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---
layout: default
title: Public Invention
---
# A Personal Invitation
The creation of new technology is not the only or dominant way to help our fellow-beings. Love is more important than lasers, and kindness more important than computers. Still, many of us are better suited to serve humanity in code than in a sermon, or holding a test tube rather than the hand of the dying.
If you are one of those persons, I invite you to participate with me in a project I call Public Invention (PubInv). Throughout 2015, and now 2016, we hope to run a number of projects best described as “inventions” that will be valuable to humanity. This is not particularly original. This is yet another project in the exponentially growing tradition of working for the public good.
What we do hope to do is use some modern principles:
* We will be completely transparent and open from the first.
* Everything we produce will be shared to everyone without exception.
* We will organize our work using an Agile methodology, whether our work is software, hardware, research, or education.
In other words, this will be an free-libre open-source project that welcomes participation from the public and seeks to organize work so that the work so that as many hands can pitch in as possible, and so that as many voices can contribute as possible.
There have always been public inventors who have worked in the public interest. Benjamin Franklin and Buckminster Fuller are perhaps the best examples. The Curies and Jonas Salk forewent patents in order to make their research freely usable by all. The patent system has provided valuable incentive over the last 200 years to inventors, but it now seems largely obsolete in a rapidly moving world of ever-increasing abundance.
The Free Software movement has blazed a trail that we hope to follow with hardware inventions. Every year the Free Software movement, of which Wikipedia is perhaps an outstanding offshoot, add billions of dollars worth of value to the economic well-being of everyone. Sadly our economomists have not caught up to this fact, and becuase much of this work does not require money to change hands it is not treated as expanding the Gross (Domestic/World) Product.
If you are willing to forgo the siren song of intelletual property and have the mental strength to contribute to inventions directly for the benefit of all humannity, I invite you to contact me.
You may wish to examine our project [concepts](https://github.com/PubInv/PubInv/tree/master/ideas) to see if any appeal to you.
-- Robert L. Read, PhD
# Accomplishments So Far
* [The Gluss Project](http://pubinv.github.io/gluss/) has [demonstrated](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T8XSMhwKUE) a very novel unconventional robot.
<iframe width="280" height="162" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1T8XSMhwKUE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
* The [Gluss Pusher project](https://github.com/PubInv/Gluss-Pusher/tree/master) is developing an inexpensive prototype linear actuator for building large, highly scalable robots.
* We have published a legitimiate novel invention: [The Turret Joint](https://github.com/PubInv/turret-joint) which is essential to the construciton of Gluss robots.
* We've created and published [CoilChoice](http://pifah.github.io/CoilChoice/), and interactive tool for desiging electromagnetic coils.
* This project later took 4th place on the Women in Technology Institute (WITI) Virtual Hackathon.
* A team formed at the Austin Hack for Change Civic Hackathon won "Most Hacked Forward" superlative with [ATX Preemie Warmer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb-F0qTptJs&list=PL9nAioXQFlE59Aalkz2NbcodxL4__Su7y).
* An educational [double pendulum simulation](https://pubinv.github.io/chaos-pendulum/) has been created,
as part of an unsolicited proposal to Montshire Science Museum for a physical exhibit.
If any knows of a better double-pendulum simulation, please let me know.
# How to Contribute
We welcome your participation. You are welcome to email me <[email protected]>.
However, as a public project, it is even better for you to comment publicly.
You can do this by opening an ("issue")[https://github.com/PubInv/PubInv/issues] here at GitHub. If you want to add to or improve one of the existing documents, you can do this with a "pull request".
You may wish to subscribe to our <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T8XSMhwKUE">YouTube Channel</a>. Since we are bound neither by the need to keep something secret due to patent restrictions imposed by Universities, nor by the formality of Academic publishing, nor by the need to maintain trade secrets, we publish informally a lot at YouTube.
At the momement, we have a **desperate need for someone who can sketch** (like with a pencil) to do some simple art for our most active project, [The Gluss Project](http://pubinv.github.io/gluss/).
I am a computer scientist. I greatly admire artists but don't pretend that I can create art. We will always have a need for artists, writers, and educators.
We will also need chemists, welders, mechanical engineers, 3D modellers, software engineers, physicists, biologists, mycologists---we exclude no field of endeavor.
In summary, you can contribute by:
* Offering to improve our art or wrting or videos,
* Suggesting a new project,
* Working on a story,
* Offering to lead a project,
* Teaching us something new, or
* Even suggesting non-PubInv proejcts that we should contribute to.
If you are not familiar with GitHub or git, please email me to give you assistance.
# A Warning
Some of the projects proposed here involve dangerous chemicals, powerful forces, fire, explosive gases, and biological hazards.
Humanity an not advance without experiementation that involves some risk. The important thing is to remain safe
at all times and not to proceed with an experiment until you have proper safety equipment and training. In particular,
although we encourage young people to participate in Public Invention, they should not participate without adult supervision.
We will attempt to discuss safety precautions within each project. However, because this is a distributed project
and each participant may be creating their own experiments and machines, it will not be possible for us to
provide safety guidance in all cases. Please proceed carefully at your own risk.