Blog Update Feb 2015

Treatment

Points: We got lots of proof of concept supporting delivery of magical goals. It is time to go the last mile on economic significance.

• Development velocity
• Extreme Manufacturing
• Single day builds. This is significant. We know of no other company or production mechanism that can produce a comlete heavy machine

Script

It's been quite a ride over the last 4 years. We introduced the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS)

50 icons - with 4 year update across them

on the world stage at TED in 2011:

TED Talk

The promise is grand: developing the distributed, open source economy. The start of solving problems faster than they are created.

Critics of the open source economy point out that open source fails to provide positive feedback loops for funding. We've been busy showing that revenue models can be built upon efficient production resulting from the open source approach. We produce technology that is not Non-Commercial, and encourage others to do so, so that the open source community does not have to Pull a Makerbot - ref.

The CEB is efficient and low cost because of the open source approach. Perhaps 200 or so people have contributed to technical development, builds

The importance of the GVCS is that it's a set of machines that can go a long way to provide material security at significantly reduced cost - food, energy, housing, fabrication, energy, and other needs. Because the set is open source, the machines are intended to be replicated freely to create impact on any global grand challenges that are related to material security. Think - that's just about all the problems in the world today - directly or indirectly.

TED Talk

The project focuses on the development of the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS): 

The promise of the distributed network approach, as opposed to the broadcast (centralized) approach is that more people have access to raw productive power. We have learned that are plans are sufficient for someone to download and build machines on their own. In 2011, the first ever replication occurred.

While many people think about Africa when they hear about the GVCS - the set is intended to fix our own backyards before we take it anywhere else.

So far, 104 machines have been built in total - most being heavy equipment like the brick press and tractors, and also a few small ones like the micro Power Cube or 3D printer.