– Robert L. Read
Today, Public Invention was awarded a $291,848 grant from the National Science Foundation to scope an Open-Source Ecosystem for Distributed Quality Management. The goal of this grant is to build an ecosystem of open-source players that will function on the basis of “trust through transparency”. This standardized transparency will allow distributed manufacturing to quickly provide safe and necessary goods to users facing armed conflict, economic upheaval, or natural disasters. In the future, we want emergency and medical supplies to be available even when traditional supply chains fail. Modern 3D printing and computer-aided manufacturing make this possible; all we are lacking is a system of quality transparency, which is absolutely essential for safety and user confidence. We are honored to receive this prestigious grant.
This transparent ecosystem model was not my idea. If any one person deserves credit for it, it is Victoria Jaqua, a Public Invention board member and my Co-PI on this grant. Nonetheless, as the named Principle Investigator, I feel a heavy responsibility to use taxpayers’ money wisely. I take this very seriously. Much of my time for the next year (summer 2026 to summer 2027) will be spent driving this mission to success.
Public Invention will take 15% of this grant(some is excluded) as a de minimus administrative fee, which amounts to $37,500. The rest is carefully earmarked and budgeted, and can not be used for general purposes. This grant will increase our impact, but hardly impacts our general financial position.
Public Invention has pioneered the hybrid approach of using volunteers to create open-source public inventions and humanitarian engineering projects. We have shown, or perhaps learned, that we can make progress without regular funding—but we progress much faster with financial support. We provide a fantastic return-on-investment to any donor who measures success in terms of intellectual impact per dollar. I doubt any university can match us–in part because I receive no compensation from Public Invention, and am, in fact, a donor.
Nonetheless, fundraising is hard for us because we do not fit the traditional molds. We are not a university, but we do research and publish peer-reviewed papers. We strive for impact, but it is largely indirect through our inventions rather than a direct distribution of money or services. We give young people opportunities to join a technical team, and sometimes provide them with their first paid technical job. Nevertheless, we are not an educational organization.
We need some forward-thinking donors to give us a million dollars for the next three years. This would approximately triple our current, tenuous revenue. It would allow us to:
- Pay more of our unpaid volunteers, increasing the number of hours we work on public inventions and the speed with which we complete projects.
- Bring global volunteer teams together through travel more often, improving morale.
- Undertake larger projects, such as improving and commercializing the PolyVent emergency ventilator and implementing the LibreCorder point-of-care AI diagnostic system.
Despite the fact that it is more fun to start new projects, “Persistence is a Superpower”. We are currently working on about 14 projects, and our goal is to finish several of them in 2026. Some of our project-specific goals include:
- Completing the Moonrat portable incubator paper, which is in the review process.
- Drafting and submitting the Krake general purpose alarm paper.
- Finishing the EcoPot cooking pot computational fluid dynamics research and testing it over actual wooden fires, as well as drafting and submitting the paper to Design.
- Tripling the performance of the ferrofluid pump.
- Working on the FLOSCOM gap-analysis project to commercialize one of our four free-libre open source projects.
As of July 2026, we have about 40 active volunteers. Our goal for the summer of 2027 is to have 60. Specifically, we are recruiting Invention Coaches who can lead projects.
Public Invention is trying to pave the way for a new century in which altruistic invention and humanitarian engineering is a third pillar joining academic research and for-profit tech firms. Whether this is possible remains in doubt. We need donors in order to find out.