Immersion Program Video

In 2004 I got a PhD in plasma physics - and I discovered - that I was useless. After all my years of scholarly training - the further I went in my education and in my life the more useless I felt in terms of solving pressing World issues. I realized that an integrated, systems-based approach - which I called Open Source Ecology - is critical to making a better world. I started a civilization reboot experiment. I started a farm in Missouri - moving to the middle of nowhere. This was the birthplace of the global village construction set.

We design and build open source industrial machines and publish the plans on the internet for free so far we prototyped 18 of the 50 machines - everything from 3D printers, micro tractor, the compressed Earth brick press and - then moved on to microhouses, and then the larger seed Eco home and the aquaponic Greenhouse. You can see my Ted Talk on on the global village construction set to get a good introduction to the early days.

Our next step is growth. We have so far achieved critical Milestones such as the ability to produce our machines in a single day. We have pioneered Xtreme manufacturing - a method of social production - of rapid group-based builds where a team of people works on all the different modular Parts of a build -in parallel -and then assembles the product rapidly into it's finished form. We have seen that there is a clear revenue model in this immersion education and production method -as we can both produce real products and provide immersion training. One of our main challenges to replicating this model has been the skillset required for it's replication. And for this reason - we are pleased to anounce our first ever immersion program. It is a 5-week deep dive where we start with the open-source micro Factory tools. In the program, candidates will learn not only how to build a 3D printer, a CNC circuit Mill a small laser cutter, plus a filament maker for producing 3D printing filament from scrap plastic - but also the skills of product design and development that allow them to build new versions of the machines. We focus on a construction set approach, where we use modular, scalable, interchangeable parts - which allow us not to build a single machine, but many different machines of different function or scale. On the culture front we focus I'm teaching a mindset of open learning, with a pragmatic goal of collaborative development to replace the proprietary status quo. We believe that we can have all the technology in the world and still be miserable as our human capacity 4 compassion and love is critical to making a better world. we start this by selecting for a deep commitment in a culture of Open Source. We release all designs, Enterprise blueprints, and trainning materials as open source, open source hardware association compliant.

How do we remain relevant when all of our materials are open source? Our revenue model is based on training, and we select for mindset of . collaboration where the candidate actually believes that more can be accomplished by working together rather than alone. This model of collaboration has been proved Beyond any doubt within the world of Open Source software and our goal is to extend this model to the world of the non-virtual economy - or open source hardware and open source infrastructures for civilization. As such, we remain relevant as we create a collaboration platform for open source development. We hire our graduates so that they can contribute 75% of their effort to further product R&D, and we provide continuing professional development so that our fellows continue to collaborate rather than to defect. We are making the Road by walking here and as we know from the Forefront of Entrepreneurship the future is created by those who are unreasonable those who do not follow the normal rules.

To create a rich learning environment, we identify mentors and guides, and we look forward to the time when we hold our first developer conferences.

For those who need financial aid, we identify sponsors in their respective communities so that there is real cool on our students side to help them succeed.

As such we are inviting ose fellows to apply for the program. it is a deep commitment on both sides - with the outcome is full-time work with open source ecology. This is our first program and we will continue with one or more programs every year or we continue on the open-source microfactory using are modular techniques we design construction sets such that for example are basic Machinery platform lends itself to scaling up two larger machines such as the CNC torch table or a heavy duty CNC mill and lathe. By developing the open-source microfactory we intend to create a distributed production mechanism as discussed already by many other groups such as the Fab labs and the hackerspace movement our goal is a replicable scalable open source product development paradigm which can become an open-source everything store based on collaborative product development 4 very large markets.

Our strategy is that open source ecology serves as a collaborative product development, marketing, and certification organization. Immersion workshops constitute approximately 25% of work time, and 75% of the effort goes to further development of the global village construction set our goal is to create the open-source economy or collaborative development is simply the norm in the stead of proprietary research and development. We believe that this is a prerequisite for transitioning Beyond a permanent Warfare economy in which we currently live - as the military continues it's transition from a model of destruction to a model of entrepreneurial creation using open source collaboration. So if you're up to this challenge, consider applying for this work.