February 2015 OSEmail
Dear Community,
We are starting our monthly newsletter up again after a brief hiatus. Until now, OSE has been focusing on technical development that can lead to creating Open Source Blueprints for Civilization. Over the last 4 years, we have shown 6 technical proofs of concept (see notes under this slide). Having gained much experience, we are ready to regroup for the next phase - the development of a strong community and upgraded collaboration techniques.
Community Development Jonathan Kocurek is now OSE's Commmunity Manager. We are developing cohesive Working Teams to facilitate involvement and continuity. Continuity is a major challenge in any development project - so more effective role allocation and improved orientation materials will help.
Financial Sustainability - One of our milestones is building machines in a single day - which leads to exciting possibilities for creating value. Based on the 1 day build - we are transitioning now to a sustainable revenue model. It is the workshop production model - as an economically sustainable move forward based on open hardware.
This is important because this is a bootstrap approach that can scale the movement to many locations - as we intend to scale this work globally.
The economics work. The machine costs $4000-5000 in materials. We sell the machine for $10k, and the nearest competitor costs $52k. Tn our workshop last year, we make $5k from the sale, and $5k from tuitions - $10k net earned over a weekend.
We are taking these methods to Housing as well - showing that we can build a house on the time scale of a weekend. So far, it took us 5 days to build our 800 sf microhouse 4 addition - up to the roof and insulation. We did not finish the interior during that time - but we learned a lot as a proof of concept to see what is needed to achieve completion. We disovered that CEB by itself is difficult, so we intend to provide the house as a Product Service system - via our tractor + CEB press infrastructure and skill. It turns out that hybrid CEB - carpentry can be a highly replicable business model.
Distributive Enterprise. This year, we would like to take the CEB Press, Aquaponics Greenhouse, and 3D Printer to full economic replicability. This means - designing and streamlining production - and publishing exhaustive documentation - so that, for example - someone can work with a local fabricator to sell the CEB Press - We call our model Distributive Enterprise.
Aquaponics
Schedule for 2015