Managing the lifecycle of IEEE´s Humanitarian Technology with peer-review

The objective of this paper is to describe a Product Lifecycle Management process for IEEE´s Humanitarian Technology (HT) “Solutions” that leverages IEEE´s peer-review. In 2011, the Humanitarian Initiatives Committee (HIC) of IEEE Region 7 organized a student design competition [1] with the specific objective of understanding the design process of HT “Solutions” to be made available as open source. The 2011 competition was an initial effort to understand open source licensing, open source hardware and the open source development model. Adoption of the open source development model was a stated objective of IEEE´s Humanitarian technology Challenge (HTC) [2]. The HIC held a student paper competition in 2013. The goal of the 2013 competition was to nurture the growing interest in Humanitarian Technology in Region 7; to address HIC´s concerns from the 2011 competition, more effort was focused in the paper review process for the 2013 competition and standard IEEE peer-review tools and processes were used. This document presents in Section III the lessons learned during these two competitions, and proposes in section IV a Product Lifecycle Management framework for the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of OSI development that leverages IEEE´s peer-review process.