Edgeryders finally moving on with CAPS application on Care by Hackers

Research Network Horizon
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This is an update for those in the community interested in EU funding and who have been following posts about “should we” / “should we not” try our luck with the Horizon2020 calls: a proposal on Building a social innovation community (still on, but chances to go forward are lower by the day), and one on Building open care tools by hackers which are embedded in and tested by communities at large. It is the latter which is finally happening.

Since December when we launched an open call for collaboration, some of us in the ER company have furthered the work of finding partners to set up a consortium, by emailing personal contacts in our networks, particularly Alberto’s and Nadia’s. Turns out that is a more effective way to find solid organisations in this first, challenging step. Happy to report we have one, which is interdisciplinary  and consists of three universities and three SMEs. As required by CAPS in their criteria for having both ICT and non-ICT partners leading the project, ours has both the scientific and technological credibility of academia and the hands-on experience and attitude of the hacker scene:

  1. science university dpt. in Bordeaux, France.

  2. business and economics university dpt. in Stockholm, Sweden

  3. innovation university dpt. in the UK

  4. community of healthcare practitioners in the Netherlands

  5. makers lab in Milano, Italy

6. community building organisation, yours truly, Edgeryders in the UK.

(not mentioning the names because I don’t know where everyone stands on this)

What’s happening next? We will proceed with writing the application, even against the odds. Many of the organisations and people involved in this proposal are really committed to doing this project anyway, and once we have it written it will be easier to knock on other doors. So we re-iterate the offer for other Edgeryders who (this time in particular), are involved in building open hardware: be those hacker spaces, FabLabs, or individual makers of sorts. Given the impossibility to subcontract  in EU funded projects, the Edgeryders company would simply hire you as part of the Edgeryders team. @ArthurD can confirm that our legal status allows for this flexibility.

To be able to budget for your work already at this stage, it would be necessary for you to get involved in writing the application writing and specify exactly what you would be doing.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, let’s talk :slight_smile:

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Subcontracting…with Edgeryders…

Just to confirm…Edgeryders (the company) can subcontract with any person or any organisation for the purpose of carrying out any joint venture under terms that can be negotiated to suit any particular or specific project such as the CAPS programme…

Hope this helps…let us know if you have any questions; general or specific. 

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It does help

Thanks @ArthurD. If and when this happens, we will discuss the details.

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What would be the terms and conditions?

It’s a question that i always ask.

What sort of strings are going to be attached to the funding?

There was the project that @Alberto mentioned, where we couldn’t make public, or re-use, any of the work that was done, once it was handed over to the project sponsors.

When working in the commercial sector, i have one schedule of charges for any of the Open-Source work that i do, and another for the proprietary work.

I set the different charges large enough, that most customers are happy to go with the Open-Source model. There are very few of my customers who can afford to pay me for my proprietary work.

This would change our budget projections, and for a some of my more ethically-minded colleagues, would change whether they would be interested in taking the contracts at all.

This in turn, would change the range of skill-sets that are available, which will change the project feasability projections, and the project scheduling.

This may have been discussed already, but i couldn’t find the notes for this on the website, Could you point me to where i can find this information?

If this hasn’t been discussed yet, it needs to be sorted out, before any work begins.

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Easy :slight_smile:

@Billy_Smith, everything needs to be OS. Edgeryders is way committed to the model, and besides how can you empower communities with proprietary solutions? It is illogical.

That said, I think Noemi did not have in mind a full-on rediscussion of the strategy: the proposal is already broadly framed and the framing has been agreed upon by the partners, at least for the purpose of applying to CAPSSI. I guess what she had in mind was probing the community for ongoing experiences that we could support: for example “I am helping my friend to build the control interface of is own wheelchair” or “in my condo we are running a system whereby we check on each other every so often to make sure everyone is OK”, or “I always wanted artifact/service X to help me cope with my health problems/disability, but I can’t find it on the market, can anyone help me build it?” Stuff like that.

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@Alberto: I already got that from the T&C’s that you pointed me to, and i’ve been reading up on a lot of reference material that Andrew Katz suggested i look at.

I wasn’t suggesting a re-discussion, i just wanted to know where to find the information i asked for, and what terms that the sponsors would require, if different from the terms as laid out here, /t/edgeryders-dev-testing/331/user-manual#legals

I’m sorry to ask about this again, but my experiences within the music industry has led me to be cautious about contracts,

It was also a question that i was asked this morning, and because i couldn’t give a complete answer to person asking it, i knew it was something that i needed to come back to.

I don’t know what sort of terms are usually attached to EU funding, as i’ve never applied for it before.

I can’t find the reference, but there was a post you made about one project that was handed in, maybe a year ago, where you were unable to re-use any of the work that had been done, due to the project sponsors conditions.

Are you still under NDA, or would you be able to talk about that project?

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Oh, sure

Asking makes sense. But I assure you that EU funded research is culturally very different from the music industry (and well I know it). Now the EU mandates open access publication for any science paper coming out of research it funds. As for artefacts (sotware, hardware) we can choose our own IPR policy, ad we chose to be open, consistently with the project itself.

That other project you are talking about took that stance because it was not approved for funding. The consortium (so the project’s authors, not the non-existent project sponsors), decided to keep the proposal private so that they could build on the work already sunk in it. However, had the project been approved, it would have built open source software and open knowledge. Many people feel uncomfortable working “out in the open” when a competitive process is in sight.

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Cool!  :smiley:

Thank you for clarifying that.

The EU Open Access policy is the answer i was looking for.

Now i can find the rest of the details myself. :smiley:

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Now that the licensing discussions have been clarified, we can get on to the interesting stuff.

I’ll give a shout on the London Hackspace mailing list about this. There’s a large community of people from a wide range of backgrounds,  with a wide range of skills and interest, who’ve been building all kinds of incredible things.

You can find the main website here, the wiki here,  and the “I Made A Thing” blog here.

Some of the projects can be found here, though there are also a large number of other projects that are barely documented, because they’re too busy making the next New’N’ShinyThing,

The open evening is every Tuesday, though if you’re in London on a different day, give me a shout and i’ll be happy to show you around.

I’ll also mention this to the East London Inventors Club, which meets once a month at the Knowledge Dock at the Docklands Campus of the University of East London. They’ve got some incredible minds and centuries of combined experience there. It was one of them that specifically asked me about the licensing issues. (Once burnt, twice shy.) They’re meeting this Thursday, so i’ll gauge the level of interest and get back to you all.

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Expectations management

Billy, that’s very generous, thanks! A little bit of expectation management is in order: the last think I want to do is disappoint you or the clever people in London Hackerspace and ELIC.

  1. the proposal will probably be rejected. The approval rate for H2020 proposals is around 3%. If this happens, we are thinking around some plan B, but nothing definite yet.
  2. Edgeryders does not make budgeting and executive decisions in isolation. Even if our proposal is successful, Edgeryders is only one of the consortium partner – not even the leading one, and not the one leading the prototyping phase of the project. What we can definitely do is to recommend people and projects to the consortium. 
  3. Prototyping is only one phase (of four) in the project. Noemi explained this in this comment. So, it is not the case that, were we to be successful, there would be 1.5 million EUR for prototyping care-related OSH stuff: that number would be likely 200-300K, and would need to include our own makerspace partners' staff and structure costs. I do think there could be some paid opportunities for developing a couple of cases, though.
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If we’re looking at a 97% chance of not getting this funding, then we shouldn’t worry about it.

Yes, we should still apply. If you don’t ask, you don’t get… :))

However we should be working on this with the understanding that we probably won’t get the funding from this source.

What sort of systems can we set up by ourselves?

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Some other answers

Hey Billy, so you asked me elsewhere a couple of questions, some of which Alberto already answered.

The budget we’re looking at is somewhere well below 2 million eur, which will be spread out across 2-3 yrs and according to each partner’s budget. The call advises amounts between EUR 0.5 million and EUR 2 million.

The prototyping phase is only part of the project activities, we’d also be doing a lot of community building to back up the prototype(s) based on where priorities seem to be; developing tools to aggregate and visualize critical conversations regarding dev and use of open source hardware; build a policy level evaluation of potential impact/ uptake of prototypes.

Skillsets required from people in Edgeryders who would respond to the call above: tentatively we have in mind open hardware developers or people very much immersed in such communities who could act as conveners and curators for the conversation. I think the list is open though…  Coming on board, you would then budget your own work in the proposal as per an agreement with ER the company, and as per reimbursement constraints from EU. For example if you have a physical workshop you would be using, you might want to budget for not just your time, but also for use of space, tools, materials in the workshop which would be crucial to prototyping. For this we’d need to do our homework properly to make sure we’re in compliance with regulations.

Hope it helps…

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Hey @Noemi,

When talking about technical solutions, it helps to have some form of context, as in, what are the problems that you would need us to solve?

For example,

The London Hackspace started from two people having a conversation about a broken swivel chair.

Russ: “If i had a lathe, i could fix it!”

Jonty:“Where would you keep a lathe?”

Six weeks later, they had 15-20 people meeting in a pub talking about a shared workshop.

Four months later, 30 people had a room in a community centre.

Twelve months after that, 80 people opened an industrial unit in Shoreditch.

Six months after that 100-150 people opened up the larger workshop in the unit next doorl.

Two years later, 500-600 members, and we moved to our current premises.

Two years after that 1100+ members, and a greatly expanded set of shared facilities.

With no external sponsorship. Entirely funded by membership subscriptions. Where we can do what we like, when we like. Which is usually make all kinds of wyrdness… :smiley:

None of this was originally planned. It just evolved gradually, as a set of cumulative creative responses to individual problems. Add some duct tape here, build a new shelf there, wire an extra plugboard here, “We should get a lasercutter.”,  “hey guys, i’ve found a lathe from a workshop that was closing down”, “i was given an arc welder from freecycle!”, “Imperial College want to get rid of an old 3D printer.”, “I bought a kiln at spittalfields market for £50! :D”, “We need a cutting table for dress-making”, “We need somewhere to put our tools. There’s an Ikea bed in a skip outside, we’ll use the frame to make it.”, and when other people could see how easy it was, they were inspired to start their own spaces in other towns and cities.

By sharing expenses, we could afford bigger and shinier toys and tools. By sharing our skills and experience, we learned from each other, so all our skills improved.

And it was fun.

It’s still growing, and changing. We’re still making things.

And we’re still having fun. :smiley:

So what problem do you need to solve…?

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Empowering people to takeover control of own social/ health care

Oh, so inspiring, thanks for sharing.

The major problem is providing for ourselves and our well being in life after government support, budgetary cuts, increasing unemployment rates, discredited pension funds, to mention a few. And not depending on unaffordable solutions, or solutions that compromise our privacy (IoT). This means figuring out cheap, non-proprietary solutions to support active ageing, or prevention oriented healthcare, or DIY 3d printed care devices…  You see, these can be both technical and social solutions. Looking for past  discussions we’ve been having, you might want to check the writeup after last year’s LOTE. For me personally these are buzz words, but others in the team have 1st hand experience with these.

Now, after breaking this down into several specific problems each with a conversation of its own, we could find out that one is deemed more relevant or urgent and that’s where we would base a solution.

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This sort of situation is why i’m working on OSHW Infrastructure. “The tools to make the tools to make the things we need…”

So that people can make and maintain them for themselves, and don’t have to rely on the proprietary industrial supply toolchains. Having the capability to make the means of production to make the means of survival.

Come with a specific set of problems, and we’ll be able to desgin and build the tools to solve the problems.

Because we’ve got access to the hackspace, and other workshops, we have the capability to work almost any material you can think of. There are a few that we don’t have the capability to work, but those are mostly toxic chemicals that we wouldn’t want to use anyway… :))

For example, one member of the hackspace is currently trying to build a water-filter for her boat. Sure, she could just buy an off-the-shelf product, but then she’d be tied back into the unsustainable industrial supply chain, which would miss the point of why she bought the boat in the first place.

Another example, there are two people who are working on designing and building CNC systems, and robotic systems. While they’re doing this for fun, it’s an easy stretch to expand this into the automated manufacturing of medicines, which would work around one of the resilience problems that Vinay pointed out for the Canary Islands.

So, to repeat the question, what specific problems are you trying to solve?

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i just realised that there were two points i’d forgotten to make.

If a solution exists in the commercial environment, it’s a problem for which the solution already exists. The hard part has already been done.

If it’s not under patent, then we can make the tools, to make an equivalent quality of solution, but we can do it for a lower price.

Because we’re empowering people to make these things for themselves, they don’t have to cover the profit margin that the commercial solutions require. As long as they are making these things for their own use, they won’t have to cover the insurance costs or the liability costs, and they’ll end up removing nearly 30% of the costs of the commercial solutions.

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Specifics are yet to come

No specifics yet, Billy. The question is generic: there is an emerging approach to care (health/social/active aging related) that I call “care by artifacts”. An elderly person, for example, can be fitted with accelerometers, location and motion sensors so that, if she falls in the shower, some control center will receive an alert. Business is embracing the Internet of Things in this area.

Problems:

  1. you end up "running Windows in your body" – proprietary software controls the care you receive. And since you don't know (and can't know) how it works, you probably don't want to be entrusting it your physical and mental well-being.
  2. business models in IoT-powered care point towards chronicization. If you heal, or become autonomous, you stop paying the provider. This is bad for business and can't be allowed. So, the proprietary IoT in care points towards a world in which you have to pay to be well.

Solution (?):

Move from “care by artifacts” to “care by skilled communities”. When artifacts are needed, they will be produced and maintained: the community has a large enough knowledge pool that “it can work on almost anything”, as you say. For this to work, all soft and hard artifacts are to be open.

Our idea is that this approach will be discussed, and some specific problems will be selected. At this point, we will prototype solutions to the specific problems. But this does not happen until we have had a chance to have that conversation.

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> No specifics yet, Billy.

> No specifics yet, Billy. The question is generic

Ok, but the earlier we know what we’re going to do, the sooner we can start on fixing things.

@hexayurt pointed his audience to an article in The Guardian, where you had an island community that had very strong social cohesion, which was one of the primary factors in the long life expectancy of the inhabitants. You can’t build that with an IoT device.

In the UK, part of the problem is that the approach of using “Free Market” solutions for this cannot provide an equitable system for everybody. Because companies are legally required to make a profit for their share-holders, they are forced cherry-pick their market segments accordingly.

This is not a problem when you’re making and selling mobile phones or laptops. Market segmentation is an entirely appropriate strategy to maximising profit, as your customers aren’t forced to use your products.

It’s a problem when you’re fulfilling service sector contracts. Because the tendering process has been set up, so that there are different geographical regions covered by tenders. The for-profit companies are legally required to cherry-pick the best contracts, and turn down the most expensive. This leads to the situations that you can find in Cambridge right now.

We need provide a long-term infrastructure that’s going to be fair for everyone.

This is a social problem. You cannot solve a social problem with a technical solution.

A simple social solution that would work, would be the formation of health co-operatives, where the service users were the primary share-holders, and the profit they received would be healthier, longer and happier lives.

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Project space open

Hi @Billy_Smith & others, just to let you know we submitted a proposal that our small company ended up leading because our initial lead partner withdrew. It took roughly a month of hard work and rallying resources, filling in several templates and ending up with a 70 page proposal.

In light of the discussion above, we have made sure there will be small pockets of money around to support existing community initiatives, aside from the project’s main prototypes -which will be emergent, as explained above (driven by WeMake makerspace in Milano).

The name and project group is OpenCare, you are most welcome to join, especially since we’ll need to re-think opportunities if this one doesn’t succeed. To add yourself to the group follow these instructions.