Joshua M. Pearce is the John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation at the Thompson Centre for Engineering Leadership & Innovation. He holds appointments at Ivey Business School, the top ranked business school in Canada and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Western University in Canada, a top 1% global university. At Western he runs the Free Appropriate Sustainability Technology (FAST) research group. His research concentrates on the use of open source appropriate technology (OSAT) to find collaborative solutions to problems in sustainability and to reduce poverty. His research spans areas of engineering of solar photovoltaic technology, open hardware, and distributed recycling and additive manufacturing (DRAM) using RepRap 3-D printing. He wrote the Open-Source Lab and Create, Share, and Save Money Using Open-Source Projects.
Authored Comments
We need to go further than just the data and the code - by moving to open source scientific hardware - we can open up experiments to everyone as well.
It is not just data and software the UN should be targeting - it is long past time the UN adopted hard standards for pushing open source appropriate technology - the open source hardware that NPOs like AKVO actively develop and share. Every technology that works should be tested, vetted and open sourced so that others from around the world can use it and build on it - this kind of lateral scaling has incredibly low costs and will actually make some of the larger goals achievable.