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Open Source Ecology Wiki (OSEWiki)

Welcome to the Open Source Ecology Wiki (OSEWiki) at OpenFarmTech.org

Please see our weblog for an online journal of theory in practice at our land-based facility: Factor e Farm.

Please check the Red Pages to see if there are any questions you can help answer.

Support the project through the 1000 True Fans campaign!

Support the project through the 1000 True Fans campaign!

Introduction

This wiki is dedicated to the open, collaborative development of a basic and robust infrastructure for a 'Global Village' economy, as embodied in the list of the 28 above products and services. Such a village is inherently:

  • one which promotes the highest autonomy and freedom
  • grounded in self-sufficiency
  • dedicated to voluntary pursuits, right livelihood, and quality of life

The basic assumption for a 'New Village' economy is that humans are capable of transcending the struggle for survival and resource conflicts, where this preoccupation is replaced by higher pursuits of personal and societal evolution. Read more.

Factor E Distillations

The Factor E Distillations video episodes help explain the concept of Open Source Ecology. See the Factor E Distillations page to watch previous episodes and check the blog for the latest updates.

Email Marcin at joseph.dolittle@gmail.com for further information.

Global Village Construction Set

In effect, the 28 products serve as a sufficient, but incomplete, basis for a Global Village Construction Set. We are talking about resettling land to become its stewards - whether in locations already settled or on frontiers. See the Marketing Brochure.

Economy creates culture and culture creates politics. Politics sought are ones of freedom, voluntary contract, and human evolution in harmony with life support systems. Note that resource confilicts and overpopulation are eliminated by design. We are after the creation of new society, one which has learned from the past and moves forward with ancient wisdom and modern technology.

Furthermore, it should be noted that this is a real experiment, and product selection is based on us living with the given technologies. First, it is the development of real, economically significat hardware, product, and engineering. Second, this entire set is being compiled into one setting, and land is being populated with the respective productive agents. The aim is to define a new form of social organization where it is possible to create advanced culture, thriving in abundance and largely autonomous, on the scale of a village, not nation or state.

Products.jpg

Product Selection Criteria

The selection of 28 products is based on

  • Availability of a land or facility base
  • Essential contribution to an infrastructure for living and working
  • Essential goods and services of wide use and large markets
  • Provision of a robust village economy and sufficient surplus for further developments
  • Generative nature of the product, thus promoting self-replication of the village
  • Selection of a widely applicable and sufficient, but not complete, range of economic activity to support a community
  • Viability of a community on a village scale, perhaps 100 people, but as few as 2 or as many as sustained by the land base

Collaborative Development Process

The open development process involves global contributions of content to a rigorously defined process for developing, deploying, and improving the Global Village Construction Set. The rigor lies in a template that guides the development through all the necessary theoretical and practical aspects of deploying a given product. The same template, or process, is adapted to deliver all the products of the Construction Set. The template starts with product definition and ends with economically significant models of production.

If you are interested in contributing to this wiki, your first step is a quick debriefing on the issues we are trying to solve. Please bring yourself up to speed with the background, project status, and action items as described in the =Development Template= below. Once you read up on the current work and key issues being considered, you are in a position to make meaningful contributions consistent with the goals and progress of the overall project.

With a sufficient pool of technically-skilled collaborators, we aim to deploy the complete Global Village Construction Set in 3 years, starting at the latter part of 2007. The result is a formula for building your own village - whether you pursue our open source designs and business models yourself or with a group, or buy infrastructure components from providers, or buy an entire turnkey village infrastructure according to proven specifications. From that point, all you need is land and people to populate your village, and you are on your way to freedom.

Enterprise Community Contract

We are proposing the formation of Global Villages in the form of productive enterprise communities that strive for unprecedented quality of life:

  • material abundance
  • freedom from bureacracy and unnecessary activity
  • total focus on one's true interests

For our particular OSE prototype implementation, we are interested in the following general essence of an Enterprise Community Contract:

  • 2 hours of productive activity daily, such that 100% of the community's food, energy, housing, transportation, and technology essentials are produced for subsistence, with surplus production for market
    • Agriculture base follows permaculture design, and includes production of water soluble organic fertilizer, orchard, nursery, and crops, as well as certain food processing and value added propositions
    • Flexible fabrication produces advanced technologies at the cost of materials
    • Cost of living is reduced dramatically, from $20,000/year in the industrialized world, to negligible income requirements, under the assumption of high-tech self-providing
  • Each participant undertakes a study program of full stewardship of the community, including:
    • Agricultural production capacity
    • Technological literacy to operate and maintain flex fab equipment and other machinery
    • Numeracy to facilitate design
    • Study of the mind and body to expand one's consciousness, skills, and abilities, and to disseminate such human augmentation widely towards eliminating mind control of the masses
  • Entry of new people can be negotiated by the new participants providing skills and productive contribution to the community
  • Beyond the 2 hour requirement, participants follow a research lifestyle to promote further development of the community or of the greater world

Enabling Technology - Salient Features of Technology Base

Without going into details, the main features for the comprehensive technology base are:

  • Hybridization of power devices - decoupling of power source from the working unit in order to produce electrical drive is a formula for increasing integrated efficiency of electromechanical devices such as electric vehicles, tools, heavy equipment, etc. For example, the hybrid car decouples the engine from its wheels by using an electrical generator to feed electric wheel motors. Note that this eliminates the clutch, transmission, crank case and its oil, differential, drive train, and other parts, and replaces these items with electric wire from the generator to electric motor. This is a huge efficiency leap, one in fuel efficiency, and two, in eliminating billions of dollars of industry which is outdated today due to the hybridization option. As such, we can talk of complex machines with huge simplification, assuming easy access to infinitely scaleable and controllable, low cost electric motors (these do not exist today). For example, we can envision an agricultural combine where each moving part is powered by its own electric motor - producing a leap in simplification and maintenance of the overall machine - as all belts, pulleys, gears, and other power transmission components driven by a single engine - are all replaced by electric wire. One can point to many examples where such strategy would provide leapfrog advance in device simplicity and maintenance.
  • Open source fab lab - combine and expand the [1] with xyz table as in RepRap (http://reprap.org/), and you can envision a robust fabrication device that integrates open source computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided manufacturing (CAM). This device would perform a large variety of machining and fabrication operations, and would be producible at the cost of materials if metal casting is available. When deployed, we are talking of producing any advanced object or device at the cost of materials. Would you like to fabricate an electric motor for your personal transport vehicle? Here, I'll email you a file to make on your local village fabber. In practice, one could conceptualize a single or several Multimachines, with their milling-drilling-lathing functions, surrounding an xyz motion platform with interchangeable heads. These heads could include acetylene torch attachment, plasma cutter, CO2 laser, router, hot wire, or additive heads such as a plastic extruder found in RepRap. This overall fab lab concept could start with a basic machine such as the Multimachine, with computer controls and table added in time. As such, this is a realistic proposition - with supporting open source knowhow with significant advancement already available. This propels civilization to new levels of decentralized material prosperity, and implies significant reduction of resource conflicts, especially if material feedstocks are sourced locally - as in the next point.

Here is an initial Fab Lab design: Fab Lab.jpg

Here is a sample Product Matrix that falls right out of Fab Lab capacities:

Product Matrix.jpg

Sample Scenario

Imagine a village with buildings of dirt (CEB) with year-round greenhouses (sawmill, CEB, bioplastics from local trees), with all facility energy produced by a solar turbine, where people drive hybrid cars with car bodies (bioplastics) made from local weeds, with critical motors and metal structures (aluminum) extracted from on-site clay, which are fueled by alcohol produced on-site, on a wireless network linked to the greater world. That's just a sampling of the technology base. Food, energy, housing sufficiency. There are no poor among us - because we are all evolving human beings and farmer scientists.

Development Template

An Index for the Open Source Technology Template is shown here, including explanation of each heading. This template, properly adapted, shall be the famework seen when you go into any of the 28 products in the links on top of this page.

  1. Product Definition
    1. General - What is the product, what needs does it meet, why is it relevant to a village economy, and how is it relevant to making a better world
    2. General Scope - Options, variations in implementation, spinoffs, phases, and evolutions that the product is aimed to include. This section reveals the deployment strategy - in terms of the desirable steps to be taken towards product deployment.
    3. Product Ecology - Relationship to other products in a village, as well as ecological qualities of the product, including environmental, human, and technological aspects.
      1. Localization - how the product may be produced and sourced locally, and what global resource flows it can displace
      2. Scaleability - exploration of how the product may be designed to scale in production or output
      3. Analysis of Scale - Exploration of the appropriate scale for carrying out this enterprise, based on the notion that human orgnization works most effectively up to a certain size, after which organization begins to break down. The effective scale may change depending on the scenario.
      4. Lifecycle Analysis - material flows analysis, 'from crust to dust'
    4. Enterprise Options - Possible enterprises that may be undertaken, as related to the given product, in the sense of neosubsistence - or providing both for the needs of the community and for outside markets. Note that village design favors neosubsistence in order to integrate participants' lifestyles for increased self-sufficiency. Enterprise may involve production of the product itself, fabrication of devices that build the product itself, production of other items using the product, education, training, certification, consulting, further R&D activities, and others
    5. Development Approach
      1. Timeline
      2. Development budget - This is a highly flexible item, since the core development team labor has been donated until project completion, and a research facility is available. Costs incur for materials, outsourcing, and hiring of independent contractors. All costs may be eliminated by collaborative contributions, and resources come in as they are needed in a bootstrapping fashion. In case larger contributions become available for top-down funding, it is useful to do general accounting, and to specify a required budget in terms of those allocations that would propel the project forward significantly. Thus project financial accounting should include:
        1. Value spent - total value of monetary and in-kind contributions utilized specifically by the project, and provided by voluntary contributions; summed in US dollars; voluntary labor is not counted
        2. Value available - resources that are available but have not yet been utilized
        3. Value needed - This is what's needed in labor and materials to complete the project under two scenarios: normal and accelerated. The normal scenario assumes voluntary labor and materials at cost. The accelerated scenario refers to spending money to outsource the necessary developments. Outsourcing means spending the money on independent contractors who would otherwise not contribute their services in a volunteer fashion. For this, labor is accounted in hours. In the industrialized world, typical professional services may be $50 per hour.
    6. Deliverables and Product Specifications - Specific, robust implementations of products taken from the General Scope upon which development will focus in this wiki. Forks to different implementations or spinoffs may occur, but should initially be limited to the 28 products that may be administered by a core development team, unless the core team has a sufficient number of administrators who can retain clear direction based on purity of conception, and who can provide quality control of the content.
    7. Industry Standards - This is a brief summary of techniques and product specifications that are found currently in mainstream market competition. This is provided to show a frame of reference that reveals how our developments relate to the status quo, and at what point they differentiate or evolve from accepted practice.
    8. Market and Market Segmentation
    9. Salient Features and Keys to Success - Explanation of the critical features of the Deliverables, and how they can produce breakthrough developments, such as those of ecological features, durability, cost reduction, ergonomics of production, and so forth.
  2. Technical Design – The general assumptions for product design are, wherever possible: (1), lifetime design, (2), design for disassembly (DfD), (3), modularity, and (4), scaleability. Technical design progress will be visible in real-time, as updates are posted on an ongoing basis.
    1. Product System Design – This parts starts to define the technical aspects of products beyond Product Definition. This includes the product itself and framework of other products within which the product is used or fabricated. Product system design includes components of the Scope as defined in Product Definition. Different options, variations, or implementations of a product are included. Product system design is an iterative definition, such that the best approach will be pursued as additional information becomes available. Particular product development forks may be selected. Product system design includes:
      1. Diagrams and Conceptual Drawings - these may include:
        1. pattern language icons that help simplify technological discussion, see technology pattern language icons
        2. Structural diagram of the technology
        3. Funcional or process diagram
        4. Workflow for productive activities
      2. Technical Issues – main technical issues to be addressed and resolved
      3. Deployment Strategy – Prioritization of steps to be taken, such as design – prototyping – fabrication iterations. The goal is to build on past work, involve additional developers, obtain peer review, identify prototyping collaborations, and follow import substitution to build capacity locally, until an integrated technology base, including provision of feedstocks, is under control of a community.
      4. Performance specifications
      5. Calculations: design calculations, yields, rates, structural calculations, power requirements, ergonomics of production - labor and fatigue, time requirements for production, economic breakeven analysis, scaleability calculations, growth calculations
      6. Technical drawings and CAD
      7. CAM files whenever available
    2. Component Design – Design of components related to the product system. This will be the main thrust of the wiki, as product ecologies are based on individual components. These components are likely to be located on their own subpage, because each component design has a number of subsections:
      1. Diagrams
      2. Conceptual drawings
      3. Performance specifications
      4. Performance calculations
      5. Technical drawings and CAD
      6. CAM files whenever available
    3. Subcomponents– breakdown of components into subcomponents will be provided as needed.
  3. Deployment - Deployment prograss is visible by the documentation provided in the sections above, but tangible results of substance can be documented by pictures, video, data, and so forth. Progress is designed to be transparent to the observer.
    1. Production steps - fabrication, assembly, and any strategic insights of the production process
    2. Flexible fabrication or production - describes infrastructure requirements (equipment, utilities, etc.), tool requirements, techniques, processes used
    3. Bill of materials - materials, sourcing, and prices of required materials or feedstocks
    4. Pictures and Video - of materials, parts, prototypes, working models
    5. Data- any results that are measured
  4. Documentation and Education- this section is dedicated to preparing and disseminating results, in the form of publications and technical reports.
    1. Documentation - reports on results, or more comprehensive reports educating interested individuals in mastering techniques under consideration.
    2. Enterprise Plans - The bottom line to this entire project is whether economically significant goods and services can be produced in a replicable fashion. Are people able to use the presented information for entrepreneurial, right livelihood goals? The best mark of a complete development process is the number of independent replications. That is, is the information sufficiently complete and clear, such that people can egage in an entrepreneurial, subsistence, or neosubsistence opportunity? To facilitate this process, we are publishing enterprise plans that help to clarify and deploy enterprise opportunities related to the products in this wiki. Since the authors will be either directly or indirectly engaged in many or all of the projects- in an economically significan way- it is natural for working business models to be developed and shared. It may be claimed that enterprise plans, coupled with thorough background information - is the essence of a true education. A true education is one in which rapid learning enables one to be a self-sufficient, productive, and constructive steward of their community and of the greater world.
  5. Collaboration - this section is a clear definition of work that needs to be done and how in particular the development and deployment process can be shared with the greater community. The basic procedure is for the collaborator to learn about the background and status, and to begin addressing the issues that need to be addressed. The list of Developments needed is the basic call for contributions.
    1. Review of project status
    2. Current Steps - lists current development work that is being done
    3. Developments needed -
      1. General - wiki markup, supporting links, relevant background, soliciting peer reviewers, and other details at 'Identifying stakeholders' below - are always welcome.
      2. Specific - This is the essential part of the wiki, as it lists the specific tasks to be done for project deployment. Collaborators should view this list and pursue addressing issues.
        1. Background - this motivates why a particular approach or implementation was chosen, and why others have been eliminated, and, possibly, under what conditions the eliminated options could be revisited.
        2. Information - This is a list of information-level tasks to be done, such as collecting background information, producing designs, performing engineering calculation, doing feasibility studies
        3. Implementation - This is a list of hardware-level tasks, such as fabricating prototypes, procuring materials, and so forth.
    4. Sign-in - Please sign in with your name and contact information if you are contributing information. Name, email, and Skype are preferable. This is to facilitate communication.
  6. Resource Development - This section is aimed to organize resource development or funding for project deployment. This includes:
    1. Identifying stakeholders - this is a list and description of individuals, groups, organizations, and institutions that may be particularly interested in the product under development, at any of these levels:
      1. Information collaboration
        1. Wiki structuring, markup
        2. Addition of supporting references
        3. Production of diagrams, flowcharts, 3D computer models, and other qualitative information architecture
        4. Technical calculations, drawings, CAD, CAM, other technical designs
      2. Prototyping - collaborators with access to fabrication capacity
      3. Funding
      4. Preordering working products - see Soliciting stakeholders below ###Grantwriting - see below
      5. Publicity - help in getting the word out on developments, and recruiting new collaborators
      6. User/fabricator training and accreditation - New skills will be required to operate the economy proposed here. Training and accreditation is a natural part of product dissemination.
      7. Standards and certification development - Independent review will be solicited as a means to verify and control quality of products and services.
      8. Other
    2. Grantwriting - The development process is designed to have sufficient background, motivation, definition of issues, breakthrough potential, technical content, and integrated comprehensivity; such that grants and various proposals for support should fall out as a direct byproduct of the information content. This is a mechanism for outsourcing some of the fundraising function of this deployment effort. We encourage codevelopers to study any or all of the products to understand them sufficiently well to be capable of writing grants related to product deployment.
      1. Volunteer grantwriters - One avenue is grantwriters who volunteer to write grants at no cost grantwriters.
      2. Professional, outcome-based grantwriters - These grantwriters collaborate in grantwriting by adding value to the proposal effort, and get paid a percentage upon success of bringing in resources
    3. Collaborative Stakeholder Funding - Once products are demonstrated, we will solicit stakeholders to fund production capacity. This is a highly innovative social enterprise model, where stakeholders contribute a small amount, say $50, to the actual building of a facility for producing a specific item under the model of flexible fabrication. Funding will go towards: (1), building the flexible fabrication facility with the appropriate equipment, (2), bringing in and training a person who will operate the flexible fabrication facility. The motivation for the stakeholders is an absolutely lowest cost product - at near the price of materials - if the design is sufficiently simple and flex fab capacity is sufficiently advanced, to minimize the cost of production. The trick here is to be able to fund a facility collaboratively, such that the price reduction in the cost of production can be realized. This is essentially a question of distributing the development and production cost via a collaborative enterprise model.
    4. Tool and Material Donations
    5. Charitable Contributions

Open Engineering Strategy

Here is a diagram of the engineering development strategy:

Engineering Strategy.jpg

Definition of Open Source Hardware and OSE Specifications

See the updated entry for OSE Spec here.

We like to be clear about the meaning of open, or open source,' as used in this work for items of physical production. By open source, we mean documented to the point where one may replicate a given item, without even consulting with the developers. To us, this embodies the most complete form of documentation possible, where sufficient detail is provided to enable independent replication. This is open source embodied in OSE Specifications. Other features of OSE Specificationsare:

  1. Freely downloadable documentation
  2. DfD, lifetime design
  3. Simplicity and low cost are of prime importance
  4. Replaceable components
  5. Modular Design
  6. Scaleability
  7. Localization
    1. Level 1 - product fabrication or production is local
    2. Level 2 - material sourcing is local
  8. Product evolution - phases and versions are pursued
  9. Concrete Flexible Fabrication mechanism exists for others to purchase the product at reasonable cost
  10. Open franchising - replicable enterprise design is available, and training exists for entrepreneurs

Thus, these features are meant to promote liberatory technology - open, replicable, essential, optimal, and ecological goods and services for humankind living in harmony with natural life support systems.

Working Assumptions

Here is a partial list of assumptions that we are making as we go about the development work of this wiki. These assumptions help one to understand our motivations and approach.

  1. Underlying dynamics of human civilizations are related to peoples' resource base. The resource base, and its control through the control of other humans, is the feedstock for power and its accumulation. Resource conflicts occur because people have not yet learned to manage the global resource base without stealing from others. In other words, society dynamics have not transcended the brute struggle for survival. As a society, we remain on the bottom steps of Maslow'™s pyramid. Transcending resource conflicts by creation of abundance, on the unit scales of few hundreds to few thousands of humans, is a present possibility under the assumption of open source knowledge flows and advanced technical capacities for material production.
  2. Today, most humans are controlled not by a commercial force (armies) but by information and social engineering that feeds the commerce itself. Understanding means of social control; understanding the mechanics of one's mind, body, and spirit; learning to discern mechanics of mind control and propaganda as they are used in New World Order agendas; and applying learnings to meditation, expansion of consciousness, and evolution of one'™s awareness and powers“ are all crucial if civilization is to escape the control of commercialism and is to give up its dependence on a centralized, planned economy.
  3. Said propaganda and conditioning has successfully removed the notion of self-sufficiency as a viable means of livelihood. Most people are afraid of self-sufficiency and consider it a return to the stone age. Most people cannot envision that advanced civilization can be created in small (100-1000 person), self-sufficient, highly skilled communities. Furthermore, most people do not realize that it is possible to educate, skill, and evolve human beings such that an integrated, self-sufficient lifestyle option that promotes advanced civilization on a small scale of human organization is created. It it possible to achieve this level of excellence if people are taught real knowledge and wisdom, as opposed to undergoing global workforce training.
  4. Education curricula have typically deleted practical applications deliberately, to produce subjects of the global workforce. If education is reinstated – then self-sufficiency will emerge as a natural option.
  5. Self-sufficiency is not an antisocial behavior, but a means to full individual and community accountability for resource conflicts, foul politics, and other corruptions of large-scale endeavors. (review works of Gandhi, Schumacher, Fuller) Self-sufficiency is a means to highest quality life – by definition, one is in control of one'™s destiny when one is self-sufficient. The assumption of self-sufficiency is that its practitioners must be highly skilled, and not products of centralist education.
  6. By self-sufficient, we mean in full control of providing one's needs. Note that self-sufficiency refers to needs - those things that allow one to survive in absolute health - and not wants. Self-sufficiency does not imply a solo, isolationist endeavor. Self-sufficiency may be accomplished with the help of as many people as it is possible to maintain full accountability, transparency, and sound ethics within that group. This group may be dispersed globally. Historically, sociology of human settlements has shown that this scale of self-sufficiency is a few hundred people. (see E.F. Schumacher; other references)
  7. The State promotes well-paid incompetence, largely through specialization, such that subjects produce sufficient surplus to pay for their own oppression.
  8. Education, media, and social engineering programs have subjugated human integrity to passive consumerism, with its related problems (resource conflicts, loss of freedom such as wage slavery). The only way out of this is creating a framework within which humans can prosper: provision of true education, learning of practical skills, stewardship of land, advanced technology for the people, and open access to economically significant knowhow.
  9. Import substitution is reducing dependence on external feedstocks and replacing them with local ones. People in control of their resources control their own destiny. Thus, to localize the essential parts of an economy completely is the prime formula for social stability. Localization should not be considered a struggle, but merely a possibility. It is a possibility that is not recognized because most people, as specialists, lack integrated technical literacy and skills that make a local economy feasible.

Deployment

The Rubber Hits the Road: OSE Product Cycle

To deploy the technological items of interest, we pursue a series of 15 steps known as the OSE Product Cycle. We develop the technologies of interest one by one, and as the components become available, we add them to the infrastructure of our facility, Factor e Farm.

It is a great challenge to design a collaborative development program for creating a world-class facility for open source economic development. The first natural challenge is that we are asking remote co-developers to take interest in the project, without enjoying the full benefit of seeing the integrated fruits of the effort – namely, the building of the facility itself. We address this point by motivating the development of each of the 28 key technologies for infrastructure building as products in their own right. We divide and conquer, and propose the development of the 28 technologies through the avenue of explicit products that utilize these technologies. As such, we can attract stakeholders interested in particular products, and develop the key generative technologies as part of that process. We already mentioned that our endpoint is optimized production facilities for products.

The above paragraph begins to address the issue of gathering stakeholders for the development process. However, it does not addressed the various challenges that lie in the path of deploying the 28 technologies- the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS)- via a distributed, open source pathway. The key challenges and some solutions are proposed in Figure 14.

Cycle.jpg

Figure 14. Challenges and solutions for deploying Global Village Construction Set component production for internal and outside markets.

The points of Fig. 14 are several:

  1. Synthesizing the entire Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is an ambitious endeavor.
  2. If we are talking about 28 technologies, and perhaps a 6 month development period until optimized production for each, then there is no way that we could deploy the GVCS, and build a world-class open source research and development facility, within our proposed time frame of 3 years (2008-2010).
  3. The only way to meet the timeline goal is to proceed with parallel development of the technologies.
  4. In order to pursue parallel development, funding must be available to accelerate progress.
  5. We will pursue a bounty funding mechanism based on attractive product packages and clear definitions of deliverables.

A detailed, step-by-step process, or deployment strategy, emerges out of Fig. 14. for rapid deployment of essential technologies for Global Village construction. It relies on distributed stakeholder co-funding cycles of approximately 1 month in duration, utilizing a social enterprise internet platform.

OSE Product Cycle

This OSE Product Development Cycle is:

  1. Core Team: Assemble a core development team for each product. This team must serve the functions of: (1), social enterprise website development and fundraising management; (2), technical development; (3), strategic development; (4), review team.
  2. Ecological Review: Publish Ecological Review on website. This review introduces the product of interest and all its attributes, and requests feedback on product choice for meeting a particular service. For example, for renewable energy production, the boundary layer turbine with solar concentrators is considered. In this technology choice, we propose a certain set of deliverables, and challenge the audience to come up with a better solution based on ecological design and localization agendas. We provide the Ecological Review as a motivation for certain products, which is our marketing effort to attract stakeholders to our technology choice. After considerable review, we believe that our product choices represent the best available technology for meeting certain needs, as supported by the Product Selection Metric in this proposal, and as motivated by ecological features, ease of replicability, and localization potential.
  3. Product Definition: Beyond the Ecological Review we define the Product Specifications of the Deliverable. This fills the clear deliverables requirement of Fig. 14. This includes a timeline and budget for product delivery.
  4. Design Phase: Next, we produce a Design, BOM, Sourcing Information, and Fabrication Procedure. This is published on the enterprise website.
  5. Review: We then send the information from step 4 out for review. The first level of review is a technical review team. This team of about 5 qualified people reviews the (1) technological aspects, (2), social merit, (3), P2P economy effects, (4) Quality of Life merit, (5), merit from the standpoint of liberatory technology if production time is counted , (6) ecological and regenerative merit, (7), dissemination and replication potential. The results of this review process are then sent out to an external, distributed review team, to verify whether the technical expert opinion holds merit with non-experts in any of the fields.
  6. Bids: Three bids are requested from prospective fabricators for prototype fabrication after the design has been agreed upon.
  7. Fundraiser Recruitment: Now the fundraising cycle proper begins. The first step is to recruit a fundraising team. This team of 10 or so individuals who will lead a publicity effort to direct others to our social enterprise site to request funding. We are looking for a large number of stakeholders to share the development risk, with small donations, and a possible funding collection tool such as Fundable.org.
  8. Fundraising: The role of the fundraising team is to identify potential stakeholders, contact them, and direct them to the website. We propose a week of conscientious fundraising by this team to collect the necessary funding. After 1 week, progress will be evaluated to update fundraising strategy. Details of disbursement upon successful funding are determined on a project-by-project basis, and are to be documented in the deliverable definition (step 3).
  9. Product Delivery: After a successful funding cycle of approximately 1 month, the building of a prototype (or other deliverable) is funded and product is delivered to Factor e Farm.
  10. Product Testing: The funding cycle is repeated for every step of the product development process. The step after an initial prototype is product testing. This may require certain infrastructure or outsourced testing procedures, and if costs are associated, this step will cover them.
  11. Prototype Optimization: The next funding iteration is to deploy an optimized prototype. This includes any redesign, and involves the fabrication of an entire device, from gound-up if needed, to document the ergonomics of optimized production.
  12. Fabrication Development: The next iteration is to deploy an optimized fabrication facility. This is probably the major cost step for all the technologies, unless the infrastructure and machining requirements are already satisfied by the existing flexible fabrication capacity at Factor e Farm. The goal is to have optimal production capacity for several or all of the products being fabricated at the same time.
  13. Fabricator Recruiting: Factor e Farm will provide an in-house fabricator (person) at the outset of a particular production effort. New people will be absorbed into the operation as soon as possible so that the Factor e Team could proceed to other products. This requires preparation of training materials and training time for the new participants.
  14. Fabrication Optimization: After a fabrication facility is tested, production results are replicable, and quality control requirements are met, optimizations are made to the production facility itself. This may include installation of additional equipment or reorganization of the work space.
  15. Production: Once step 14 is complete, production can begin in full. Orders may be accepted and filled at this point.
  16. Enterprise Replication: Once full production is in place, we will teach prospective producers via freely-downloadable documentation, on-site training internships, and workshops.

We will test the above 15-step strategy immediately by applying it to:

  1. The CEB machine fabrication facility development, with XYZ table developed as part of the program (components: CEB, XYZ table)
  2. Solar Turbine electrical generator prototype fabrication (components: Babington burner, steam generator, turbine, solar concentrators, Multimachine, electronics fabrication)
  3. Swing-blade circular sawmill prototype fabrication

The above projects are prioritized to meet our building (CEB and Sawmill) and energy needs.

Products

Here is a brief description of the technologies that we are developing.

CEB Press

CEB - Compresssed Earth Block press - regarded as the highest quality natural building method; also used in upscale housing; does not require curing - so may be built continuously; lends itself to 100% onsite building material sourcing; excellent thermal, acoustic, and strength; aka structural masonry. Also usable in fences, cisterns, road paving, Usable for ovens in a bakery, pond dams, thermal storage cisterns, silos. Used for barns, dairy plant, bakery building, additinal housing, greenhouses, etc. I would go so far as that could be the secret weapon of the entire operation. Other connections in diagram: requires soil to be pulverized, which may be done with the agricultural spader. May be used for building raised beds, modular building and greenhouse units. High value flex fab enterprise opportunity for any entrepreneur interested in fabrication of machine- huge profits are possible, because other CEBs are expensive ($25k for one of 3-5 brick/minute performance). Livelihood opportunity for independent builders. Requires as little as 1 person to operate. OSE design is based on power from tractor hydraulics - where the tractor is a general tool that can supply power to a large number of devices. Output with 2 people - a 6 foot high round wall, 20 feet in diameter, 1 foot thick, can be built in one 8 hour day. Fabrication is simple - after metal is cut - a drill press is required for drilling holes for design-for-disassembly structure. Welding is required in a few places where bolting is not practical, such as the hopper box. Summary: a high performance, rapid, semi-skilled building technique, which lends itself as a building method for creating advanced civilizations. Lifetime design.

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