Shuttleworth Fellowship Application

Shuttleworth Fellowship Application - Marcin Jakubowski

Bio – link to Resume - Marcin_Jakubowski_Resume

Marcin Jakubowski came to the U.S. from Poland as a child.  He graduated with honors from Princeton and earned his Ph.D. in fusion physics from the University of Wisconsin, before shifting direction and starting a hydroponic vegetable farm. He then began his education from scratch, and in 2003 he founded Open Source Ecology in order to make closed-loop manufacturing a reality. At his research and training facility, Factor e Farm in rural Missouri, he is developing the Global Village Construction Set and has since become an international leader in open source hardware.

TED Talk – 4 min - http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html

GVCS Kickstarter – 3 min - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/622508883/global-village-construction-set

Personal Intro – 3 min -

Transcript of Felowship Application Intro Video

4 Application Questions

Describe the world as it is. (a description of the status quo and context in which you will be working)

The status quo is an economic system based on artificial material scarcity. This is defined as a general global condition, where in the abundance of material and energy resources (rocks, plants, sunlight) in the absolute sense, humans fail to distribute and utilize these resources effectively or ethically to meet human needs within the constraints of natural life support systems. This promotes geopolitical compromise - which continues to manifest as resource conflicts, material deprivation such as hunger and poverty, corruption, and a general tendency of competitive waste to compromise genuine human progress.

What change do you want to make? (a description of what you want to change about the status quo, in the world, your personal vision for this area)

My program for addressing the above issues involves open-sourcing of material production. We are addressing this currently by developing the 50 GVCS technologies for creating infrastructures of small scale civilizations with modern comforts. I am committed to removing material scarcity as the underlying force driving human relations, personal and political – by making access to material security a universal human condition, as opposed to a privilege enjoyed by the few today. I am doing this by demonstrating this first-hand: living a life of post-scarcity. By developing enabling tools, I would like to demonstrate that advanced civilization can be build on the scale of any land parcel, using its local resources – starting with me and a community that I build as the guinea pig. By developing open source tools and techniques, I would like to make ethical living the norm, not the exception. This option has deep economic implications post-scarcity economics - where a repository of open design fuels distributed, flexible, digital fabrication on an equal playing field where everyone has access to the best design. I am interested in developing the next economy - in the form of distributive economic systems based on open source principles. I would like to create the Ubuntu of open hardware as the means.

What do you want to explore? (a description of the innovations or questions you would like to explore during the fellowship year)

To this end, we're building the GVCS as the enabling tools – a high performance, open source toolkit sufficient to create complete economies. This will be in preparation for my next step, taken on from 2013 – testing these tools - by determining whether a modern standard of living can be achieved by using these tools at a required work load of 2 hours per day. This will be tested on a community of Dunbar's number in size, and real data points will be generated on the feasibility of applying all knowledge of humanity to date for the purpose of creating sustainable settlements as a foundation for genuine human progress towards cultural advancement where people gain a higher level of fulfillment and meaning in their lives.

What are you going to do to get there? (a description of what you actually plan to do during the year)

To do this, we are currenly building our facility infrastructure – to accommodate a team of 12 leading fabricators/prototypers who both deploy further prototypes and engage in production for bootstrap earnings. In particular – we have demonstrated the earning potential of $5k/week from production earnings. We will be dedicating the equivalent of 4 people out of our 12 person team - working one week per month on production – to generate a net of $250k next year – to fund further development. I will serve as the project manager – to realize a rapid parallel development effort, in which we iterate through three prototypes until product release, with approximately one month per prototype. In particular, I aim to secure $540k of funding by year-end 2011 – to lead a remote prototyping effort of 12 projects at a time at a budget of $15k/project/month, while managing 8 more prototypes at a time on-site at Factor e Farm – our experimental facility - at a budget of about $5k/month. We will continue engaging a bootstrap earning strategy because we want to close the development loop to full testing of economic feasibility within the context of a distributed manufacturing economy. The unique feature of our goals that we are aiming to demonstrate high earning potential and rapid scalability of production – while communicating these techniques to the outside world so others can replicate our production. Our goals are extremely ambitious: collection and burndown of $2M within the next 14 months to deliver the full 50 GVCS product releases by year-end 2012, and developing the enabling kernel for the next multibillion dollar economy within 5 years - to realize the promise of post-scarcity production.

Our focus is on a combination of an on-site production/prototyping/training effort, while engaging in management of remote prototypers. The on-site effort saves us a factor of about 3x in prototyping cost. The required budget is ~$50k/product release from remote collaboration, and $15k/product release for local development – about $1.6M – so with a 40% overrun allowance the total is on the order of $2M. The key to success is recruiting 12 skilled fabricators – our Dream Team 12 – to generate prototypes as our key deliverable - and recruiting 12 full-time, on-site documentors - to create instructional videos as the key deliverable for replicability.

We are aiming to scale production earnings from $25k net this year to $250k net next year. We aim for about $250k from Kickstarter, $500k from the nonprofit sector, and $1M in investment by Jan. 2012 from 3 sources: (1), stakeholder investors interested in product pre-sales; (2), angel investors, and (3), low-interest personal loans. The Shuttleworth Fellowship would provide resources that will further increase the quality of our deliverables. Specifically, you can see the list of 50 technologies of interest here. You can see a sample of our documentation here. You can get a feeling of our immediate goals until December 24, 2011, in our Kickstarter video.

Thank you for listening to this. In conclusion, I would like to say that I am doing nothing new here – sharing is not a new idea. We all as humans want the same things, such as happiness and freedom. My innovation is developing a replicable, practical route to getting there on a personal and on a political scale. The question revolves around a strategy for developing a viable option for achieving material security on the global scale.