Design Break
URL = http://www.designbreak.org/
"Designbreak is a new Open Design organization – a nonprofit organization with an elegant development interface including a system for displaying CAD files in context. Designbreak purports to actively seek out or fund the manufacture of designs that have an application for the social good. Users may apply for both open design and research grants under this organization; paid employment is available where appropriate to leaders of funded projects." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_design)
Description
" Designbreak is an organization dedicated to bringing the open source movement beyond the scope of computer programming to become a major player in market capitalism. The movements commonly referred to as the open science movement and the open design movement have barely begun to take shape, and designbreak is dedicated to becoming a focal point for these burgeoning forces of change. Our goals include using science and engineering to help alleviate environmental degradation, increase access to medicines for the poor, and raise the standard of living in developing nations.
The concept of designbreak is similar to that of existing open source projects: to create an organization that can organize and network scientists and engineers in order to solve global problems. Designbreak is a point of collaboration for designers and researchers, an advocacy group for the implementation of open design projects. Design break projects can be academic or technological in an attempt to challenge these problems. Many of our projects will be competitive alternate versions of existing commercial products designed with regard our goals. Design break will represent all commercial projects created here in an attempt to get them to into market.
Either big industry will use our better, free designs to create superior products or entrepreneurs will pick them up and market forces will do the rest. Additionally designbreak is planning an interdisciplinary peer reviewed journal for research and inventions created under the auspices of designbreak. In this way money will no longer be the only mediating factor in markets; moral precepts such as environmentalism, desire for equality and workers rights will take on greater importance, allowing capitalism to blossom as a reflection of our society, not perverting its guiding principles." (http://www.designbreak.org/)