Working Openly

Why Work Openly?

1. Education Through Transparency

When you work openly, every step of your process becomes a learning opportunity for others. Instead of knowledge being locked away in patents or proprietary silos, it becomes part of a living library accessible to anyone who is curious, ambitious, or in need. This multiplies the impact of your work: every mistake, breakthrough, and iteration becomes a seed for the education of countless others. In OSE’s vision, this democratization of knowledge ensures that nobody is excluded from learning and creating.

2. Creating New Business Models and Industries

Openness does not destroy value — it creates new forms of it. By releasing knowledge and designs, you don’t give away profit, you expand the playing field. New business models emerge: cooperative manufacturing, time-bank based housing, distributed production. Whole industries can spring up around open designs, just as Linux gave rise to an ecosystem of companies, services, and applications. OSE’s work shows how open-source tractors, brick presses, and houses can seed regenerative, localized economies that thrive on inclusion, not exclusion.

3. Sharing as a Foundation of Trust and Goodwill

To share knowledge is to build trust. Working openly fosters a culture where generosity replaces secrecy as the engine of progress. This creates what you called an anti-ponerological feedback loop: instead of secrecy breeding exploitation, openness fosters goodwill, cooperation, and healthy human relations — an economy of affection. When people see that your work uplifts rather than exploits, they are inspired to join, contribute, and amplify the effort.

4. Affecting the World Systemically

Open work doesn’t just touch individual lives — it shifts the structure of society. It undermines monopolies, reduces inequality, and spreads opportunity by lowering barriers to entry. In OSE’s framework, collaborative and inclusive design ensures that technological and economic development leaves nobody behind. Every design, every build, every open document is a step toward a system where abundance is shared and scarcity is no longer artificially enforced.

The Philosophy in Action: Open Source Ecology

OSE embodies this philosophy by developing the Global Village Construction Set — 50 essential machines for civilization — openly, collaboratively, and inclusively. This is not just a catalog of hardware. It is an act of systemic design, weaving education, economics, and community together:

• Educational Impact: Apprentices learn by doing in the Future Builders Academy — building homes, machines, and infrastructure in a way that makes them creators, not consumers.
• Economic Inclusion: Models like Freehouse and work-study housing eliminate debt traps, ensuring that even those with limited capital can build a dignified life.
• Collaborative Design: Hundreds can join in parallel, improving machines, construction methods, and institutions together, instead of siloed competition.
• Leaving Nobody Behind: Every blueprint is free. Every skill is teachable. The knowledge is there for anyone willing to pick it up.

Toward a Culture of Open Civilization

Ultimately, the philosophy of working openly is about more than engineering. It is about human flourishing. By breaking down walls of secrecy and exclusion, we unleash not just new technologies, but new ways of living together. This is a shift from a civilization of extraction to one of regeneration, where collaboration and goodwill become the new default.

Openness is not charity — it is enlightened self-interest. Because when others rise, we all rise.

Tactical

At OSE, we work openly. Working openly means some practical things as:

1. Logging. Keeping a Work Log with links to work product so that anyone on the team can find out what another person is doing automatically, thereby facilitating collaboration with minimal orientation time. Key to this - The key to using a work log effectively is linking directly to work product, so that everything is transparent and self-verifiable. For example, don't put on your log - "I was working on the printer design today", but instead, post a direct link to the working CAD file.
2. Work in Progress - publish work in progress, not just results. This allows for effective feedback loops for improvement - otherwise you are not really collaborating. Note that the majority of the time, a project is in development. Thus, if you publish only when it's done, you are missing out on most of the potential collaboration.
3. Publish Early and Often. As soon as you start any document - upload it. This is 'publish early and often'. This serves two purposes: you've succeeded in backing it up - and for collaboration purposes - you now changed the document from a solo work to a collaborative project.
4. Publish Once- But, whenever possible - use cloud editable documents to Publish Once - start them and make them open for anyone to edit. That is correct. We have never had vandalizing issues on working documents yet, even though they are open. You can close them up (remove edit permissions) when they are no longer to be edited.
5. Use Digital Age and Open Source Publishing Tools. See the History of the Internet.
6. Transparency. Keep relevant information transparent. For example, if you found out some piece of new information, and documented it - include a link so others can learn more if needed. Think of it - if someone else were studying my work, how can I help them learn faster?
7. What you are doing is important. - Don't make documentation a burden. Start by understanding, at a deep level, the concept of Time Binding and Economic Time Binding - and note that humans have a unique and powerful capacity to build on past experience. If you appreciate this capacity - AND are working on an important project - that should be a good motivation for documenting, and not feeling that it's a waste of effort. And, make sure that what you are doing is important. Ask yourself, "if this is not important, why am I doing it?" and then eliminate any unimportant tasks from your task list. Why is your work important? Because working openly creates a new paradigm in civilization, enabling evolution to happen more effectively.
8. Self-Esteem - Understand that high self-esteem is important to working openly - as working openly means you are vulnerable - to questions! Study the latest science about Self-Esteem and build it if you don't think you have it. Become like Muhammad Ali - double greatest.
9. Findability - Enable any other collaborator to find your work. This could be anyone - an existing team member - or a new person - regardless of whether you know them or not. There will be others who will want to see your document - especially if you remember that what you are doing is important.

Collaborative Messaging Tactics

• If pictures are shared, share them to upstream social media, both organizational and your own. Specifically, if you get a notification of shared pictures, post to OSE Workshops FB Page or other OSE media.
• Comply with Collaboration Ecology and reach out to other technical groups. Many parts and modules that OSE uses are likely developed elsewhere. We specialize in integration into working ecosystems that follow the OSE Mission
• When communicating, attend to OSE Specifications for our design scope and principles.
• Distributive Enterprise and Mass Creation of Genius are core to our work. The former provides the financial independence required for the self-determination requirement of genius.

Links

• Working with OSE
• Psychology of Non-Collaboration
• OSE Principles of Collaboration
• Designing for collaboration - [1]
• Working Openly - Laura Hilliger - [2]