What is OHM?
This problem is already solved. Just not for us.
Inside a closed supply chain, one company owns the designs, the file formats, and the system of record. Ask it who can build part 47-B and it answers instantly, because every part and every supplier lives in one system that one organisation controls.
Open hardware has no owner and no shared format. The designs are scattered across repositories, wikis, forums, and PDFs, described however their author felt like describing them. The workshops that could build them are scattered too. So the most basic question in the field — who can make this? — has gone largely unanswered for years.
Open Hardware Manager is an attempt to answer it.
What it actually does
OHM keeps structured records of two things: open hardware designs, and real production facilities — makerspaces, fab labs, university workshops, small manufacturers. It works out which of those facilities can build a given design, and hands you what you need to go and ask them.
That's it. OHM is a way of finding out who can make the thing. It is not a marketplace, a shop, or a broker: the conversation that follows happens directly between you and the workshop.
A real example
Take the High-Clearance Face Shield, a design published on the NIH 3D Print Exchange during the COVID-19 pandemic — a face shield with enough frontal clearance to be worn over dental loupes.
It is in OHM's catalogue. Ask OHM who can build it, anywhere, and the answer is unhelpfully large: thousands of workshops, because the design needs 3D printing and a great many places have a 3D printer.
Ask a better question — who can build it in France? — and OHM returns more than 250 named workshops: GraouLab, SimplonLab, Villette Makerz, Humanlab, and hundreds more, each one a real place with a real address that a person could contact today.
That second question is the one worth asking, and before OHM there was no practical way to ask it.
What this is for
Three things follow from being able to ask that question.
Anyone can produce open hardware. A design that only its author can manufacture is not really open. Knowing who else can build it is what makes the licence mean something in practice.
Mutual aid becomes possible under pressure. In a crisis you cannot build this network — there is no time to find workshops, agree formats, and establish trust while people are waiting. The network has to already exist. Everyday use is what makes it exist.
Nobody has to depend on us. OHM is open-source software you can run yourself, on your own infrastructure, in your own jurisdiction, connected to whichever other instances you choose. The version hosted at openhardwaremanager.org is a convenience, not the product.
Where to go next
- The problem — why open hardware in particular has resisted this for so long, and what has to happen before any of it works
- How it works — the moving parts, in plain terms
- Is OHM for you? — what it offers a university lab, a community workshop, or an organisation that needs to run its own
- What's built and what isn't — an honest, automatically generated account of what works today