OSHW Priority list

[HLA-27b]

Woohoo a brand new OHSW section! Thanks Dave!

And here is the first question to stir up the things a bit:

What are the most urgently needed open source projects in your opinion? If we were to make a priority list, what should go on top?
What open source thing would be most beneficial to humanity?

This is an electronics forum but there is no reason we should limit ourselves to it imho.

[firewalker]

Medicine formulas.

Alexander.

[Rerouter]

perhaps start with posting links to where you can find the OSHW logo for various cad packages

other than that, perhaps a dna analyser, and high channel eeg, both of those i believe are considerably expensive in the medical world, and slow down there progress a little,

for the industrial world, a HART to usb communicator would help out a whole mess of technitions rather than forking out close to 1 grand per modem, possibly even adding in other standard signals and communication protocols, ....

thats all i can think of off the top of my head, and these things may already have designs, and large parts of them do come down to software :/

[HLA-27b]

Medical equipment and medicines were the first things I thought of too.

My understanding is that medical research is one of the most profitable and therefore best financed fields of research ever. Also it is besieged with patent thicket. There is a way to do it however, if the community organizes a big champaign to raise money and then use this money to finance research with the condition that all findings would be open sourced....  In other words a scientific lab financed by the community in a kickstarter sort of fashion?