February 2015 OSEmail

Dear Community,

We are starting our monthly newsletter up again after a brief hiatus. Until now, OSE has been focusing on technical development that can lead to creating Open Source Blueprints for Civilization. Over the last 4 years, we have shown 6 technical proofs of concept (see notes under this slide). Having gained much experience, we are ready to regroup for the next phase - the development of a strong community and upgraded collaboration techniques. Our next milestone is achieving compression of design time 100-fold from 5 years to 2 weeks by using exreme swarming techniques. Critics say that only a small team can work efficiently, but we have inklings of evidence that extreme coordination of larger groups is feasible.

Community Development Jonathan Kocurek is now OSE's Commmunity Manager. We are developing cohesive Working Teams to facilitate involvement and continuity. Continuity is a major challenge in any development project - so more effective role allocation and improved orientation materials will help.

Financial Sustainability - One of our milestones is building machines in a single day - which leads to exciting possibilities for creating value. Based on the 1 day build - we are transitioning now to a sustainable revenue model. It is the workshop production model - as an economically sustainable move forward based on open hardware.

This is important because this is a bootstrap approach that can scale the movement to many locations - as we intend to scale this work globally.

The economics work. The machine costs $4000-5000 in materials. We sell the machine for $10k, and the nearest competitor costs $52k. Tn our workshop last year, we make $5k from the sale, and $5k from tuitions - $10k net earned over a weekend.

We are taking these methods to Housing as well - showing that we can build a house on the time scale of a weekend. So far, it took us 5 days to build our 800 sf microhouse 4 addition - up to the roof and insulation. We did not finish the interior during that time - but we learned a lot as a proof of concept to see what is needed to achieve completion. We disovered that CEB by itself is difficult, so we intend to provide the house as a Product Service system - via our tractor + CEB press infrastructure and skill. It turns out that hybrid CEB - carpentry can be a highly replicable business model.

Distributive Enterprise. This year, we would like to take the CEB Press, Aquaponics Greenhouse, and 3D Printer to full economic replicability. This means - designing and streamlining production - and publishing exhaustive documentation - so that, for example - someone can work with a local fabricator to sell the CEB Press - We call our model Distributive Enterprise.

Aquaponics

Schedule for 2015