Host project on community website for easier ordering

[patcon]

Hi again @OrenLederman!

A few of us have been talking and meeting to work on this. (We keep notes fwiw)

We came across some websites that we were hoping to use so that it's simpler for the next group to walk this path. They allow for project sharing, and essentially one-click ordering for others who want to do the same fabrication.

• PCBWay: Shared Projects
• seeed studio: Project Hub
• Elecrow: Cooperated Designers (seems more profit-motivated and top-down than others)
• EDIT: Upverter

tl;dr - Would you be opposed to our setting up a presences for openbadge on a community platform like these ones?

Here are some comments -- 🔍 facts, ❤️ feelings, and 💡 ideas -- related to this discussion:

community platforms: Meaning community side of PCBWay, seeed studios, etc.

General

1. 🔍 The openbadge license is MIT, and so we're technically free to do anything.
2. ❤️ I feel preference to work in a way that aligns with your expectations and goals.
3. ❤️ I feel eager to make it simpler for others to start projects with openbadge.
4. ❤️ I feel eager to actively contribute to having a presence on community platforms, so that I can help foster a larger peer community of collaborators.
5. ❤️ I feel open to letting your team manage this, if you have strong feelings on it.
6. 🔍 The community platforms don't seem to offer accounts for team management.
7. 💡 We could share an single account.
8. 🔍 seeed studio has some options for teams/contributors that we could use accordingly.

Profit-sharing and incentivization on platforms

1. 🔍 The platforms seem to offer financial incentives (paid or discount).
2. ❤️ I feel uninterested in being personally enriched by hosting a project on these platforms.
3. ❤️ I feel that the incentive could be used to promote something community-minded.
4. 💡 We could enabled "monetization", but use it to give community projects discounts/credits.
5. 💡 Alternatively, we could try to disable any monetization on the account.
6. ❤️ I feel that monetization should be disabled if it in any way increases the price of regular orders.
7. 🔍 I've tweeted at PCBWay to discover options for commission.
8. 🔍 The community platforms have referral programs, eg PCBWay's.
   1. 💡 We could use the above-mentioned shared account to receive referral bonuses from doc/readme links, and hold it for community uses.

Anyhow, I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Hopefully this is a helpful format for this discussion :)

cc: @kevinphys (pls feel free to add your own thoughts! 😄 )

Summary

Took some comments from rest of issue for summary:

• 🔍 I get asked a lot of questions about deployment and data analysis. (Oren)
• ❤️ I feel it's hard to get started with no hardware background. (Jörg)
• 🔍 I can contribute data analysis skills. (Jörg)
• 🔍 Many people are requesting badges. (Oren)
• ❤️ I feel that monetization of selling badges is possible. (Oren)
• ❤️ I feel that money could support project dev within community. (Oren)
• 💡 Design an easy-to-use badge firmware "burning" tool. (Oren)
• 🔍 I am too busy to take lead on new things. (Oren)
• 🔍 Students might be available to help. (Oren)
• 💡 Let's take actions to finalize renaming the project to Rhythm Badge. (Oren)
• 🔍 New firmware rewrite will be released soon. (Oren)
• 🔍 I can help build badges for fellow researchers. (Bjoern)
• 🔍 Oren can't sell badges as member of MIT. (Oren)
• 🔍 A worldwide capacitor shortage makes ordering harder, as stock changes rapidly.
• 🔍 Testing a programming new badges takes time. (Oren)
• 🔍 Initial support and analysis of new teams takes time. (Oren)
• 🔍 sgilbert92 needs to order a couple hundred badges. (Stephen)
• 🔍 Badges will soon be tested in classrooms. (Stephen)
• 🔍 Badges will soon be tested in assisted living facilities. (Stephen)
• ❤️ I feel that we need a better place to ask questions and create discussions. (Oren)
• ❤️ Questions are often in email right now, and need a better place. (Oren)

Summarized up to #109 (comment)

[jmueller17]

This would be very interesting. We have used previous version of Sociometric Badges for research. I have made brief inquiries how to fabricate our own version of the open badges but given up pretty quickly. As social scientists with little to no hardware background you don't even know where to start. So, if this goes forward, excellent.

Happy to contribute on the data analysis side later on. I've written some R code to work with the previous badges https://github.com/jmueller17/sociometrics

[OrenLederman]

Hi guys,

(also adding @jordanreedie and @MichaelHopfengaertner to the discussion)

I think it's a great idea, and will be happy to help. I was playing with the idea of trying order badges from PCBWay or Seeedstudio so I can make the assembly process more generic and easy for people. We are getting many requests for badges, so it can be a good way for enabling people to make their own.

Monetization might be a good idea. I'm not planning to get rich because of this project, but this money can help support some more development of the system and benefit the community (for example, designing a badge firmware "burning" tool that is easier to use...).

The only thing is that I currently don't have time to take lead on this (trying to wrap up my PhD this year, and handling a 2mo baby and a 2yo toddler..). But I will help with whatever I can. If there is enough interest, I might be able to pull in some more resources (students) to help.

Oh, also - we should refer to the project as Rhythm Badge (OpenBadge is an official Mozilla project, and they asked us to change the name). At some point i'll rename the repositories...

Also - fun fact - we have a new firmware version in the making (in a fork of the project). A complete re-write that will make it easier for people to contribute to the project. We are almost done testing all the existing functionality, and will soon start testing some new stuff (better protocol, accelerometer support, etc).

Cheers,
Oren

[eskofier]

Oren, in case you are too busy, we can build badges for fellow researchers.
All, it would be important to know the demand for badges. 10, 100, 1000?

[OrenLederman]

I actually haven't been keeping good track of the requests recently. Typically, people ask for some andges (about 10) to try out , and later on might need more. But making the badges by itself isn't too time consuming for me. Here are the problems I see:

• I can't sell badges since MIT is a non profit
• Ordering badges is about Ricky nowdays because of the shortage in capacitors. It requires fidning alternative capacitors every time and place the order quickly.
• Badges then need to be tested and programmed
• And then, there's the initial support for using them and basic analysis :)

So by creating a community I'm hoping to made the information needed more available and help people help each other. Hopefully, in a way that scales.

[patcon]

Ordering badges is about Ricky nowdays because of the shortage in capacitors.

I knew Ricky was behind it. He is admittedly a bit tricky.

[patcon]

And @eskofier, might that offer apply to civic technologists who are working on citizen science initiatives? We are part of the g0v.asia civic tech community (prounounced "gov-zero"), working loosely with PDIS, part of the Taiwanese government.

We were looking to do a first run of 15. No pressure. (Email is patrick.c.connolly @ the googles)

[OrenLederman]

Bah. That's what happens when I try to write quickly on my phone. I miss my blackberry keyboard...

…

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 10:57 Patrick Connolly ***@***.***> wrote: Ordering badges is about Ricky nowdays because of the shortage in capacitors. I *knew* Ricky was behind it. He is admittedly a bit tricky. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#109 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAWUCX9Ij2m7JN0Z9SSchmlqt_aGxNUcks5uodFAgaJpZM4X5x_h> .

[OrenLederman]

Oh, by the way - just noticed that you mentioned beacons. I don't know if I mentioned it, but we typically use badges as beacons (instead of off-the-shelf beacons). It allows us to manage them better through the system - setting their IDs from the server and monitoring their battery.

iBeacons should be fine though, but we haven't done excessive tests with them.

[sgilbert92]

fyi we'd like to start a new project with using the badges in classrooms, and another project where we'd like to use them them in assisted living facilities. So I'd easily want to order a couple hundred. Stephen Gilbert

…

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 11:42 AM Oren Lederman ***@***.***> wrote: Oh, by the way - just noticed that you mentioned beacons. I don't know if I mentioned it, but we typically use badges as beacons (instead of off-the-shelf beacons). It allows us to manage them better through the system - setting their IDs from the server and monitoring their battery. iBeacons should be fine though, but we haven't done excessive tests with them. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#109 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ATCqCUB7FfBU0qBy0LEKW_-zLuzc4_RDks5uoentgaJpZM4X5x_h> .

[OrenLederman]

It's getting busy in here :-) .
@patcon - another thing to consider is hosting a simple forums system somewhere to make it easier to ask questions and create discussions. Is this something that Seeed/PCBWay offer as part of their community projects?

[patcon]

I've been investigating the seeed/pcbway systems for most of the afternoon, and it seems that they're pretty rudimentary. They offer comments and "likes", but no forums per se. I wouldn't want to try to manage a community over there -- just allow ordering and simple interactions. I'll think on other options. I might lean toward github (perhaps another repo) until that fails or gets complaints, just because that seems in flow with the other work flow?

PCBway actually seems better than seeed. PCBway allows you to share a project, and someone can add a PCB to the cart. There is a specific place on the project page to attach a BOM, and I think the idea is that you can then add another line item to the cart by asking for assembly. It's not seamless, but it's not bad.

Another option, though unsure how pricing would look: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/how-to-sell-your-widget-on-sparkfun#option-2-sparkfun-manufactures-you-get-a-royalty (perk of sparkfun is that they're fully assembled and have a high standard for docs and support)

[OrenLederman]

I think that github is ok for tracking issues, but sometimes you just want to have a discussion, or ask questions. In particular, people ask me a lot of questions about tips for deployment and data analysis. Saving these questions in a forum instead of emails can be useful :) I'll try to look into that, and see where I can host something like that.

[patcon]

I feel that.

To summarize: we've currently got:

• GitHub. Asynchronous. Technical. World readable. Requires GitHub account.

Potential options for future:

• Discourse forum. Async. Less technical. World-readable. Requires new sign-up. Self-hosted.
• Google Group. Async. Non-technical. World readable. Requires common Google account. Meets email people where they are. Can easily forward emails to community. Not self-hosted.
• Gitter chat. Synchronous. World readable. Non-technical. One-click participation. Requires common Twitter/GitHub account. Not self-hosted. Generates email notifications. Can be "bridged" with existing Slack teams. [?]

My preference is to cover more space that GitHub doesn't with minimal hurdles of participating, and so for me:

Gitter > Google Groups > Discourse

Anyone else have thoughts or suggestions?

[OrenLederman]

I'm not a huge fan of synchronous chat for large discussions. I think it's a good tool when you routinely work with other people and when you need to coordinate stuff (and we might need it sometimes).

What I had in mind is more of a forum system. I'm thinking of the other use cases that I see, which is mostly Q&A and support - manufacturing/fabrication, questions about deployments (base stations and server) and data analysis. Creating topics will allow you to reduce clutter and make it easier to search (think stack overflow).

I'm not sure what the solution is right now, I'll have to think about it for a bit.

[OrenLederman]

Also, going back to one of the original questions here - does anyone have a preference for PCBWay or SeeedStudio? I can try and order a small batch of badges from one of them and see if the quality is ok