Lots of news...

[Robert Read]

Dear Team,

A lot has happened since I last wrote. I have written a very condensed 12-page annual report:

https://www.pubinv.org/wp-content/uploads/Annual-Report.pdf

I really think you will enjoy reading the annual report; it has pictures and talks a lot about what we have been doing.  Some of this was discussed at our (first) annual Public Invention Confernce on Jan. 9th, which was attended by 60 people, and is now available at Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp_hsAEumq4&list=PL9nAioXQFlE7nIMLXCdgPBDKsJ8nt8gRi

We broke the talks up into individual talks (about 5 minutes each) with titles, so you can easily find what interests you.

In other important news:

1. PolyVent, an international pandemic ventilator project, has joined Public Invention. We are in the process of on-boarding them, with proper free-libre open source licensing of their designs. This means Public Invention is now building every part of a complete respiration support eco-system.
2. Ben Coombs has ordered boards and cases for the VentMon  T0.4, which should be fully assembled and tested by March 1. We will continue to give these away free-of-charge to open source teams, and 3 such teams have requested them. We are making 15 units, and this design is much more professional and compact that the previous design.
3. I am now a provisional board member of Helpful Engineering, strengthening our ties to the entire humanitarian engineering community. Victoria Jaqua, form Open Source Medical Supplies, is on or board, completing an additional connection, and I recently spoke at COSMIC, another organization.

I wrote and published an essay at Hacker Noon:

https://hackernoon.com/humanitarian-engineering-the-open-source-pandemic-response-r93g3349

Which explains the whole landscape as I see it.

Upcoming, Public Invention is going to do several things:

• Continue to grow by recruiting more Invention Coaches and projects,
• Construct a complete open-source respiration medical device eco-system of composable components.
• Apply for a grant to support this work.

Just a note: anyone is free to start a conversation in this list, which has 54 members, as long as it is something related to Public Invention!