About

The Open Hardware Summit is the annual conference organized by the Open Source Hardware Association and the world’s first comprehensive conference on open hardware; a venue to discuss and draw attention to the rapidly growing Open Source Hardware movement.

Speakers include world renowned leaders from industry, academia, and the maker community. Talks cover a wide range of subjects from electronics and mechanics to related fields such as digital fabrication, fashion technology, self-quantification devices, and DIY bio. Workshops focus on, but are not limited to, education, manufacturing, design, business, and law. As a microcosm of the Open Source Hardware community, the Summit provides a friendly forum to be as inclusive as possible. The Open Hardware Summit was founded in 2010 by Alicia Gibb and Ayah Bdeir with support from Peter Semmelhack and Bug Labs in its founding years. Read more history.

2014 Chairs:

2014 Chair Addie Wagenknecht is the co-founder of NORTD Labs, an international research and development lab founded in 2007.  NORTD produces open source hardware projects that have been used and built by millions worldwide including the open source laser cutter Lasersaur. She is also a member of the hacker collaborative Free Art & Technology (F.A.T.) Lab and the founder of Deep Lab, a crypto-deep web collaborative. Her research and creative works have been exhibited internationally at Museumsquartier Vienna, The Istanbul Biennial, and bitforms gallery in NYC. Her projects have been featured in a number of academic papers, books, and magazines, such as TIME, Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, The Economist, MIT Technology Review and New York Times. Her works are available at bitforms gallery in New York City.  More information is available at her website or follow her on twitter.

2014 Co-Chair Simone Circero is a strategist, product and service designer focused on co-design, design thinking and innovation helping both startups and established organizations to thrive. Simone also designs and runs workshops for strategy creation, product and service design, and more. Blogger and public speaker, OuiShare Connector and Program Fellow for the OuiShare Fest, he’s also founder of Hopen Think Tank in Rome. Simone also works a lot with Open Source Hardware and Distributed Manufacturing business models and strategies. Indeed besides being Co-Chair of the Open Source Hardware Summit 2014 he’s also International Branches Chair at Open Source Hardware Association and works with several open source hardware companies. More information is available at his website or follow him on twitter.

2014 Review and Co-Creative Chair Nahid Alam is the co-founder and CEO at Litehouse that builds smart home prototyping platforms.  She loves building all things hardware. Her TEDx talk highlights some of the problems that needs to be solved to accelerator innovation in the hardware space. Recently, she was featured at EEWeb.

Earlier she was a Sr. Design Engineer at Intel, proposed Intel’s strategy on Maker Movement. Originally from Bangladesh, Nahid is a strong advocate of STEM education, organizes Modular Electronics Meetup, volunteers in various STEM workshops, trilingual and loves hiking. More about her work at her blog or follow her on twitter.

2014 Ticketing & Sponsorship Chair Aileen graduated from The University of California, San Diego with a major in Computing in the Arts. She was introduced to open source hardware in her electronics arts class taught by Alicia Gibb, and later got hired to assist the good people of OSHWA. Her interests include graphic design, magical friendship ponies, and sleep.

2014 Media & Support Chair  Zachary Menegakis is an open source hardware and software developer who devotes his time and expertise across both educational and entrepreneurial endeavors. Zack has been part of the Maker community in New York City since 2011 and holds a Bachelors and Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon. His industry experience in cloud computing and passion for hardware tinkering led him to found Kinisi, an inventive startup dedicated to bringing smart, internet-connected devices to civic technologists, environmental scientists, and hobbyists. In his free time, Zack holds hardware learning workshops in NYC and enjoys the outdoors.