How to Build a Kit

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Hint: Feel free to edit this, these are my two cents.

Overview

One of OSE's goals is to create The Open Source Everything Store (OSES). OSES is an online store powered by distributed production and quality control - whereby production is democratized and de-specialized. OSE believes that products are needed for sustainable and regenerative living - but the current systems of production and distribution promote consumerism instead of self-determination. Led by these United States, this model of consumerism is being exported widely around the world.

The OSES is a public domain effort to distribute the production of manufactured goods in order to reframe industrial productivity to self-determination of people in harmony with natural life support systems. We believe that an open source effort where people collaborate on production and distribution can free civilization from consumerism if the efficiency and quality of consumer goods produced in a distributed way can match and exceed the current standard offered by the global economy. We believe that the route to doing this is enabling more people to be productive - as part of their way of life - by leveraging open source design and automation in the productive process. The idea is that if it is sufficiently easy to produce quality products in a distributed way - by using advanced production tool chains that are end-to-end open source - then a shift towards distributed production can happen in practice.

We believe that the missing link today is cultural consciousness of this possibility, followed by lack of open source tool chains to make this happen. Another challenge is how to support such development - as transforming the industrial productivity to open source is a large undertaking. The proposed route is taking a few key products to their true distributive enterprise potential, via a voluntary effort.

This effort should leverage information age techniques in order to scale. One scalable production method is the Kit. A Kit is an advanced product design that can be produced by the open source Desktop Microfactory - or even with simple assembly from easy-to-source off-the-shelf parts and basic tools. The revenue model behind a kit can be a service that focuses on helping customers build practical, useful things. Http://kit.com gives a small percentage to the kit producer. The service model would involve instructional videos, marketing assets, financial analysis, and other assets supporting distributed production. On one side, anyone is free to replicate the enterprise.

Economic Model

Given that many advanced products rely on intellectual property, public design can capture this value. It is possible to do this if sufficiently large numbers of people are involved in design. Incentive challenges such as Herox.com can be used to incentivize public development, while using crowd funding to produce the incentive prize.

Kits can be sold at a financially-sustainable markup. If a producer has their own desktop microfactory, they can capture the value of that production.

The ultimate incentive is environmental and social. Environmentally speaking - recycled plastics (and then other materials in the future) + open source design imply lifetime design - as products can be repaired or upgraded. Ultimately, open source materials production will enable closed loop, local materials cycles based largely on rocks, sunlight, plants, soil, and water. Socially speaking - if companies are producing unhealthy products that destroy the environment - it is only a matter of time until people accept this no more. Production, by this consideration, is likely to go closed loop and responsible. The only likely way for this to happen is by distributed production - assuming that technology is sufficiently advanced to allow small scale production. Ongoing developments in technology support this assumption.

Links

• Example of a kit in progress - Kits - Superfridge Conversion