Strategic Plan 2 Ambitious
Mission
The mission of Open Source Ecology is to create the Open Source Economy - an economy that optimizes not only production, but distribution - while promoting environmental regeneration and social justice.
Vision
Open Source Ecology will not rest until the barriers to human evolution are toppled. Our platform is
- Eliminating Material Scarcity - 50 machines of the Global Village Construction Set - a Village in a Box
- Freedom for All - The elimination of war, and conflicts over resources
- Enabling the Human Spirit - community of 12 people, 2 hrs. per day to reach a modern standard of living from local resources - an ultimate standard of human potential
- Open Invitation - The benefits of Open Source are bigger than software.
Introduction
Our goal is to create a parallel Open Source Economy that captures 0.1% of the global market share of all physical production by 2028. This production includes food, energy, housing, fuel, transportation, electromechanical technology, and microelectronics. An Open Source Economy is defined as an efficient economy - where Efficiency means access to open source design and openly-published business models/enterprise templates (Distributive Enterprise).
All wealth comes from sunlight, rocks, soil, plants, and water - the abundant feedstocks of modern civilization. We are creating an open source toolkit that allows people to convert these resources directly to a modern standard of living - at a cost of no more than 2 hours of work per day. This is an ultimate standard of human potential.
An open source economy involves unleashing access to enabling know-how anywhere in the world - implying relocalization of economic production.
The OSE plan for achieving the above involves:
- Distributive Enterprise Platform - Developing a scalable, open source product development methodology by year-end 2013.
- Civilization Starter Kit - Developing the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) in 2014 and 2015 to demonstrate the development of 6 parallel projects via the Distributive Enterprise Platform.
- Immersion Curriculum for Distributive Enterprise Fellows - Creating a curriculum for distributive entrepreneurs to build OSE economic hubs worldwide. The first training campus - called OSE Incubator - will be built in 2016, with the first class of 12 Fellows graduated by 2018 after a 2 year immersion program.
- OSE Incubators - New OSE Incubators will be developed on 3 year cycles from start of immersion training, to reach 144 OSE Incubators in 2022.
- OSE Campuses - The OSE Incubators will train other entrepreneurs who are interested in starting productive facilities within their own communities. These new facilities are known as OSE Campuse. They focus on the production of all tools relevant to creating a complete economy. Our goal is to incubate 12 OSE Fellows per class. These Fellows start Campuses world-wide, to reach over 3000 in 2028.
The GVCS consists of these tools:
Edit. Document may have links visible only upon editing.
Funding
We intend to fund our operations via a combination of grants and production earnings. We have a half-time Director of Development. The Factor e Farm workshop is a 4000 square foot flexible fabrication facility, with 12 production bays - capable of producing at least 4 large machines at a time. We aim to reach a $20k/month production earnings level by December, 2012 - by selling 4 CEB Presses per month at a net earning level of $5k/machine. We aim to attain $80k/month by December, 2013 - by selling 16 machines per month - after adding several further machines to our Full Product Releases.
Scaling Strategy
Introduction
It took MacDonalds about 20 years to scale to 5000 branches from start-up. We are aiming to match this rate for startup of open OSE Incubators and OSE Campuses by achieving about 3000 branches in 12 years from the first OSE Incubator. An OSE Incubator is a training facility for training the distributive entrepreneurs - those who will train others to replicate further Incubators. We intend to, first, create 144 Incubators - and these incubators will train entrepreneurs who then build open source ecology in their respective communities. The distinction between Incubator and Campus is that the explicit role of the Incubator is to train distributive entrepreneurs (OSE Distributive Enterprise Fellows) - while the role of the Campus is to create OSE Fellows dedicated to community economic development, without the explicit role of training distributive entrepreneurs.
OSE Incubator
We intend to spend 2016 creating a curriculum for a 2-year replication training immersion program for social entrepreneurs - and specifically, for OSE Distributive Entreprise Fellows. We intend to start the first class of Fellows in 2017, with 12 graduates by 2019. During the course of their immersion curriculum, Fellows will participate in production runs and capture their productive value as capitalization assistance for their future startup. Upon graduation, these Fellows will work closely with OSE International to set up 12 Incubators by 2020, and 144 worldwide by 2023. This includes:
- Recruiting Incubator staff
- Building Incubator infrastructure with the Staff, with capitalization assistance of $100-150k as above ($80k/month net production model from OSE Microfactory)
- Recruiting a class of 12 further Fellows
The established Incubators will work closely with the Fellows to reach the 144 Incubator milestone. Upon these being established, the function of the Incubators will shift from training OSE Distributive Eneterprise Fellows to OSE Fellows. The distinction is that the latter are agents of open source economic development in their communities, as opposed to trainers of new Fellows.
OSE Campus
An OSE Campus is defined an a land-based, autonomous entity with a 4000 sq ft workshop which clears approximately $1M of value generation per year and serves as a economic engine and nonprofit hub within a surrounding economy. OSE Incubators train OSE Fellows - the startup entrepreneurs who build the OSE Campus.
The design of the OSE Campus is intended to be scalable on a month replication time scale, such that OSE Campus may scale their operation readily. Because Campuses are autonomous in operation, they may scale as the centers of a networked economy in a world where nation states have diminished in their relevance as political centers of organization. The OSE Campus is intended to be an economic hub of a regional, resource-based economy.
10 Month Development Roadmap
We currently have a $440k budget for the next 10 months.
10 Month Budget
Team Development
The current team is shown in yellow below. We are currently recruiting a Master Prototyper, 3 Machine Designers, and a Construction Director. We have a Videographer for documentation, a Farm Manager for running the agriculture operations, and we have a Director of Development for setting up the organizational infrastructure as a hybrid enterprise.
We are considering a Community Manager, as the ED is currently performing this role.
Development Scenarios: 5 and 15 Year
Note: The cost for all 50 prototypes has been determined by estimating man-hours required based on average salaries. The total was determined to be $2.2M [1], or about $40k/product release on average (not including organizational overhead).
Here are our assumption for determining the possible development rates:
15 Year Development Time
- We currently have a $440k budget for the next 10 months, which we plan on burning down to produce 28 new prototypes as above (about $16k/prototype, or $48k/product relase after 3 prototypes). In this budget, we are securing volunteer support on branding and business support/development via the TED network, and we are paying for key support and core development (prototyping) work as in above budget.
- The key development rate-limiting step is managing the development of our infrastructure - physical, development platform, and organizational development.
- Key priorities on infrastrucure are:
- Physical Infrastructure: Stabilize physical infrastructure by completing energy, housing, and water infrastructures; develop agricultural and energy-production operations.
- Development Platform. Developing a scalable, open source product development methodology. Keys to this development are a streamlined process for crowd-sourced solutions, such as Flash Mobs. This includes a robust methodology for assuring that design, CAD, prototyping, testing, video, technical writing, and other aspects can scale - by providing both tools and organizational inrastructure/process.
- Organizational. This involves support staff and process.
- Our budgeted salaries for the key people are about 1/2 the market rate. The assumptions here are $4k per month for a Master Prototyper. An average hourly rate for a fabricator is $20, which is low for a Master Prototyper - who is expected to have a broad fabrication skill set. For a Machine Designer, the average hourly rate is $40 (link) - which means our Machine Designer budget of $4000/month is one half of a competitive rate.
- We assume that we can recruit stellar candidates - but this may be difficult - and is a risk factor in our development plan.
- We rely on volunteers for many roles.
With the above assumptions, we can foresee the following development pattern:
- Current prototyping rate of 1 per month
- Stabilizing organizatinal/physical/platform infrastructures by end of 2013
- Can this be accelerated? Not likely, since infrastructure-building takes time. At the end of this time, we develop a rapid development platform that we can scale to 6 projects at one time - which is the max possible under 1 executive and operations manager. To increase the rate of prototyping, a higher organizational complexity would be needed.
- Let's say that we can stabilize by end of 2013 - then we have assured $20k/month earnings in 2012 and $80k/month in 2013.
- We have $1M/year budgets as such. Then it takes us 2 years to finish the GVCS - to cover a cost of $2.2M. This assumes no further grant funding.
- Then in 2015, we begin developing curriculum, and we develop Incubators and Campuses according to 15 year plan.
Can this be accelerated?
5 Year Development Time
With professional assistance on all fronts of organizational, physical infrastructure, HR, process, and technical aspects - we can potentially accelerate development like this:
- Solve all infrastructure issues on 6 month time scale with professional Construction Manager
- Solve all organizational/business structuring issues within 3 months - professional consultant
- Recruit an entire team within 3 months - recruiter
- Develop basic product development platform in 3 monnts - 1 person full time
- Develop all organizational processes in 3 months
- Begin full development process by Q2 of 2013.