Guidelines for Open Source Hardware in Academia and Large Scientific Communities

Zsuzsa Marka

Creating Open Source Hardware is not as simple as passing schematics to the user. Instead, there are numerous critical, often multifaceted, and rarely documented challenges. What threshold knowledge, training, and experience is necessary to translate a design into a physical object? What are the overlooked critical motivators of design choices that are only documented in the designer's mind? What practices make a design valuable for everyone?

The recommendations described in this guidebook arise from the following:

Feedback provided by past and recent designers, users, and testers of hardware (built by the Columbia Experimental Gravity group) in an open-source context fromthe perspective of their diverse careers and life experiences.
Input collected from members of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA, IceCube, and VERITASCollaborations* on the feasibility of moving hardware developed in largeinternational collaborative settings to open source science, and specifically opensource hardware.
Recent experience of high-school and college students who participated in an end-to-end exercise of testing publicly-available documented hardware that waswritten over a decade and a half ago.

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