OSE Clubs

OSE Clubs

OSE Clubs are groups at schools, universities, and other communities which get involved in OSE development. This is an ongoing involvement, at least for one development/challenge cycle. The goal is creating productive open source enterprises around the open source products that are being developed. Involvement includes:

• Webinars - 1/2 hour per week
• Minimum of 3 hours of Design Sprints or development time per person per week
• Quarterly Incentive Challenges - where OSE clubs meet in a physical location and compete for prizes

The focus of Clubs is to work cooperatively, and then to 'compete' by building upon each others' work. We design products on the Critical Path of OSE - such as the open source microfactory - and larger products.

Clubs get ongoing support from OSE for ongoing development - and participation in quarterly incentive design challenges where the goal is to develop an economically significant product every quarter. As such, the OSE Club has an entrepreneurial component - towards bringing production back to the community level - by teaching about open source design and collaboratively-developed, free enterprise.

Club Mentors

Each club must include general membership (students or others) as well as a Mentor or Organizer. The Mentor is required to take a 3 day Continuing Education Training program. The first outcome of the Training Program is building the OSE 3D printer for Club use. The printer is used in rapid prototyping - especially developing other machines based on the modular, scalable Universal Axis construction system.

Mentors are required to take OSE 3 day training like this qualifies the educator to be a mentor/advisor of the OSE Club. The goal is have many venues worldwide that engage in rapid parallel development - a public engineering effort. Because we teach entry level skills, use readily accessible open source software tools, and develop part libraries that people can build upon - we can engage a large audience of nonspecialists in meaningful work.

For example - a cordless drill, aerial drone, different CNC machines, Raspberry Pi cell phone - as well as simple things such as 3D printed pens or 3D printed rubber mallet - these are all things that can be made with the open source microfactory 3D printer, laser cutter, and CNC circuit mill.

The cost structure for the 2 day continuing professional education is $1400 2 days - and $2000 for the 3 day program. This would be per team of 2 educators to build a printer to keep with them. The 2 day program is more for professional education. The 3 day program is also professional education - but adds the dimension of meaningful involvement with OSE.

The promise of the teacher/advisor training would be to increase involvement with design that matters. We could offer other microfactory tools - see options at https://microfactory.opensourceecology.org/workshops/. We would do ongoing development with quarterly product release schedules - which means that teachers are incentivized to do something much bigger than what they do in their own school - by becoming involved in important world work. We have the benefit of a construction set approach. For example, our Universal Axis is a robotics construction set - and can be scaled from rods that are 8 mm to 1" to 3". Imagine kids beginning to build heavy duty machining tools.

See more information at 2 Day Teacher Training Workshop

Links

• See also - Getting Involved