David Li

Conversation

• Open source discussion - leveraging talent
• Example - Ghana person - made a biodigester production ready.
• Open source in china is driven not by philosophy, but by necesssity. Getting to know people is easy.
• Strength of China is engineering and design -
• Not traditional outsourcing - Taiwan, Korea, HK, Singapore - in 70s and 80s. This is more accessible in China.
• Cutting out the middleman - if there is a sufficient local need - production follows.
• A lot of manufacturers of Shenzhen are doing manufacturing in Africa. If global - easier in China.
• Kenya as an example - customs tax is 10% in Kenya, vs import from China is 35% for fully assembled. If disassemble - then it's 10% import.
• Chinese companies joint venture with Kenyan companies.
• Work with Kenyan Chinese
• McKenzie report - comprehensive report on the scale of private investment in Africa
• Why doesn't Alex Socolof hire China to teach builds of tractors. $3k EV - shipping is $800. Import tax is 100% of vehicle. Tata is $3k. About $8k.
• Different countries have different regulation. 10% import duties.
• Africa is like China 30 years ago - government officials were accessible.
• Opportunity to go electric.
• For tractors it's not who has access to government officials - there are already rules to increase innovation in China.
• Couple of partners in Ghana, industrial part. Money is in real estate.
• Available manual labor - FAO - Smallholder Farm - target is smallholder farm.
• 80% of all agriculture land is smallholder farms.
• Red tape is there in China.
• Ghana is quite entrepreneurial.
• Ghana for heavy machinery - Accra is not heavy industry - Kemashu is heavy machinery. They are also the garage of West Africa. Used cars get fixed up there. Huge used car industry. Kemashi Hive - entrepreneurship hub. Big garage culture.
• Lots of old cars end up there.
• In USA, about 50% of all farmland is smallholder farm?
• In USA, farmers are one of the highest suicide rates in the world. According to a recent article.
• Trump country - the smallholder farm - less than 20 hectares
• Bigger farmers are less susceptible to suicide -
• Industrial farms in Europe will probably go out of business. Smallholder in Europe will do better.

FabLab

• You get more attention for putting a tractor on the blockchain rather than a tractor on a farm
• Narrative for agriculture.
• TroTro factory - Uber for tractors
• Fab Lab - other kids will not be as brilliant as MIT. 'I can get MIT in here' is attractive.
• One thing that prevents FabLab from being useful - is that people are not used to copying design. Because FabLab highlights the invention of someone. Something that is not economically significant.
• Atelier Paisans is a cooperative. So that is a good thing. Engineering team responds to farmer, not farmer to engineer. Their business model is - core team of 7 engineers - design lower cost tools for farmers. 70% comes from material markup, and 30% from workshop.

Business Model

• Look for Open Source Certification -
• Certify compliant products.
• "Centralization is ok for production" but knowledge should be open source.
• Moving towards local and distributed

Action

• Smallholder farm - labor is a short supply
• Chinese factories are becoming smaller. SHenzhen has 200k factories.
• The farm village - knowledge is pretty open. Even in village scale - 5000 e-commerce shops. 2000 factories - 50,000 people village. Everyone does some part of supply chain.
• Agrarian into industrial - in 1700s, noncompete was unknown. Very competitive. In initial stage, there were many companies. Or even Fairchild semiconductor - spawned 1000s of companies in Silicon Valley.
• Cooperation - Fab Village. Invited projects to develop and test stuff. Feb 19.
• 3rd Gen China GPS.
• Spectrometer data for plant growth and chemical composition of earth.
• Autonomous farming equipment.
• 200 people.
• Partner Lingde Big Data. Regarding spectrometer data. Engine manufacturer. Electric.
• Quality control - it's not that it's missing - it's that you have to pay for it.

Trend

David is, like Bold by Diamandis, calling for crowd sourcing and crowdfunding. On top, he calls for open source - but it is not clear whether he supports OSHWA compliant, collaborative design, or more the flavor of Academic Open Source with high barriers to entry.

Notes

• Article on DIY and professional build services in China. Also, white label and gongkai. Critique of Bunnies Huang. Questions - how to convert this to open source, not proprietary consortia of Gongkai? The key is open source design at the component level - not proprietary parts. This can enhance closed loop production cycles. Recycling of parts in Shenzhen is good, though. Concentrated open-ish network vs distributed manufacturing. 85% of electronics are made in China. Not distributed - [1]

Links

• Atelier Paysan (french ag machine co-op): - https://www.latelierpaysan.org/English
• https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/making-adapting-sharing-fabricating-open-source-agricultural-tools/2018/07/06
• Shanzhai (the chinese "open source"):

https://app.additor.io/p/w6JjNDkS#5919dc65499c573415eafa42