FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Open Source Ecology

Our vision is very ambitious. We are hacking society.

We are building a set of machines for creating a self-sufficient modern life from low-grade, abundant, local resources. Further, we hope to build the infrastructure to allow people to share the information needed to redesign, repair and re-imagine this set, to develop networks for sharing skills and raw materials, and to help each other perfect our vision of self-sufficient living.

We hope that having survival needs taken care of outside of the current order will give people the freedom to become deeper, more thoughtful, more creative human beings. By giving people a means to live a modern life that is closely connected to the land that sustains them, we hope to allow them to become careful stewards of the land. This way of life may change the game for human survival on this planet.

Isn't this just revisiting the back to the land movement of the 1970s?

It's more than that. How farms operate has changed dramatically since the 1970s. On most commercial farms, mechanization has increased steadily, while new seed, fertilizer, and irrigation technologies have increased production dramatically. There has also been significant research and development in both biointensive agricultural techniques and permaculture. These techniques helped make intensive food production that improves soils and requires little to no ongoing input of resources possible for many small farms and communities. Some mechanization and technology is synergistic with these techniques in ways that maintain their ethos of ecological responsibility. Given this, there are many new possibilities for what a self-sufficient community can be.

The internet has also changed what a self-sufficient community can be. The internet makes it easy to share knowledge and collaborate on problems with people who are far away. This makes bazaar-style open-source software development possible, and it’s starting to have the same effect on hardware. Automated fabrication — computer numerical control — could make it possible to do a lot of machinery design and construction with less labor and less capital investment than was needed back in the 1970s.

Biointensive agriculture and permaculture are powered by design. It is now possible to share design development and improvement of agricultural systems in ways not possible before interconnectivity through the internet. We can develop a truly open source permaculture. OSE is also working to create RepLab, a digital fabrication workshop. A functioning workshop could allow people to instantly share plans across the internet and produce machines and machine parts on a small scale in a short time frame.

Response adapted from a comment by Kragen Javier Sitaker on | hackaday.com

Why use machines? Aren't traditional farming methods less wasteful and toxic?

Why use machines? Time. Subsistence farming is exceptionally labor intensive. Modern tools bring the power to lessen labor burdens and increases quality of life substantially.

An integral part of our work is creating industrial processes that are fully in harmony with an ecologically responsible approach to living. We are pursuing completely closed ecological industrial cycles, with which there is no waste. Right now we are building tools and machines to get us to this point. We are working on Level 1 of the Global Village Construction Set, which does require some industrial inputs from outside, along with their negative impacts. This a preliminary step needed to take us deeper into the process of creating a truly ecological approach to technologically modern self-sufficient living.

Isn't specialization and mass production more efficient/better?

Mass production can be far more efficient, and much of this efficiency is gained through the externalization of costs. There are a number of negative externalities usually produced by business-as-usual production that are not factored into market cost:

• Transportation: Taxpayers paying for roads are subsidizing distribution costs.
• Pollution: Water, soil, air, and noise pollution cost everyone, most intensely the economically disadvantaged. It is often the case that when industrial pollution is tolerated, products cost less. It can be more efficient to avoid environmental remediation.
• Worker alienation: Treating workers as valued contributors often runs counter to goals of efficiency.
• Aggregation of wealth: Centralized production is especially conducive to centralization of wealth.

Certainly, some industries gain more efficiency through externalization of costs than others. It may be that mass production of some things will continue to be preferable, but what those things are remains to be seen. Open Source Ecology seeks to create technologies that do not rely on these negative externalities for efficiency.

Further, greater efficiency can be undesirable. Efficient systems can become very reliant on a certain set of external conditions to allow them to function. In the rare event that a major shift were to occur, much of business-as-usual production could suddenly lose its ability to operate and would have to transform rapidly at great cost or perish. OSE is working to allow people to build resilient communities that are tied only to the land, allowing them to weather external changes.

Global Village Construction Set

We are building new machines by recombining existing technologies. The Global Village Construction Set is designed to become a fully integrated set of machines for creating a self-sufficient modern life from the resources of a small amount of land.

The plan for the GVCS has 3 levels, each taking the project a step farther away from reliance on outside inputs:

• Level 1: Building a set of machines as complete products using off-the-shelf components.
• Level 2: Building tools to build components for the machines of level 1.
• Level 3: Building machines and processes to introduce raw materials into an ecological industrial cycle to be used to serve as materials for the components of level 2.

Why not buy these tools and machines at my local store?

1. They'll cost more. Farm and construction implements bought in the current market are limited because their designs are the intellectual property of the companies that produce them. This results in low accountability. While higher quality, cheaper machines would fare better in a pure market system, the market system we're working our way out of is far from pure. This results in higher prices. Drastic cost reduction is a well-known feature of open source products. See an estimated price comparison (searching for link).
   • Proprietary technologies:
     1. Planned obsolescence: Companies routinely sell products with a limited useful life in order to maximize profits. When products wear out quickly, sales go up. The overall cost is much higher than the cost of buying one quality product.
     2. Competition through advertising: Rather than competing by reducing prices or increasing product quality, entire industries may set uniformly high prices while companies in that industry compete with each other through advertising only. The consumer loses.
     3. Regulated repair: Proprietary technologies require keeping users in the dark about the design and inner workings of the machines they are using. Warranties can be used to discourage tinkering by requiring repair by licensed repair technicians. This repair can be very costly, and add greatly to the overall cost of the machine.
   • OSE technologies:
     1. Lifetime design: The technologies of the GVCS are designed to be easily taken apart and fixed. These simpler machines are built to last a lifetime.
     2. Collaborative development: We are also documenting our plans with open source licenses so that anyone may replicate our designs. Open source development can reduce design inefficiencies. More minds and hands devoted to a problem can lead to solutions for building at a lower cost, in less time, and with fewer resources.
     3. Self-replication:
     4. Demonstrated cost reduction: We have demonstrated about a 5-fold reduction of cost over the competition with The Liberator compressed earth-brick press: $8k vs $45k. The RepRap open source printer project has demonstrated a factor of at least 10, where prior to RepRap, one would have to pay $10k for a 3D printer. Similar trends are observed for many other open source variants of proprietary technologies.
2. They're wasteful.

OSE working towards no-waste communities. This vs. linear resource flows. For a simple presentation on linear resource flows, see The Story of Stuff project. By creating these machines as a set, we eliminate redundancy of function, and therefore a great deal of waste.

1. They're static.

Not modular, not mod-able. They can't be remixed, tweaked, and built upon.

Where can I find plans?

RepRap

Plans being developed for the CEB press: [CEB plans on openpario]

See the LifeTrac plans under development.

Plans seem to be lacking. Is it because the focus has been on building rather than documentation. The documentation is key! Need more people to help bring the documentation up to a higher standard?

What kind of license are you using?

OSE has chosen a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (cc by-sa). You may remix, tweak, and build upon the work of OSE, even for commercial reasons, as long as you credit OSE and your new creations are licensed under identical terms.

Do these machines have any relevance in the third world? Aren't they too costly?

It seems like these machines are limited to those who have the thousands of dollars of investment capital to build them in the first place.

This set is designed to be self-replicable. This means that the first set is far more expensive to create than subsequent sets because

How can I help the project?

We are looking for many kinds of help from people of all types, places, and skill sets. Check out How can I help? for a summary of things you might be able to do to further the project.

Product Development

How long does it take to develop and produce a product?

Obvious answer here: It depends on the product!

Here are some of the products under development.

Will a company that joins the support of OSE product development efforts have any business advantage over any other local company in utilizing the technology when available (faster access, access to other knowledge, etc.), or does that go against your philosophy?

That's a good question. The existence of a business advantage depends on what type of business you are operating. If you are an open source-type business, that means that you invest in development of things that you are interested in offering as products. It also means that you are tapping collective intelligence. In this scenario, you accept the concept of free enterprise - a Jeffersonian concept that means that barrier-free access exists for anyone who wants to go into business. This is not the current mainstream model, which typically operates as monopoly capitalism.

On the other hand, if you are interested in a business advantage via barriers to entry of other players, such as non-disclosure or delayed disclosure of the development results - then the answer is that we do not engage in such practice. This is simply because such secrecy does not promote the highest level of flexibility or innovation. The benefits of the energy created by openness outweigh the advantages of immediate funding. The immediate funding will not address the long-term needs of open source economic development.

Supporters of 'monopoly capitalism' - as distinguished from open source 'capitalism' - may argue that protection of proprietary interest promotes invention. We assert that collective intelligence, now available in the internet age, has much more potent creation potential than proprietary development. When collective intelligence is active in product development, the gap between the producer and consumer can now be narrowed - with the emergence of personal fabrication. We believe that this is trend is increasing, and that needs can be satisfied more efficiently using this method.

So to answer the question more explicitly - yes, you will get faster access - in so far as the results are produced more quickly when additional support materializes. Yes, there will be access to other knowledge - in so far as additional funding can produce more practical improvements. The only trick is - everyone will have access to these results, because we will be working towards these goals efficiently - ie., by utlizing full openness in our research program. We have learned from our experience that the more open you are, the more collective intelligence you are able to tap. Indeed, we don't believe a proprietary effort can ever be as effective - because once a certain number of open source contributors are found - products begin to surpass the quality of limited proprietary funding. We are far along in demonstrating this with our Factor 10 engineering results. Granted, this does require an open source business model, which may not be consistent with your company's current model.

If there is a way that your company can attain competitive advantage without requiring the limiting of any disclosure, then it should invest in our developments. If not, your company may want to consider further evaluation of the open source business model to determine its relevance to future corporate strategy.

Fans

What is a True Fan?

Generating and maintaining True Fans is a way for individual and small groups of artists, producers, inventors and makers to crowd fund the resources they need to continue creating new work. Open Source Ecology is looking for people to fund its projects by donating a fixed amount per month. The Standard Subscription is $10 per month. As of September, 2010, there have been requests for larger donation options. In response, we created Gold, Gold Extra, Platinum, and Angel subscriptions at $20, $30, $50, and $100 per month, respectively.

We have shown consistently that we spend nearly 100% of donations directly on prototyping and product release work surrounding the 40 items of the Global Village Construction Set.

Factor E

Aren't cities more efficient?

urbanization is ongoing. Do we really have to decentralize?