
DDMP aims at promoting and improving the connection of makers and designers with the market (Maker to Market) through the development and recognition of an emerging European Maker and Design culture. This is done by supporting makers, their mobility and circulation of their work, providing them with international opportunities and highlighting the most outstanding talent. And a way for highlighting creative talent is also with a quality label: a visual recognition that both certifies and promotes projects and their authors.
Within DDMP, the goal of the European Makers Quality Label is to become a Europe-wide quality label that certifies and promote the work of talented makers and designers in the Distributed Design movement. In order to reach this goal, the DDMP project is working on designing the label, on formulating its criteria for selection, application and awarding and on setting up its management.
Brands have always been important for open source projects, and there have been even two projects of quality labels. The Open Hardware and Design Alliance (OHANDA) was a project that aimed at encouraging the sharing of open hardware and designs with a free online service where creators of Open Hardware and Open Design projects could register their products and obtain a common label, similar to a non-registered trademark and based on the four freedoms of Free Software. A similar but more structured and still active initiative was established later by the Open Source Hardware Association, the Open Source Hardware Association Certification, a self-certification process that gives authors the right to use the Open Source Hardware Certification logo on any open source hardware product.
What could the European Makers Quality Label be? As a starting point, a label can certify, protect and promote a product or a service. So it could be applied to:
Then, we should discuss how it is awarded:
Trademarks, can also be:
Then, in legal terms, for a quality label like this, we have three main options for the European Makers Quality Label:
What will be the European Makers Quality Label then? During the first year of DDMP we explored the legal and governance aspects of such labels, and we are now working on: