapes further innovation.
Constant Innovation: We invite and incentivize builders and tinkerers, and push for feedback from the user community to implement improvements
The projects we undertake often have their roots in already-published open-source projects, sometimes they are projects where the scope is such that the collaborating lab/s prefer to take a less active role, and let us take the lead. With some projects, we are the only actor, and take all the initiative with the design and documentation.
Whilst we remain committed to OSH as per the definition above, the nature of our collaborations may require some items in our product portfolio to be proprietary, as long as it does not change the company’s broader goals.
What are our challenges in working with OSH?
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NeuroGig OSH is a for-profit company. A handful of researchers find this incompatible with the ethos of open-source hardware. And a handful of business stakeholders find open-source to be incompatible with profitability. We believe profitability and open-source both are drivers of excellence.
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How do you fairly incentivize all role-players, including all community members with some involvement in the development process? Incentives can be difficult to set, especially within university regulations. Our approach is to start from the assumption that a win-win solution is available. We try to communicate challenges and expectations correctly and frequently, in order to achieve a balance.
Additional notes on specific ways we try to achieve our aim of increasing availability and uptake of open-source hardware in the neuroscience community, and more on our challenges:
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We will promote neuro open-source hardware projects, whether we are involved with the project or not
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When we select a project, we take time to “productize” the instrument. This means end-users can benefit from (often improved) instruments, with warranty terms and company support.
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We encourage end-users of NeuroGig-built instruments to refer to original papers in their publication references, when possible. Original developers should therefore get more citings because of the wider user-base.
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NeuroGig gives credit to the original publication/developers and other parties who contribute to later development in our product literature. But we endeavour to incentivize contributors in a balanced way. Some researchers may have experienced the difficulties sometimes intertwined with deciding who to list as co-authors and in which order on a highly collaborative academic paper. This balancing trick has some parallels to our challenge here. Also, very few academic researchers understand the cost and challenges of productizing a design and of handling all the business intricacies to ultimately have a happy customer. However, we have had considerable successes on this front, and hope to improve with experience.
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Part of our commitment to decentralization drive is to also include regions and communities are sometimes isolated or excluded from mainstream innovation. We are particularly bullish about opportunities and the potential of the African continent, where we have a physical presence.
