All the Open Hardware Summit 2014 videos are up and running on Vimeo: please find the full album here!

Below, you can find opening remarks by Addie and David Cuartielles:

Welcome by Addie Wagenknecht and Opening Remarks by David Cuartielles (2014 OHS) from OSHWA on Vimeo.

Wednesday October 1, there will be a timely public transit strike in Rome starting at 8:30am and ending roughly around 5pm.

To get to the Summit workshops, we recommend you leave early using transit, or depend on Taxi’s, Uber cars or bikes.

If you need any assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out- –

See you Wednesday!

This years hastag #OHSummit
please use it when posting photos to flickr, instagram and any tweets.. !

The Open Hardware Summit which is organized by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) is thrilled to announce our non-profit status as a 501c3 in the USA!

Now we are officially a non-profit, all memberships to OSHWA are tax-deductible and all sponsorships for the Summit are as well. . ! How cool is that? Retroactively to the date of OSHWA’s incorporation on May 25, 2012, contributions are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Why become a member? Membership gives you visibility within the community and allows you to vote on the organization’s board members, creating positive momentum within the larger open source movement. Additional benefits to membership include schwag like stickers, and a discount to all OSHWA events, like the Summit. Members also receive priority access to events which typically sell out, such as the Open Hardware Summit Day 2 workshops.

You can read more in detail about about the non-profit status here or sign up to become a member right away.!

Unfortunately we have to announce that David Lang will not be able to speak at Open Hardware Summit this year due to a personal conflict, instead David Cuartielles, Arduino Co-Founder and a well known member of the Open Hardware community will join us in the opening remarks! Woot!

Important notice: please be aware that you’ll need to print your ticket as we will need this to speed up the check in process. The Auditorium will recycle all the paper used for tickets.

PS: did you see our post on what will be going on on day 2 and how to reach the venue?

As you may know, this year Open Hardware Summit is being hosted as one of the events in the Innovation Week Rome. It’s a week long festival that will end with the European Maker Faire. All the the events, including the Summit will be taking place at Rome’s Auditorium. The streaming link for the Summit will be available on both the Innovation Week’s website and ours.

The link to the livestream will be published here when it’s available, so please check back prior to the Summit’s opening remarks..!

You may have registered for OHSummit day 2 so here’s an small teaser of what’s going to happen. You obviously know that Day 1 is going to be an amazing conference with an incredible amount of great speakers but, we felt it was good to clarify what’s going on for Day 2 which debuts this year at Open Hardware Summit.

Day two will be a community day, just following the intense agenda of Day 1, will be a moment to connect and learn from the key protagonists.

As a reminder, please remember to bring your printed tickets to the venue because – as the event is free – we may need to limit access once the rooms are full. So be sure to be there early before doors open.

The Workshops

As you may recall we’ll have three room. One room will be dedicated to three beautiful workshops:

• 9:30 WS1 Gabriella Levine: An Open Source Hardware educational toolkit
• This workshop will expose people to the knitty gritty of Open Source Hardware, engaging with the basics of the definition of OSHW, how to choose licenses, resources for companies and individuals.We will discuss some of the challenges that companies and individuals face, and best practices for releasing an OSHW product. We will discuss the OSHW toolkit, as well as OSHWA’s future plans. We will use this workshop to spur an offline international working group for OSHWA

• 11:30 WS2 Benjamin Tincq: Mapping the Business Models for Open Hardware
• This workshop aims to explore the different business models for OSHW. Based on existing case studies and an initial mapping structured around the manufacturing value chain, we will discuss the strengths, challenges and applicability of different models (ex: product vs service, open design vs open manufacturing, platform model, etc.), and maybe come up with new ideas that haven’t been explored yet.
• 15:00 WS3 Eric Pan: Manufacturing Basics
• This workshop aims to offer a 2 hours experience bringing ideas into real products. We will build a batch of secret-until-OHS-day-2 item from scratch, simulating processes from Design, Prototyping to Manufacturing. Hope you will completely immerse into the pain of under-engineered designs, and re-think DFM (design for manufacture) when walking away.

The Open Hardware Unconference – “Making Open Hardware Scale”

Another room will be dedicated to a community “unconference” targeted for 50/70 people that will be based on the format of the Open Space Technology. In the early morning session you’ll be able to propose your session topics around the theme of “Making Open Hardware Scale” (an in general on the topic of Open Hardware). We will enumerate and prioritize the potential sessions to be run during the day and everyone will vote to express her interest. The most voted sessions will be run right at the start while the others will be “planned” for the day execution.

As said, this room will be run accordingly to Open Space Technology format which basically means that session proponents will have to be available to document the session – in electronic format or paper – and other folks will be free to roam from one session to another (sessions going on will be easily recognizable). OSHWA already supported an event which looked into Open Hardware and used the same approach. It was the Open Source Hardware Documentation Jam (you can see a full report here to understand the basics).

The Office Hours – Meet And Share and two beautiful Q&A Sessions on Open Hardware

A third room which we dubbed “office hours” will be available for people that want to connect with OSHWA and organize small breakout sessions. OSHWA will host two (one in the morning 11AM, one in the afternoon 3 PM) 1 hour long Q&A sessions with key representatives.

When those Q&A sessions will not run, you’ll be able to organize small presentations and meetings with other community members, talking about projects and future developments.

This room will be informal and convivial and we hope you can use this room to get your questions answered by experts and connect your projects and ideas with a bazillion new partners.

Getting to the venue

To get to our wonderful venue for this year you can follow the instructions here > http://www.auditorium.com/en/info/come-si-arriva

In general, it’s pretty straightforward to get there by public tram: the tram N. 2 will bring you there in just four stops from the starting stop which is located in Piazzale Flaminio. Tram 2 starts about every 6 minutes. You can get there by METRO A (Flaminio – Piazza del Popolo Stop).

You can easily find Taxi parking lots around Rome but, in case you need one you can call one of the taxi companies: the easiest way can be to call +39 3570 and ask for a Taxi Gold service (CC payment, English speaking drivers). A Taxi Parking should be found also in Piazzale Flaminio which is the nearest metro stop to the Auditorium.

Also you can use Uber (which is available in Rome) or similar services obviously.

Becky Stern is a firewalker! She created the Firewalker LED Sneakers, which use wearable sensors to make a light show as you walk. As Director of Wearable Electronics at Adafruit in New York City, Becky blends art, technology and traditional crafts like knitting and jewelry-making for a living. Her work focuses on using open source hardware and code libraries to teach the community how to utilize conductive textiles and other nontraditional circuit materials in their projects. She teaches Wearable Electronics on Wednesdays on the Adafruit YouTube Channel.

Becky believes that open source will have a huge impact on the fashion industry. According to her, “Fashion already has a rich culture of copying and riffing, and I believe open source modules with great documentation can be used by fashion designers and be more easily adopted and built on top of than proprietary sensor modules.”

Level up and listen to Becky Stern this year at the Open Hardware Summit! Tickets available here.

Imagine making Forbes China’s 30 Under 30 List by making wishes come true. That’s what Eric Pan does for the maker community as the founder of Seeed Studio, an open source hardware facilitator in Shenzhen. As part of the Seeed Studio community, users submit their desires for electronics components and other members help discuss and create them.

Eric made a name for himself as a leading figure in quick-turn prototyping and small order manufacturing in China. He’ll be a featured speaker at the Summit, talking about this year’s theme “From Open Making to Open Manufacturing”. On this topic, Eric says, “It’s a great and unavoidable topic, especially now that manufacturing becomes a major obstacle for hardware innovations…Hope this year’s conversation would unite open hardware believers on shareable resources.”

Eric believes that a wider adoption of Open Source Hardware would make engineering knowledge and supply chain experiences easily accessible to the public, thereby helping non-professionals use technology for their applications in a much more agile manner.

Learn more about the latest in manufacturing open source hardware at the Summit and come hear Eric speak! Get your tickets here.

David Lang changed underwater exploration forever with his hugely successful OpenROV kickstarter. OpenROV is an open source, low-cost submersible robot used by hobbyists and educators around the world. It’s also a growing DIY community of both amateur and professional ROV builders and operators from over 50 countries with a passion for exploring the deep.

Now David’s working on an amazing new project called OpenExplorer, which is a way to collaborate on and share adventure and exploration. As David describes it, he’s “focusing on the way that open source methodologies can change and improve science and exploration. The costs of the tools have dropped dramatically, so now it’s time to try new models that allow people to work in public, and collaborate with others in an open manner.”

David will be speaking at this year’s Open Hardware Summit about these projects and about what excites him most about the future of Open Source Hardware.

It’s not too late to get tickets and come see David speak!