1. Organize a network of researchers and other interested community members with regular meetings. 2. Create a common research agenda, prioritizing topics that are relevant to the 2025 goal and those that support and grow the community. This agenda should be reviewed and updated regularly with input from the OScH community. 3. Publish research findings in OScH community forums and venues, such as the GOSH forum, the Journal of Open Hardware (JOH), conference proceedings, repositories, and community blogs.

1. Encourage use of OScH in publicly-funded institutions. Key strategies include: 1) promoting procurement policies that favor OScH, including use of institutional equipment funds; 2) providing targeted evidence of the benefits of OScH to institutional leaders; 3) recruiting knowledge transfer professionals with greater experience of OScH to provide briefing sessions for colleagues and fellow professionals. 2. Develop campaigns that turn the need for OScH into an issue that cannot be ignored by decision makers. Tactics include: 1) producing campaigns in partnership with civil society organizations tackling specific problems through the use of OscH or with student groups whose education is affected by lack of access to science hardware; 2) partnering with allies in influential leadership positions; 3) sharing advocacy materials based on the example of effective campaigns for Free and Open Source Software. 3. Collaborate on a global open hardware platform to address significant challenges e.g., infrastructure assessment pre- and post-disasters or environmental monitoring for major pollutants. The process and outcomes should be evaluated to demonstrate impact and benefits, as part of ongoing research into OScH (see Learn).

1. Support the development of OScH distributor networks. Enable a network of distributors to increase the mainstream supply and availability to diverse users, while mutually benefitting a wide range of producers and users. This can collectively drive down the resource costs of launching OScH projects and products. 2. Identify or develop resource sharing best practices for scaling up and contextualizing manufacturing and distribution via decentralized routes.

1. Organize and promote online forums and face-to-face activities. Global events, such as GOSH, can encourage international collaborations and enable wide dissemination of OScH. Local and regional events would help overcome language barriers, cost of travel for people who have difficulty securing funds, and cultural differences, thereby enabling development of more context-relevant design and use of hardware. All such activities should be welcoming spaces, particularly for those from underrepresented groups, by respecting diversity and ensuring accessibility through proactive facilitation, implementation of codes of conduct, and translation to non-English languages. 2. Design and implement mentorship programs bringing together mentors and mentees with diverse backgrounds. These programs will help disseminate OScH values and principles, and promote skills exchanges that recognize the reciprocal learning that happens between ‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs’ on a given topic. 3. Develop Open Educational Resources, localizing them where necessary. These resources should cover i) the fundamentals of OScH in the context of open science practices; and ii) practical development and use of OScH. Educational activities should be informed by contextualized evaluation methods wherever possible. 4. Support outreach activities aimed at broader audiences. For example, promoting the visibility of OScH in mass media and social platforms, along with other Open Hardware outlets and networks such as Arduino, Instructables, Hackaday, and PLOS. These activities should emphasize the diversity of the OScH community, while avoiding the usual stereotypes associated with science, scientists, and scientific equipment.

1. Convene and collaborate with community members, researchers, businesses, and lawyers to improve Open Hardware licensing and contracting strategies for OScH. 2. Create templates for contracts (following the examples of the “ContractPatch” project from the Software Freedom Conservancy), to help people make informed decisions about contracts and open licenses for their projects and products.

1. Build a common pool of open data on OScH projects to support the design of metrics based on concrete challenges and solutions across cases. 2. Create contextualized metrics for assessing the impact of OScH projects and promote their adoption by funders. 3. Engage researchers in Science and Technology Studies10 (STS) who can contribute empirical studies of socio-technical contexts for OScH design and development.

1. Prepare and disseminate OScH documentation “best practices.” 2. Build a shared publication framework for OScH documentation. 3. Support the development of Free and Open Source tools for hardware design to allow OScH design files to be shared and edited by anyone. 4. Create guidelines for testing, calibration, and validation of OScH with respect to existing standards, sharing testing rigs with assembly instructions whenever possible. 5. Provide training sessions and workshops to support current OScH projects. Online groups could also be identified or created to seek and provide feedback to OScH developers. 6. Identify and encourage the development of modular software and hardware components, libraries and resources that make it easier for non-experts to build, assess and contribute to OScH projects.

1. Draft a comprehensive guide for public and philanthropic funders on supporting OScH development and related activities, with the goal that by 2025 funders should preferentially fund open projects and require a well-justified case for exceptions. This guide should be periodically updated with information indicating progress toward specific benchmarks, focusing on equitable projects with concrete impacts on research quality, cost, and societal impact. 2. Identify investment partners and funders who already recognize the value of Open Source technologies and seek advice on how to influence their peer funding agencies to support OScH projects. The case for support may be stronger with funders focused on global challenges and development goals such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) due to the potential social impact of OScH and the values of equity and justice that drive the GOSH community. 3. Produce a guide to existing and potential funding models. This would involve identifying and creating a network of investment partners, including incubators, accelerators, and recommended production partners.

Institutional policies should by default support and proactively incentivize OScH development and use by: 1. Providing appropriate support for OScH translation and commercialization through technology transfer offices. Specifically, this should include adoption of Open Hardware licenses and agreements such as TAPR OHL, CERN OHL, Solderpad license, and the Open Material Transfer Agreement (OpenMTA). 2. Ensuring that OScH is part of Open Science conversations. These already address the issue of academic credit for sharing research outputs at multiple levels, from academic promotion boards to national and international funder policies. 3. Offering direct support for OScH development through shared facilities such as hackerspaces, maker spaces and Fab Labs combined with professional engineering and technical support.