How to Build a Kit
Overview
One of OSE's goals is to create The Open Source Everything Store (OSES). OSES is an online store powered by distributed production and quality control - whereby production is democratized and de-specialized. OSE believes that products are needed for sustainable and regenerative living - but the current systems of production and distribution promote consumerism instead of self-determination. Led by these United States, this model of consumerism is being exported widely around the world.
The OSES is a public domain effort to distribute the production of manufactured goods in order to reframe industrial productivity to self-determination of people in harmony with natural life support systems. We believe that an open source effort where people collaborate on production and distribution can free civilization from consumerism if the efficiency and quality of consumer goods produced in a distributed way can match and exceed the current standard offered by the global economy. We believe that the route to doing this is enabling more people to be productive - as part of their way of life - by leveraging open source design and automation in the productive process. The idea is that if it is sufficiently easy to produce quality products in a distributed way - by using advanced production tool chains that are end-to-end open source - then a shift towards distributed production can happen in practice.
We believe that the missing link today is cultural consciousness of this possibility, followed by lack of open source tool chains to make this happen. Another challenge is how to support such development - as transforming the industrial productivity to open source is a large undertaking. The proposed route is taking a few key products to their true distributive enterprise potential, via a voluntary effort.
This effort should leverage information age techniques in order to scale. One scalable production method is the Kit. A Kit is an advanced product design that can be produced by the open source Desktop Microfactory.
Links
- Example of a kit in progress - Kits - Superfridge Conversion