Mission
Deep Phase Labs is an association that facilitates the technology projects of its fellows
Motivation
Career engineers like us typically have day jobs that are challenging and stimulating. However, the work is often channeled into narrow intellectual specialties. Our interests are broader and our energy greater than our employers can offer or consume. So we pursue our pet projects at night and on the weekends. But it is very difficult to make progress alone. Collaboration has always been the cornerstone of technological progress. A technology collective is meant to act as a vehicle, umbrella, and catalyst in, under, and by which its members can help each other explore the wacky ideas that everyone thinks are crazy.
Benefits to Members
Access to collaborators of various expertise and interests. An organization to pool and share resources. An affiliation to publish under that is not burdened by a public release bureaucracy.
Consultancy
A technology collective, by necessity of what it is, will create a concentration of capability and expertise that is flexible and risk-friendly. It is natural that the collective will take on renumerative consultancies. There is a balance to be struck between projects that have external-pull vs. ones that are championed internally, and that balance tips towards the latter.
Analogy
Think of career engineers and researchers as talented musicians that earn a living playing for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Classical music is delightful, but not enough. They want to rock! So they form garage bands or jazz quartets and rehearse at night to play the dives in Allston on the weekends. That is us. DPL is the garage band of prototype opto-electronic systems.
Benefit to Community
In the Boston area we have many career engineers and researchers. There is a great deal of creative potential that is not captured by the normal business marketplace. If technology collectives were formed with the same frequency as garage bands that would undoubtedly lead to benefits large and small from increased 'liquidity' of domain expertise.
Funding
Technological research is nearly impossible to accomplish without specialized tools and equipment. In order to fund these purchases, the technological collective does not rely on cash dues, but on mental contributions. That is, we take on consulting work, or put together DIY kits for sale, or publish articles and software on the internet to generate advertising revenue. The profit from those activities are invested back into the internal projects of our fellows.