Blog Update Feb 2015

Points: We got lots of proof of concept supporting delivery of magical goals. It is time to go the last mile on economic significance. -Development velocity -Extreme Manufacturing -Single day builds. This is significant. We know of no other company or production mechanism that can produce a comlete heavy machine

It's been quite a magical journey over the last 4 years. The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) - a set of 50, open source industrial machines required to build a civilization with modern comforts - has captured the imaginations of millions.

50 icons - with 4 year update across them

The promise is grand: developing open source machines, lowering barriers to entry, and thereby addressing many global grand challenges related to material scarcity. Indeed, as the focus is creation of the distributed, open source economy - the promise lies in addressing a problem deemed by the UN

The importance of the GVCS is that it's a set of machines that can go a long way to provide material security at significantly reduced cost - food, energy, housing, fabrication, energy, and other needs. Because the set is open source, the machines are intended to be replicated freely to create impact on any global grand challenges that are related to material security. Think - that's just about all the problems in the world today - directly or indirectly.

TED Talk

The project focuses on the development of the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS): 

The promise of the distributed network approach, as opposed to the broadcast (centralized) approach is that more people have access to raw productive power. We have learned that are plans are sufficient for someone to download and build machines on their own. In 2011, the first ever replication occurred.

While many people think about Africa when they hear about the GVCS - the set is intended to fix our own backyards before we take it anywhere else.

So far, 104 machines have been built in total - most being heavy equipment like the brick press and tractors, and also a few small ones like the micro Power Cube or 3D printer.