Beyond Modifying Your Honda Civic

Civic open hardware projects are surprisingly difficult to find. Google results are littered with ways to modify your Honda Civic. As a proud owner of a 2000 Honda Civic with just over 108,000 miles, I appreciate this. That said, it's not quite what we're looking for.

The phrase "civic open hardware" hasn't become as common place as "open gov" or "open data", and the phrase "civic hacking" has been passively defined to mean tools that primarily use software.

Defining Civic Open Source Hardware

Civic

The word "civic" is a pretty all encompassing term; indeed, a fun challenge is to find something in our lives in which civics to does not play a role. The definition need not be limited to things we normally associate with government. One guiding principle might be that it should involve community and participation.

There has been a fair amount written about defining "civic hacking" (links to articles in the future. For this page, the goal is to have a collection of projects that make use of "open hardware".

Open

The phrase "open source' is the topic of more debate than one would expect, with many nuances and forks. A collection of some general definitions can be found in the links below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_hardware http://www.oshwa.org/definition/

Hardware

As for the definition of "hardware", there is an opportunity here to reassert a definition that is not limited to computation. Artifacts such as D-Lab's Bicilavadora, a pedal powered washing machine, certainly employ wares that are hard, and can even be picked up at a hardware store.

The List

Insert your link here:

1. Obviously: Public Lab Tools
2. John Keefe, and Team Blinky
3. Low-Cost Illuminated Threat Alert