You put a lot of love and effort in your open hardware and you want others to find it and see how grand it is? Here is something to help you out: the Open Know-How Manifest Standard Specification 1.0 is out!
What is this? A hardware metadata standard for discoverability of open hardware. How does this work? Via a human and machine-readable “manifest” file you can put next to your read-me and license files (see an example here). This simple text file formatted in YAML will flag web crawlers that there is something interesting out there and pass them on the information you want to share about your project!
You can create a manifest file for your hardware project in our web interface and add a reference to it in our reference implementation database. This will automatically index it in our automated search page along more than 400 other pieces of hardware. We also currently work on the integration of this standard in the Observatory of Open Hardware, our search engine for sustainable open hardware, open design and maker projects as well as in the upcoming DIN SPEC 3105 standard for open source hardware documentation.
About the Open Know-How Working Group: Open Know-How brings together a community of hardware-related organisations and leaders to expand knowledge, enable collaboration and accelerate innovation in research, design and manufacturing. Its guiding objectives are to:
- Promote knowledge sharing: prioritising the distribution of open, shareable, low-cost designs to advance science, inspire innovation and save lives.
- Develop open industry standards: define open standards and specifications to make sharing the knowledge of how to make things fast, easy and accessible to all.
- Increase adoption: improve the usability of know-how to boost participation, inspire individuals to become real-world makers, and enable a thriving environment of innovation.
Need help or want to get involved? No worries, just get in touch with us at openknowhow.org!
