Pilot Model
Peter,
We are now ready to do that. Historically, OSE was focused on development, now we're ready for pilots, and that was the nature of my first trip to Haiti this weekend. I established ties with a wide stakeholdership that appears to meet the requirements for a locally-driven pilot project including local fabrication of the machines themselves.
Regarding financing, the basic model that appears to make sense after my experience here in Haiti is:
1. Fund open source technology transfer process up to local fabrication via local foundations, US foundations, or other forms of nonprofit sector activity. We develop tech transfer protocol and support. 2. Local stakeholdership is motivated by clear return on investment. Meeting of real needs or community economic development is the motivator. 3. Local stakeholders contribute back to the OS tech transfer process by knowledge capture including adapted equipment designs, open enterprise model, and complexity mapping. 4. Successful effort as such (marked by, for example, Haiti becoming a leading producer and development center of open source brick presses or tractors) means potential of wide replicability, because our main product is the OS Tech Transfer Protocol/Process with all supporting informations (designs, open business model, etc).
To take it to large scale, i would see something like this:
- Finance an open source tech transfer protocol up to local production.
- Successful pilot project.
- Viral replication.
The devil's in the details. These include gathering a team of stakeholders embodying the correct incentives for distributive, open source economic development. I would see that this is the key, as if the effort is self-funded, this gives lots of leeway.
The main platform here is in generating local production from open source designs, which becomes part of a global collaborative.
Root capital - I see it's a social investment fund. My question would be if the funder is the beneficiary, ie, direct stakeholder, otherwise I see non-optimal incentivization for success. We need to structure the process that the local stakeholders, not outsiders, are funding the project, so they have skin in the game, and no debts to pay off. I think we should stick to the usufruct investment model (the investor is the user or direct stakeholder), whatever the correct terminology is - where we have no investment from outside the community unless there are no strings attached.
Those are my thoughts. I think the best way to make this scalable, perhaps the only way, is to build from within the target community, show a success case, and let the results speak for themselves. Then we function primarily as an open source tech transfer organization.