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Build a Village Project

On February 9, 2009 - we've succeeded in historic clarification of our approach after several days of in-depth debate among core team members. Jeremy, Marcin, and Joseph Zarr arrived at the following.

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We are clarifying our path to building the world's first, replicable post-industrial village. Has one already been made? If so, please tell us about it.

We are calling this the Build a Village Project.

What is our goal? It's a fully-functioning village, with a built-in economy, of about 30 people living a real life setting, in an off-grid community of about 30 acres. Our goal is abundance and high quality of life.

Our means to this are the Global Village Construction Set as an inftrastructure base for this village - a basic set of 40 or so open source technologies for integrated, regenerative living. Our social approach to this is gathering a group of Integrated Humans to subject their lives to this experiment. While we are clarifying the Build a Village Project here, and actively seeking participants, the group who is going to make it happen is largely self-selecting. If you might be one of these people, look into being a volunteer.

Social Technology Approach

Last year, we have proven that we could build technology - with successful deployment of the open source tractor, LifeTrac, and of a high-performance CEB press.

We have also demonstrated that we could fund open source product development work via crowd funding methods.

Thus, the missing frontier to date has been acknowledged as the lack of people on the Home Team or core development team. We have been consistent in not meeting deadlines, and in retrospect, the culprit is not having people here. Of those that did come here, a number of these left because of inadequate accommodations.

Our approach until today focused on creating the building infrastructure of CEB press, LifeTrac, and Sawmill. The challenge with this approach is that even if we develop this infrastructure fully over the next few months, we will still need people to do the actual building. So why not focus on getting people first?

That's tricky business, since we don't have the accommodations to house these people. This is a catch 22 of our current bootstrapping approach: we can't develop the infrastructure without the people, and we can't house the people to build the infrastructure without having infrastructure to begin with.

As radical as this sounds - our only solution is: on-demand building of housing.

In one day, a two person team can build a basic, insulated, heated housing unit for under $500. This is an 8x8x8' insulated solar cubicle, complete with drywall. Then you're set until our self sufficient habitat infrastructure is up and running.