Comparison of Rep Rap and Davinci OSD Repositories: Is any Influence from Academic Origin?

Abstract

The open source design (OSD) is an autonomous community dedicated to design new hardware products, peer-to-peer, with collaborative design and intellectual property copyleft, using web platforms to share projects. The research about these platforms indicates absence of important configuration management features as versioning, headlines and coding. One possible explanation for such finding is that these products are developed by non-designers. This argument was investigated comparing projects from two OSD communities, on the same theme, but with different origins. The hypothesis is that academically-influenced communities present better design management practices for repositories than others created by non-specialists. The hypothesis was not verified and the results show that there is no difference in the proportion of BO types or level of detail. However, it was identified five distinct characteristics: those of academic origin the communication is better detailed, the purpose is associated with methodological support, the structure of information promotes redundancy, the target-audience is the technicians and the success of project is associated with the number of interactions.