Bioneers Script

Intent

Take OSE Brand + personal story + Collaborative Production to full expression of the vision of open source economic development.

Sample: TED Talk Script - 4 minutes

Open Source Ecology - TED Fellows Talk - 4 Minutes

This is the final talk that Marcin delivered at TED, with cadence notes.

slide

slideHi, my name is Marcin. I'm a farmer – technologist / from Poland now in the US / I started a group called slideOpen Source Ecology - and we took on a very big, hairy, audacious goal. We identified the 50 most important machines that allow modern life to exist – the basic tools that we all - rely on - every day / whether we know it or not / everything from a Tractor slide to an oven slide to a circuit maker slide. Then we create an open source, DIY version that anyone can build and maintain at a fraction of the cost. slide

We call this the Global Village Construction Set. slide

Is this reinventing the wheel? Yes. Let me tell you a story.

I finished my 20's with a Phd in fusion energy slide and I discovered - that I was useless / I had no practical skills / The world presented me with options and I took them, slide I guess you would call this the consumer lifestyle.

So I started a farm slide in Missouri / and I learned about the economics of farming. I bought a tractor slide // and it broke slide / I paid to repair it slide/ and it broke again slide / and then soon enough / I was broke, too slide. I realized that the truly appropriate - low-cost tools / that I needed / to build a sustainable farm and settlement - just - didn’t - exist yet.

I needed tools that were slide robust / slide modular / slide highly efficient / slide low cost / slide made from local or recycled materials / slide and, that were designed for a lifetime - not obsolescence. I realized slide I'd have to build 'em myself.

I did just that / slide and I tested them / I found that industrial productivity - can be achieved - on a small scale. // I posted all the slide designs, schematics, instructional videos, and budgets onto a wiki. slide Then contributors from all - around - the world began slide showing up - prototyping new machines slide - during dedicated project visits slide / To date, we prototyped slide 8 of the 50 machines / and now the project is beginning - to grow on its own slide

We know open source has succeeded with software slide and with tools for managing knowledge slide / and creativity. Despite a lot of early skepticism / it's beginning to happen with slide hardware too.

We're focusing on hardware - because it’s hardware that can slidechange - people's – lives - in such tangible - material ways. If we can lower the barriers to farming - building - and manufacturing - then we can unleash massive amounts of human potential. slide

And not only in the developing world. slide We’ve seen lots of excitement from American farmers / makers / and builders - who can use our free published library to start a construction business slide - a parts factory - an organic CSA - or just to sell energy back to the grid. / Our goal is to publish slidea library of instructional material so complete / so clear / that a single burned DVD - is effectively a civilization starter kit.

slideI’ve planted a hundred - trees in a day. I’ve pressedslide five - thousand - bricks in a day from dirt beneath my feet. I’ve slidebuilt a tractor in 6 days. I'm fairly certain this is just the beginning.

If this idea is truly sound, then the implications are significant: slideA greater distribution of the means of production, environmentally sound supply chains, and a newly relevant DIY Maker culture that can hope to transcend artificial scarcity. We're asking the question, what - are the limits - to - getting - technology - right? // Thank You. slide

Content - 20 minutes - About 5x as long as TED Talk - 5 Pages Long words

I believe in freedom . I believe that true freedom - the most essential type of freedom - starts with our ability to use natural resources to free ourselves from material constraints. And I believe that ongoing resource conflicts, fractional reserve banking, and an unstable global economy are the clearest expressions of the lack of such freedom. I believe that the route to that freedom is the open source economy.

I was born in Poland. I remember tanks rolling down my streets - and it wasn't a parade. These were the times behind the iron curtain. This was a clear state of material scarcity - where I had to wait in line for butter and meat. Poland is one of those places with a good history of conflict, surrounded by powerful neighbors. My grandfather was in the Polish underground derailing German trains in WWII, and my grandmother was in a concentration camp.

So I thought about the terrible things that happen when resources are scarce and people fight over opportunity.

I came to America when I was 10. It was great, until many years after that - I noticed that there was another type of scarcity in the West - one of planned obsolescence and debt - where people live on money that they do not have. It manifests as excess, but it is based on artificial material scarcity.

What is artificial material scarcity? Think of it this way: in the absolute abundance of resources - namely sunlight, rocks, plants, soil, water, air - from which all the wealth of the economy comes - the distribution of these processed resources is skewed - such that poverty, hunger, and war are the norm in today's world. In the digital world, many think that we can just write an app to make these problems go away - but the answer is deeper - and that answer requires addressing basic material production - as the source of our freedom.

My case is for mastering material production - as the most fundamental route to freedom. The story in America, and in former Poland, or any country in Africa or elsewhere - is a story of finance capital and productive infrastructures skewing power and access to those who hold the keys - most fundamentally - to material production. that is the base layer. That is the layer upon which finance and internet platforms operate on top of.

I believe that true freedom starts with freedom from material constraints. I also believe that the effects of freedom from material constraints are much deeper than the possibility of ending resource conflicts, poverty, and hunger. I believe that freedom from material constraints leads us to autonomy - where we regain control of our lives, our communities, and our world - where it is no longer money and power but ethics that determines the course of human and political action. This is why I started open source ecology.

Autonomy gives us freedom to pursue mastery - towards a higher purpose. Autonomy is what gives us the freedom to pursue ethics - as we no longer are stuck in the daily grind of putting bread on our table - but have cognitive surplus to look farther beyond. So we then begin to clean up our politics in our own backyards, and international criminal cases such as child soldiers who are forced to kill their parents.

So now to the nuts and bolts. To arrive at the open source economy, we are developing the Global Village Construction Set - a set of the 50 industrial machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts. We take industry standards and convert them to simple, open source, modular, lifetime design counterparts - meeting or exceeding industry standards at a fraction of the cost.

The unique feature is that the entire GVCS can be packed into a 40 foot shipping container. Then, this set can be deployed to create an entire modern economy - from raw land - where as few as 12 people can create a modern standard of living - from local resources - at 2 hours of work per day.

Before you run away scared thinking that you would never do that - I would like to tell you that I am offering to you - to be the guinea pig for you. I and 11 others - possibly even someone in this room and I invite you - will do the experiment for the world. The pioneers will trailblaze - but The more replicable application is on the community scale.

Imagine an enterprise - like Walmart of Today - that can be started anywhere that sunlight, rocks, plants, soil, water are found - that can produce anything from these natural resources. Really like Walmart - except the facility is a custom production facility - fed by resources from within a few mile radius.

Now I would like to turn to the physical reality of this. We started from raw land 6 years ago - and built our facility like this. 4000 sf fabrication facility - where we build tractors and compressed earth brick presses with which we built this very facility. We also built a 3000 square foot house. We are optimizing production, such that an inexperienced team of 6 with leadership build a complete brick press in 4 days - and now aims to do the same in 1 day with digital fabricaiton. So we are talking about netting $5k/day when the materials cost $4k and the sale price is $9k. So we are getting our CNC torch table up and running, we built our own Ironworker machine as the core of custom fabrication metal cutting, our own holepuncher, heavy duty drill press, cold saw - CNC circuit mill - and we are becoming efficient. We aim to build a CEB living unit on 2 day time scales for 12x12' modular living units with double CEB walls and straw insulation. We are trenching and digging with our tractor, with our machines sitting broken more time than in operation - but that's the reality of open source machine development. We just got our open source dimensional sawmill for the first run, and we built other machines, like the microtractor, heavy duty string trimmer, trencher, hydraulic power unit, and soil pulverizer. We are just beginning, and we don't know what we're doing. But we know where we are going: and that is to the open source economy.

This is what I really want to talk about - after exposing my background to you and showing a bit of what it looks like on the ground.

We are developing an open source product development pipeline - based on wikis, google, docs, and sketchup. Plus other open source tools.

We are developing Distributive Enterprise. We are in business to put ourselves out of business - because we are forced to innovate constantly and we have bigger fish to fry. The bigger fish is the Open Source Economy - a whale of a prize.

Our enterprise works simply. We build things. We own the productive capital. We have primacy by virtue of our social capital, which comes from us having the integrity to put ourselves out of business. But as hard as we try, we cannot put ourselves out of business, because we constantly increase our product line and diversify into other operations.

Such as: What is really our true offering?

It is the GVCS. But what exactly does that imply from the tactical rollout perspective?

=Quality Products=

• Open source machines at 5x lower cost that meet or exceed industry standards wile embodying simplicity, modularity, and lifetime design that that make these machines 50x more cost effective over their entire life cycle.
  • Where do user cases come in? To me, it's not 3rd world, but independent replication. How do we position ourselves as serving independent replicators vs. doing 3rd world aid programs? For 3rd World Programs, we promote their independent replication, and provide tech assist - we don't ship product to them.
• Here are Metrics for GVCS Deployment

=Going to Scale=

• OSE Incubator - training facility for Distributive Enterprise based on the GVCS
• Open Source Product Development Platform - collaborative development method that builds on prior work without patent restrictions to accelerate innovation 10-100x over modern development methods.
• OSE Campus - a production facility (think Walmart except with on-site custom production with material sourcing from within a 50 mile radius)
• R&D Center for Open Source Economic Development - think OSE Incubator with heavy R&D component, including offering Ph.D. programs in open source economic development
• Standards Setting for the Open Source Economy (think Open Source Hardware Association + product development methodology)

=Essential Production=

• Integrated Agriculture Operation (standard CSA except year-round, full-diet. This makes fresh, local, organic food available to the common man by reducing production cost via access to equipment, genetic stock, and techniques. Part of this operation is a significant genetic repository and propagation capacity. Reconnects the human to nature. Wendell Berry's dream.)
• Autonomous House Construction (independent house building contractors, except focusing on autonomous housing construction at a cost affordable to the common person. Uses modern steam CHP, biogas electricity, wind power, and solar concentrator)
• Village (modern cookie-cutter developer, except including agriculture, fabrication, energy, other production streams for creating a comprehensive economy; New Urbanism with a complete, built in economy)
• Center of human evolution (voluntary simplicity + right livelihood to produce a small community <200 people where a modern standard of material existence is produced on 2 hours per day of work based on local resources -such that the rest of one's time contributes to autonomy for the pursuit of mastery consistent with higher purpose (Daniel Pink)
• Community Energy - To make renewable energy available on the community level - biogas electric, pelletized biomass, solar concentrator, and wind power. Take the modern utility minus coal, natural gas, and nukes.

=Fabrication Focus=

• Digital fabrication and prototyping facility (Open Source TechShop at 1/10 the cost due to usage of open source fabrication machines; also Cloudfab)
• Collaborative Production Facility (think Hackerspace with real products and high social coordination. Reconnecting humans to their productive potential. Think New Dawn Engineering minus the labor via simplicity, modularity, design-for-fabrication, and digital fabrication)
• Off-grid digital fabrication facilities (Open Source Techshop outside of industrialized areas. Think Technological Leapfrogging.)

=Nonprofit Development=

• Pilot infrastructure-building and poverty-alleviation projects for humanitarian ends. (think Working Villages International + open source equipment)
• Third world development. Critique: Microfactory infrastructure needs to be sequenced prior to machine deployment so target population can be in full control of the technology.

Autonomy

• Doomsdayers (think of a productive infrastructure as an alternative to guns, gold + grub)
• Autonomous housing construction, autonomous communities
• Visionaries who see material security as a fundamental driving force for freedom (small market for this)

Media

• The potential of the GVCS and personal story behind it is tramendous.
• Speaking engagements and documentary opportunities can be a revenue stream.