Bootstrapping

Introduction

The term "bootstrapping" comes from the phrase "lifting yourself by your bootstraps", which is not actually possible but gets the idea across of a closed loop process. In the context of Open Source Ecology it means starting from a minimal set of people, skills, money, and tools, and using them to make progressively better tools until the full range of Global Village hardware is available. Along with an expanding tool set comes an expanding community organization. There is no point in having 50 people working when you only have a few hand tools to work with. The design problem is what is the optimal bootstrapping path, and how would it vary according to location, available resources and skills, funding, etc.