Analysis of Industry Standards Protocol
Introduction
The best starting point for open source product development is to study what has been done already: history, prior art (patents), and industry standards.
Industry Standards refers to what is in common use for a given technology. Industry standards can refer to off-the-shelf products that are being produced in the current economy. This may include proprietary and open source products.
A study of industry standards is an indispensible part of an Open Source Product Development process.
The study of industry standards should this include those products which alraedy exist in the mainstream economy, and those open source products and processes that are merely emerging - especially as Distributive Enterprise via OSPD.
Open Source Ecology takes industry standards as the starting point converting these norms to ones that are based on Open Source Ecology. Once these industry standards are understood, they can be modified to fit the needs of open source, appropriate technology (OSAT).
It is an assumption of OSE that here are no inventions, but only small incremental developments on a large, existing pool of knowledge. These are known as innovations.
In order to create an innovative design, it is critical to have a deep understanding of the designs and mechanisms that are in common use - such as in products that are available on the open market. The critical enabler of open innovation is access to documentation of what has already been done.
A study of Industry Standards includes:
- History - what has been done already? What is the first ever working example of the artifact? How has this evolved in time and geography?
- Prior Art - patents may be used as an official record of innovations' descriptions
- Study of Industry Standards - What kind of features and performances are common in commercially-available, mainstream products? These may not necessarily be desirable, but it is important to understand why they exist.
- Comprehensive listing of mechanisms or designs that are in common use today, as well as listing of lesser known designs
- Explanation of the key features of each design
- Analysis of performance to cost ratio for each machine or component. This should be expressed as cost per unit of performance, such as: cost per kW of power generated, cost per throughput of production, etc.
The analysis of history and industry standards is a good starting point for a Modules Breakdown Diagram, and for extracting working mechanisms for a Tech Tree of Choices.
Formal OSE Protocol
Hint: *Start by linking to representative products, patents, 'how it works' descriptions, commenting on notable features, or why the features are important and noteworthy. The end goal is finding patterns or common ways and costs in which services/functions are provided.
- Delve into details of the products - to explore working mechanisms of the different products
- Start identifying patterns of features - such as, "everyone seems to use x as opposed by y because..."
- Filter the technology through OSE Specifications - such as, "how does the instance of the technology endorse OSE values and design methods, and how does it contribute to the OSE product ecology?"
Crowd Protocol
- Use Coggle as a collaborative mindmap to work on this collaboratively. Paste in pictures and key performance and cost data. See example of embedding with including an edit link below the embed:
- Use Study of Industry Standards Template for an idea of the key performance data points.
- Research the machine or module on the internet.
- Publish on the wiki and link in your Work Log.
Evaluation
- Someone who has learned the background research on a given technology may qualify to be a wiki page Maintainer for a given technology or its subset.
