Hi All
A message from the Wevolver team that might be of interest to you.
Jenny
I’m reaching out to share that we have launched Welder.app, an open source spin-off of our repository and version control system for sharing and collaborating on hardware projects.
TLDR; below I’m sharing why, how, and what we launched. Secondly, I’m asking how you or someone you know could use Welder, or support it’s open source development.
Richard
Why we spin-off and open source our collaboration platform?
We launched Wevolver in 2014, focused on supporting the upcoming open source hardware movement with a platform to share and collaborate on projects.
The platform that we created was acknowledged with several awards, including the SXSW Innovation Award and the Accenture Innovation Award, and was listed by Fast Company in the Top 20 Most Innovative Web Platforms among giants like Facebook, Slack, and IBM Watson. Most importantly Wevolver was able to host a number of impactful and hugely inspiring open source projects, including Ultrascope, Hackberry, and OpenROV.
Over time Wevolver increasingly became used as a knowledge base instead of a repository & collaboration environment.
We also learned that building a sustainable business that monetized private companies for using the platform was hugely challenging without compromising on the value we’d bring to the open source community.
This left us with two goals:
- Continue to expand the value we provide to hardware developers seeking the knowledge they need to innovate.
- Fulfill the needs of the open source hardware community, and ensure the technology we developed remains available.
Therefore Wevolver has spun off the repository & version management platform and re-launched it as Welder.
The Plan:
Support Welder’s further development and usage as an open source project.
A big part of our code is already open source. There is a proprietary 3rd party text editor that we use through-out the platform that we need to swap before we can open source the whole code.
We could use help to make this a success:
We’re a small team, with not much band-with. The success of Welder depends on the open source hardware community continuing its development.
In its current state Welder is a strong foundation. It’s build upon Git as a technology for its revision management, thus able to natively support all practices and features that (open source) software developers use. At same time the interface we developed on top of it hugely lowers the learning curve that so often holds back hardware developers from adopting git.
It’s up to my knowledge the most promising approach to fully support decentralized collaborative open hardware development. Other solutions that I’m aware of do mimic either the interface, terminology, or workflow that platforms like Github established for hardware development have established, but do not actually leverage the underlying powerful technology of Git and Git-LFS those software platforms are based upon.
My Ask:
- How could you (or someone you know contribute) to Welder (On software development, design, content, product roadmap, dissemination)?
- How could you or someone you know use Welder?
- What are your thoughts, ideas, suggestions that we should know!?