Peter Semmelhack, founder of BugLabs, spoke about his company's goal to make hardware as malleable as software, freeing people to create the devices that meet their needs and improve quality of life.

While the Open Source movement has enabled rapid progress in the field of software in recent years, hardware innovation lags behind. The way that hardware products come to market is time consuming and expensive for all.  A number of factors mean that only big multinational players tend to be able to survive in this space:

• Research and development and distribution of mass market products is an extremely expensive process
• The upfront investment required to develop a new product is very high: typically it takes one year and a million dollars to produce just one prototype
• To get a high enough price point you have to produce at a very large scale
• Average returns tend to diminish significantly after about two years

However, there are big opportunities outside of mass market products, Peter argues. In the areas of healthcare and energy management, for example, there are niche markets for products with very specific uses. If an efficient platform could be used to develop these niche products, there are potentially as many gains in the ‘long tail' of the electronics market as in the mass market products such as DVD players and mobile phones.

Bug Labs provides an open source, modular system for hardware that enables businesses and individuals to innovate in a way that is affordable. Bugmodules, which include GPS, 3G, speakers and motion sensors, are designed to be clicked together to build new products with unique combinations of functionality. This approach frees individuals to start creating the specific gadgets they need in a low cost, efficient way.  Users can then add to their device any number of online applications created and shared by the BUG Community.

The BUG system can also be used to create products with specific social uses. For example, BUG4good is a handheld device designed to enable human rights workers to capture material (video, photograph etc) in such a way that it can be used as official evidence in the courts in Geneva. With total demand of just a few hundred units, this is not a market a large technology company would be likely to serve.

Jonathan Zittrain is a Visiting Professor at the Stanford School of Law. In his presentation he raised a number of concerns about current trends in online behavior. He suggested that these developments may undermine the practice of ‘civic technologies’, where unconnected individuals voluntarily come together to achieve something they could not do individually. 

The web is now full of opportunities to engage in tasks that somehow benefit a company or organization. At the most skilled end of the spectrum, there are sites such as Innocentive, a market place that organizations use to post specific problems they need solved; anyone can respond with their solution to win a cash prize. Then there are companies like LiveOps which draw their entire workforce from internet users who engage in call-centre tasks from home. There are also unskilled tasks available in exchange for extremely small amounts of pay; for example, Mechanical Turk gets workers to complete Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) such as labeling photos. ESP Game offers no pay at all but gets users to participate in its goal to label web images by turning this into a competitive game. Then there are activities we might not even realize could be beneficial to someone else – for example, creating hyperlinks in material you put online helps search engines to rank pages effectively.

Jonathan posited two kinds of concerns about these activities. Relating to participants themselves he is concerned about:

• Alienation: participants do not get to see the outcome of their work, but view a tiny part of the whole
• Moral valence: participants often have no idea who is hiring them and for what purpose
• Misappropriation: participants have no say in how their work is used
• Lack of rights: there is no protection for online workers – an individual can get laid off from LiveOps at any time, regardless of their time investment

He also set out some systemic concerns:

• Given the conditions of moral valence and misappropriation, the door is open for online users to be complicit in totalitarian government efforts to use the net to monitor and suppress (imagine Mechanical Turk being used to match protestor photos with citizen databases)
• There is likely to be a ‘race to the bottom’ – companies wanting to get tasks done in this way will operate wherever regulation protecting ‘workers’ is most lax
• Monetization of online tasks could mean the crowding out of voluntary contributions to the internet. Would so many people have freely devoted time to Wikipedia had there been a rival site offering pay for each entry?

Jonathan acknowledged that these are tough issues to address, but suggested a number of responses including: finding ways to apply labor standards so that those who invest a lot of time working on something like LiveOps have some protection; allowing workers to take their experience with them, so that it counts elsewhere if they get laid off; forcing companies to disclose the intended outcome of the overall task to enable users to make more informed decisions about how they use their time.