December 2019 OSEmail

1. We are pleased to announce expansion of our STEAM Camps to our first ever trilateral event, with 3 event locations in Europe and America. If you want a real crash course in collaborative design towards building real products - this is for you. https://www.opensourceecology.org/steam-camp-january-2020/
2. As our next major milestone in our internet infrastructure, Michael Altfield, our sys admin, succeeds in installing Discourse forum software on our staging server. Technically speaking - this was a challenge to install its Docker container on a non-supported non-cloud infrastructure while waging documentation requests with a semi-supportive Discourse developer community, while addressing security and caching. But it's now documented as we blazed the trail so others can follow if they have a similar fat client architecture to our own.
3. Build prep is happening for the CEB Microhouse build in Belize, with foundation laid, soil delivered to the site, and our new Soil Mixer ready to be added to our pool of open source machines. We are beginning the mixer build - at a cost of about $2k in materials for a one-step soil mixer which accepts raw soil, pulverizes it to a fine powder via hammer-mill action, adds a controlled amount of cement, and sprinkles in appropriate water content. The price of the next comparable machine that does this is $48k for a soil crusher (7 people to load, 1 person to run tractor for initial soil - [1]) and mixer, which requires a team of 7 people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=40&v=zpD42kWbDVA&feature=emb_logo) - compared to 3 people for the OSE version (1 to run tractor to load soil mixer and to load cement and 2 people to stack block on pallets). OSE's lean appropriate technology approach thus produces $3k and 3 people, compared to $48k and 15 people. Our goal is to normalize CEB construction as a practical and accessible way to do housing.