Is OHM for you?

OHM is useful to different people for genuinely different reasons — not variations on one reason. Find yourself below.

Whoever you are, the first step is the same and costs nothing: look for your workshop on the map. Several thousand spaces are already there, drawn from directories that already existed. There's a reasonable chance you're one of them.

University labs and FabLabs

The strongest fit today.

Universities and their fab labs produce an enormous amount of open hardware that effectively disappears. A project is built, documented on a course page or a lab wiki, and then becomes unfindable to the lab next door, let alone to a partner institution three countries away.

OHM gives that output a single discoverable form. It can read existing projects from where they already live, so backfilling a back catalogue doesn't mean re-documenting years of work by hand. And because OHM is open-source software you can run yourself, a consortium can operate its own instances and share between them without anything passing through a third party.

There's a smaller, more everyday benefit too. When a student needs a machine that their own lab's is broken or busy or the wrong size, finding another one that fits — inside a group of institutions that already trust each other — is currently near-impossible. It shouldn't be.

Community workshops and makerspaces

Three things, in rough order of how soon they matter.

Being findable in your region. People near you are looking for the things you can make, and mostly they have no way to discover you.

Mutual aid, when it's needed. You don't have to be a disaster-response organisation for this to apply. In a crisis, the constraint is rarely willingness — it's knowing who can make what, where, quickly. That network can't be built during the emergency. Being findable in ordinary times is the preparation.

Describing yourself once, usefully. Most spaces already publish something about their equipment somewhere. OHM's value depends on that description being good — and being good takes your time, which is a real cost. We know that. It's our job to make it worth it, not yours to do us a favour.

Organisations that need to run their own

If you work somewhere that cannot put its data on someone else's infrastructure — a public institution, a research body, an NGO with a duty of care to the people in its records — this is for you.

OHM is designed to be self-hosted. You run it, in your jurisdiction, under your control, and connect it to whichever other instances you choose and none that you don't. The version we host is a convenience for people who don't want to run software. It is not the product, and it is not a hub that anything has to pass through.

See federation and sovereignty for what that means in practice.

Designers and engineers

If you've published an open hardware design, or are about to, OHM is how someone who isn't you can find out that they could build it.

That is closer to the point of open hardware than it might sound. A design only its author can manufacture is open in licence and closed in practice.

Commercial manufacturers

Honestly: not yet.

If you're a prototyping shop or a small manufacturer whose interest is commercial work, OHM doesn't currently offer you enough. There's no order flow, no quoting, no payment. You'd be listing your capabilities into a network that isn't yet sending you business.

We'd rather say that plainly than have you find out in a fortnight. The pieces that would change it are real and planned — see what's built and what isn't — and if it's the kind of thing you'd want to be told about when it arrives, get in touch.

Still not sure?

Read what OHM is not. It's often faster to rule something out than to rule it in.