It has been the Columbus Idea Foundry’s great pleasure to design and present Dr. Doug McIlroy with a lifetime achievement award during the Ohio Linux Festival, which is being held in Columbus, Ohio September 25-27, 2009.

Having only been given a theme of “steampunk” and “clock”, the creative folks at iF were free to explore several options in design…

The finalized design of the clock was settled upon in late August and partially inspired by a Jaegar-LeCoultre Atmos timepiece.

This design has incorporated many useful elements of the open source community including Google Sketchup and GIMPShop as well as homegrown tools (our CNC!). The project itself encompasses the philosophy of open source in that free sharing of ideas and community collaboration will result in enhanced design and functionality.

We would like to thank all the volunteers in the iF community for their invaluable contribution to the success of the project!  Special props should be extended to David K, Alex B, and Alex S for their amazing art, digital rendering, and fabrication contributions!

Work is currently on-going for this project so please check out our blog posts for updated information.