November 2014

Friday, Nov. 28, 2014

Our next main plan for OSE is writing a book - something to the effect of The Open Source Ecology Experiment. This is to mobilize the entire OSE community to deploy the GVCS - the whole package - which is a complete set sufficient to build communities. The time scale is now more like 10 years, and 20 years for the revolution cycle to complete. The next frontiers include precision machining and melting metal - so that we can get advanced civilization's precision steel products from the scrap stream. And in the bigger picture, there are materials - such as producing bioplastics from plants and aluminum from clay, or rubber from dandelion root resin. The culmination is semiconductors - which are not yet part of the GVCS.

As we move forward, there is a major open source crossroads in the way. Do we create a big organization which has a team and structure and protocols - or remain highly chaotic, distributed, agile, and efficient? How do we hack this question? The industry standard is a typical employee-based business structure - from Facebook (closed source software) to Lulzbot (open source 3D printers). We tried a little bit of corporate structure in 2013 - but failed. So our choice is to remain highly agile, lean, and disruptive. However, how do we scale our effectiveness to the ninth degree: affecting billions - while remaining highly agile, and distributed?

We have initial notions of Distributive Enterprise close to our hearts - based on Extreme Manufacturing. We have shown that this business model is possible.

So as we move forward, we want to develop and federate our products: develop products so they are good enough - and indeed so they are the best - but the business model is completely open so that this scales to affect billions. What does this business model look like? How do we create and involve others, and find collaborators interested in the Highest Good for All, as opposed to for Some.

Writing the book and next year will focus on crystallizing this vision to create the world's first organization whose power is entirely distributed. That means we develop and demonstrate real enterprise - from manufacturing to home building. Then the world adopts it. Our criterion is thousands of replications - independently.

We have seen that this just does not happen automatically - like I though it would in 2012 after we published the Civilization Starter Kit v 0.01. The viral replication did not happen. What was missing? It's a combination of: optimizing design, optimizing fabrication methods, optimizing documentation - such as for the Brick Press - showing that beautiful houses can be built. It's simply that to take the machine from 80% to 100% takes maybe 10-100 times more effort than going from 0 to 80%.

We are creating a release schedule - April and October of every year. We take the Brick Press to Full Release in April - up to house blueprints and absolutely exhaustive fabrication procedure with significant optimization of the fabrication process.

Join us on the discussion of how to scale to the ninth order - while remaining a small enterprise, not a heavy corporation. This question of impact - by distributed enterprise - is worth solving.