Jinger Zeng, Open Hardware communities to empower citizen science.
August 5 2023, 15:00 BST/ 10:00 EDT/ 07:00 PST (3pm BST/ 10am EDT/ 7am PST)
How Open Hardware Projects and Companies Can Shape the Future of Sustainability
Over the past two decades, Open-Source hardware has leap-frogged, providing accessible tools for citizenry to design, build, hack, innovate, collaborate over, customise and deploy hardware technology. Communities of practice have grown around the technology. In some cases, open-hardware is being used as an affordable alternative to sense, monitor and gather data on non-human animal populations and environments.
Jinger Zeng is an Ecosystem and Community Builder and Contest Manger at Hackster.io, an online platform and community that focuses on open source hardware and electronics projects. As a long-term practitioner in open hardware, Jinger will share her personal experiences and take-aways from building a robotics startup based on open hardware, managing a global developer ecosystem and community, to balancing commercial vs social approaches in the field.
Jinger will dive into “IoT Into the Wild Contest for Sustainable Planet 2022”, a Hackster.io hosted innovation challenge for Seeed Studio, where over 120 projects from over 65 countries around the world were crowd-sourced and documented as open source projects. In these projects, innovators leverage low-cost sensors to visualize nature’s data for sustainability-environmental projects. The open hardware approach provides remarkable opportunities for global knowledge sharing and collaboration, enabling individuals to freely exchange ideas across borders. By prioritizing cost-efficiency, local production, user-friendliness, and accessible learning pathways, open hardware fosters low barrier entry and widespread adoption of sensor technologies. This, in turn, paves the way for active citizen participation in scientific endeavours, empowering communities to contribute to various fields, leading to advancements in areas like interspecies communication and fostering a deeper understanding of our world.
A recording of the session is now available below and via our Youtube channel.
