Bioneers Script

Intent

Take OSE Brand + personal story + Collaborative Production to full expression of the vision of open source economic development. See also info about Bioneers East Conference on Oct 26-28, 2012.

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

Personal Introduction

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 and an unstable global economy are the clearest expressions of the lack of such freedom. I believe that the answer to this pickle is the open source economy.

I was born in Poland. I remember tanks rolling down my streets - no - it wasn't a parade. These were the times behind the iron curtain - a clear state of material scarcity - where I had to wait in line for butter and meat. Poland was surrounded by powerful neighbors in its history. My grandfather was in the Polish underground derailing German trains in WWII, and my grandmother was in a concentration camp.

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

I came to America when I was 10. Many years after that - I noticed that there was another type of scarcity in the West - one characterized best by debt - where people live on money that they do not have. This appears as excess, but it's really a form of scarcity.

What is artificial material scarcity? Think of it this way: in the absolute abundance of resources - namely sunlight, rocks, plants, soil, water - from which all the wealth of the economy comes - the distribution of these 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. The story in America, and in former Poland, or any country in Africa or elsewhere - is a story of centalized capital and productive infrastructures in hands of those who hold the keys - to material production. that is the base layer. That is the layer upon which economies, political systems, and government feeds.

More specifically - we tend to think of the internet and information are the new sources of power - but I'd like to reframe that - on that the true source of power is still - natural resources, their transformation by industry - and the health of the earth relies on how well we steward those resources - so that we either crap up our environment or improve it as time goes on. These are our choices - made available increasingly to a larger part of the population - available especially due to modern access to information.

Freedom

So when I am talking about true freedom being related to natural resources - true freedom relies on our access to the information to process raw feedstocks into the lifestuff of modern civilization. that access to information is part of the economic process. The most efficient economic process, therefore, is one where information flows freely - the open source economy. Yet people today behave in denial of this basic proposition.

The patent system, trade secrets, and other forms of competitive waste take our economies back into the stone age. Open source economics is slow in its adoption. One good news is that Open Source Linux servers have now dominated the marketplace. The Linux open source computer operating system has a 25% share of the market in Brazil, while it is only 2% in more backward countries such at the US. We have great leaps of progress in the open source world - such as formation of the Open Source Hardware Association or scaling of Open Source Ecology - and community disasters such as Makerbot, an open source 3D printer - which just went proprietary. Some see open source as a scourge that takes jobs away from respectable companies.

Where does the balance lie? It is becoming increasingly obvious that the open source economy is the next economy - even if we discount my biased opinion. A business strategist friend of mine is not asking whether open hardware will be a player, but told me that "it's only a matter of time before companies like Caterpillar, John Deere, and JCB in the UK, are fundamentally disrupted by the kind of access to equipment that Open Source Ecology is bringing."

The question is simpler than the debate whether open or proprietary will triumph. The real question is: do we want an efficient economy? Open source is simply efficient: eliminate competitive waste via access to design, access to open business models, and a new corporate ethic of Distributive Enterprise - companies such as Open Source Ecology whose business model relies on taking ourselves out of business. We can't go out of business because we operate autonomously as a land-based facility. The GVCS tools provide the infrastructure. When executed rigorously, this business model brings about post-scarcity: an economic system where efficiency is the norm instead of competitive waste. In theory, innovation increases 10-100 fold so that problems are actually solved faster than they arise.

As enterprise becomes efficient - efficiency is the trojan horse for the open source economy. Inevitable - if efficiency is indeed what we want. Unleashed information is unleashed productivity.

But what do we mean by unleashed information and productivity? The natural consequence is decentralization - a Decent Economy - where flexible, digital fabrication executes globally-generated design - which fuels local production. What is the limit of this? The Open Source Ecology limit is that 12 people can take the GVCS - and build a modern economy from scratch - using local resources, at 2 hours per day of work.

In theory, it is possible that leashless productivity and efficiency - thereby reduction of the scale of production from global to local - brings about the possibility of ending resource conflicts, poverty, and hunger. But there is a deeper effect of such localization. Such localization leads to autonomy - where we regain control of our lives, our communities, and our world. If we now have time - we have time that we can use to care about the rest of the world - if we believe Daniel Pink's notion that intrinsic motivation is about autonomy for the pursuit of mastery consistent with higher purpose. At that point - the politic shifts from money and power as key determinants of personal and political power - to ethics and wisdom as the next force.

Autonomy is a condition where the scale of enterprise -the scale of a comprehensive economy - is reduced to the microscale of any land parcel with sunlight, rocks, plants, soil, water. This dense packing of information and technique onto the smallest opeartional scale - is the end of reliance on global systems - is made possible uniquely as a byproduct of the digital age. It is consistent with E.F. Schumacher's notion that societal organization breaks down when it reaches a certain scale. It is consistent with Ghandian economics, it is consistent with Buckminster Fuller's livingry as opposed to weaponry - and it is consistent with Martin Luther King's desire for governance based on law that transcends the law of man. This is because political and legal systems are build upon economies - and a decent economy means decent governance. This is the case where Autonomy gives us freedom to pursue mastery - towards a higher purpose. Autonomy is what gives us the freedom to pursue ethics - where our cognitive surplus allows us to look farther beyond. I want to create a world where politics are driven by ethics - because autonomous individuals have a choice to act based on ethics. We clean up our politics and corruption this way.

Nuts and Bolts

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.

More specifically - we build 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.

Our means are Collaborative Production. Our business model is replication. Our goal is mutually assured abundance.

One 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 one of the rare polymaths that will actually do this. - 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 - and just the data point of possibility - will extend the index of human possibility to wide replication 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.

Think of Open Source Techshop - a community fabrication facility - mixed with a Wikipedia-like library of optimal product design - mixed with collaborative production where the consumer is actually encouraged to participate in a production run.

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, keyline plow, 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.

A little further: induction furnace fueled by solar concentrator, pelletized biomass, windmills, and biogas electricity to produce the raw steel from scrap stock - such that our tractor can now be produced at $500 plus labor.

I need to emphasize our plan: Collaborative Production as a means to fund open source social enterprise.

Here is our current plan:

1. So we develop the 50 GVCS tools. Pursue strategic partnerships with specific parties interested in the development of these tools - whether third world applications or locally - where our key is assuring a level of technical development necessary to meet or exceed industry standards.
2. We attain $80k/month from a 4000 square foot flexible production facility via Collaborative Production - as a basic, replicable, operation. We build the same with our equipment, even using techniques such as vaulted domes to achieve our goals at 93 cents per square foot for workshops and houses. Typical economics are $4k in materials, $5k in profit - where we capture the value of production, and autonomous operation allows us zero overhead operation.
3. Replicate those facilities like mad - that would be the biz dev side.
4. Create the OSE Incubator - upon completing the 50 GVCS tools in 3 years - build curriculum to deploy the first full class of 12 Fellows. These OSE Distributive Enterprise Fellows follow the change model that education should include entrepreneurship.
5. Scale to 144 incubators. Catch is: there is a production model involved that nets $1M per facility, so we generate a yearly $100M budget for creating a veritable Open Source Product Development Pipeline - the mechanism for the Open Source Economy where
6. Replicate like McDonalds

The basic change model is:

• Efficient open source production yields 50x cost reduction of equipment over a lifetime - cost reduction over industry standards. How could nobody beat this? Everyone can join - but the social result can only be positive if production is open source. OSE branding is included, where collaborating parties pay a small percentage to cover certification fees for compliance with OSE Specifications. The facility is a live-in facility with a land base to minimize transportation, and energy is produced on site. That is the key branding element: absolutely responsible production.
• Education model of enterprise training - Incubators distributed world wide. Key: entrepreneurship as a force for change.
• Autonomous operation allows for zero overhead in most locations.

So, a combination of best practice (efficient enterprise) with entrepreneurship training combined with autonomous operation implies wide scalability.

How do we prevent others from replicating this? This is a high skill operation - training is needed. We maintain primacy until we develop 144 Incubators. Then we train the rest of the world.

How come huge finance capital does not follow suit and create more Incubators? It is welcome to do so. But that makes the Economy 2.0 a reality, which is our goal - so everyone wins.

Other Applications

Once the GVCS is developed, these are some of the applications that we foresee:

• A small enterprise that builds 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.

• OSE Incubator - training facility for Distributive Enterprise based on the GVCS
• OSE Campus - a production facility (think Walmart except with on-site custom production with material sourcing from within a few 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)

There are many basic productive operations possible:

• 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 Development, Developed and Undeveloped World - (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.

Other fabrication focus facilities:

• 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.)

Then there is third world aid:

• 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.

But in summary - we do know that we are after the GVCS 50 - and we are Built to Scale. We are after Decentralized production - Decent Production - for short. There are hints that docial production, collaborative production, distributive enterprise - are the case for the next economy. This phonomenon is happening in hacker spaces, Community Supported ag operations, Collaborative Consumption movements, in Urban Agriculture. Our vision is bigger: We would like to extend the model beyond elite consumers to the common man. This is not political ideology - just a business case for going to scale. But the traditional concept of scale is irrelevant - our concept of scale is to distribute the economic power to others - our metric of success being independent replications - after the GVCS is built.

We would like to extend the production beyond food to tractors, cars, industrial robots, and other core elements of modern infrastructure. Industry 2.0 - open plans executed in distributed, open source production facilities.

Collaboration Platform

There is a social component to this which optimizes global collaboration for generating design and adapting buildouts to many locations worldwide.

We are developing an open source product development pipeline - based on wikis, google, docs, and Sketchup. Plus other open source tools - which reduce the barriers to collaboration so that anyone can participate.

Our basic process starts with OSE Specifications - which essentially means open source, simple, modular, lifetime design, with design for fabrication. We focus on the modularity for quickness of development and build. Imagine a platform like Lego Blocks - where we build upon modules. As long as we know how different components and modules fit together, we can design them independently. The key here is interface design: design of how things fit together. For example, the design of the quick attach plate on the tractor determines how different implements must be shaped to fit on the front loader. Or the connector on an Arduino determines how to plug in a controller. Best example of this is legos, or Little Bits, an open source electronics education kit.

We have developed the Fabrication Diagram method for production runs - which allows us to map out the entire build process of a machine. The Fabrication Diagram facilites the build. It contains a visual representation of all fabrication steps and parts. The visual representation allows the fabrication team to understand which steps may be taken in parallel and which steps are done sequentially. Each step links to a fabrication drawing. Supporting files are arranged in well-organized folders. By visually placing fabrication steps horizontally on a page, we know that several steps can be taken in parallel. Items going down the page, or vertically down - are subsequent steps that have dependencies on prior parts being fabricated. This technique is useful when a team of fabricators is involved in production, such that fabrication can be done in parallel. We are testing this method to build a CEB Press in one day with 8 people. We got down to 4 days, and next time we aim for 2 days, and then 1 day, by the end of this year.

We are shifting our process to a method that relies on Flash Mobs - on demand ad hoc bands of volunteers - professional review - from an Technical Review Panel - a remote CAD team - while using Booktype, and wiki for publication. We are doing physical builds by Collaborative Production Runs. This is where we swarm with a team of 8 people on a build - and we can use this for both prototyping and for production. In production runs, we include our customers, and we are inviting others from the community to participate as well.

We are busy developing the platform, and one challenge is the absence of an open source CAD platform. Until FreeCAD, teh OS platform, matures - we are using Sketchup for ease of access.

Status and Review

So where are we today? We are currently scaling our organization - regrouping and reorganizing to transition from vision to institution. We are creating strategy, structure, process. It is growing pains. We are recruiting people for volunteer one month dedicated project visits - remote designers and collaborators - and we are recruiting full time designers.

Our work is about regenerating the world around us. It's about cleaning up our own economies so we are not forced to steal from others, but so we produce within our own communities. We are scaling operations. I invite you to join us - especially if you are a skilled builder or engineer or retired executive looking to make a difference in the world. See my TED talk if you haven't seen it, see out wiki, download a copy of the Civilization Starter Kit DVD v0.01, sign up to uor newsletter, sign up as a True Fan to support us at $10/month, connect us to funding oppoertunities. It's about getting the machines to the standards that we need - and creating an open source product development pipeline. Talk to me - i need mentors, and my organization needs technical review, process development, operations, and strategy. Nobody said that building the next civilization - the open source civilization - would be easy.