Hi There!
Welcome to the first of our stories series, where we share bits and pieces with news and the history of our program.
To start things off, here is a bit of how the current program took shape:
The idea of running a training series for open source hardware started in 2019 when we saw a common issue where projects not always followed best practices in terms of documentation, community building and other aspects that make a great open project.
Don’t get us wrong, this did not happen because people did not want to makes things the best they could, but simply because open projects have many moving parts and aspects to consider on top of the core thing being developed.
So in 2019 Open Hardware Leaders, a pilot program based on Mozilla’s Open Leaders program took place. We have learned a lot from that program, its 14 weeks of collaborative work and community building. Several projects graduated from the pilot, and we were really happy with their feedback about the program.
One of the things we learned, is that we wanted to make a program that had more input from the community since its start, so this program, Open Hardware Makers was born.
Supported with a small grant from the Mozilla foundation, we set out to do a community and expert consultation, in order to improve our curriculum. This consultation took place in the 2nd semester of 2020. Right now we are working on incorporating into the curriculum the changes, suggestions and feedback we got in the consultation period.
We will be launching our first call for projects soon! so stay tuned to this space or follow us on twitter for updates!