Open-source hardware (OSH) development is a new design paradigm from a commercial perspective. Openly sharing designs of technical products is a step towards democratising access to new technologies for the benefit of individuals and communities in society. At the core of the open-source hardware definition lies the freedom for anyone to replicate the hardware based on the design. Thus, enabling this freedom is a step towards developing a successful OSH. Previous research supposes that a bill of materials and assembly instructions are enough for this. In this study, we question this assumption and investigate what other factors may influence replicability of an OSH. Using data from a survey and interviews with OSH practitioners, we identify and describe these factors, which relate to the documentation, the design and the context of the person replicating the hardware. Using these insights, we present a diagram of the replication process along with questions the person replicating the hardware would ask to check whether an OSH is replicable. Finally, we synthesise this information into practical advice for OSH projects to increase the replicability of the designs they produce, and thus the likelihood of their project's success.

Knowledge management (KM) is the process of creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. In this paper, we investigate KM practices and needs in Open Source Hardware (OSH) communities. The aim is to provide insights into the KM issues and challenges facing these communities. Our analysis is based on interviews carried out with the participants of 22 projects. Interview transcriptions were coded and tagged with concepts extracted from the literature. Text mining was used to uncover the main concepts embedded in the corpus. From this analysis, knowledge sharing emerged as one of the top-rated concepts. Codification and personalization also proved to be important KM approaches, both requiring support in the OSH design process. Using a dendrogram, we highlighted the benefits and challenges of codification together with some interesting concept associations. High contributor turnover, little or no standardization and weak project structuring are still key challenges for OSH communities when it comes to ensuring awareness, making decisions and sharing knowledge.

Open source hardware is hardware whose design is shared online so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell it. In spite of the increasing popularity of this alternative IP management approach, the field of OSH remains fragmented of diverse practices seeking for settlement. This challenges providers of groupware solutions to capture the specific needs of open source product development practitioners. This contribution therefore delivers a list of basic requirements and verifies them by comparing offered functions of existing groupware solutions.

Open Source Hardware (OSH) is an increasingly viable approach to intellectual property management extending the principles of Open Source Software (OSS) to the domain of physical products. These principles support the development of products in transparent processes allowing the participation of any interested person. While increasing numbers of products have been released as OSH, little is known on the prevalence of participative development practices in this emerging field. It remains unclear to which extent the transparent and participatory processes known from software reached hardware product development. To fill this gap, this paper applies repository mining techniques to investigate the transparency and workload distribution of 105 OSH product development projects. The results highlight a certain heterogeneity of practices filling a continuum between public and private development settings. They reveal different organizational patterns with different levels of centralization and distribution. Nonetheless, they clearly indicate the expansion of the open source development model from software into the realms of physical products and provide the first large-scale empirical evidence of this recent evolution. Therewith, this article gives body to an emerging phenomenon and contributes to give it a place in the scientific debate. It delivers categories to delineate practices, techniques to investigate them in further detail as well as a large dataset of exemplary OSH projects. The discussion of first results signposts avenues for a stream of research aiming at understanding stakeholder interactions at work in new product innovation practices in order to enable institutions and industry in providing appropriate responses.