First OSEmail on phpList

Dear OSE Supporters,

We are glad to share a few announcements - for the first time now using our own email server - with phpList open source email software.

To review a little. The OSE concept was formulated in 2003, and we started with a land-based facility to explore starting civilization from scratch in the middle of nowhere, Missouri, in 2006. In 2011 I gave the TED Talk on the Global Village Construction Set[1] - and now we are 33% done:

State of Completion infographic.

You can trace our blog posts since 2007 on the front page of our website - https://www.opensourceecology.org/ - starting with the building of an outhouse. It is interesting to take a look at a video from each year since 2008 - which is found on our videos page - https://www.opensourceecology.org/about-videos-3/

We started the True Fans in 2009. Consider subscribing here [2] if you would like to support this work with a small donation each month. We only have about 40 True Fans right now - from a peak of about 400 in 2013. Now we added program revenue to our funding mix - by running public workshops beginning in 2014.

Continuing on the big perspective issues - I'm retiring for the second time now to write a book. My first retirement was from a plasma physics Ph.D. in 2003. We haven't yet got a title for the book. All I know is that it will be a good mid-point battle cry to finish the Global Village Construction Set by 2028. We am aiming to publish in 2020, after which I would like to go on a world tour like Mark Twain did last century.

But I'm really in it for the long term. If we are done in 2028, then we can replicate OSE Campuses far and wide, as points of light for inspiring their respective communities. Our latest thoughts on the model is that the OSE Compus is a research and education campus - which is a format palatable to the public and executable in practice in the form of a regenerative lifestyle. I mentioned '2 hours of work per day to attain a modern standard of living'. Yes, indeed that will be part of the design. It's a question of eterprise skill and innovation.

In 2028, just FYI, we plan to switch full time to work on human self-determination - which is a natural extension of eradicating artificial scarcity. In 2038 our work will probably shift to reforming economic and political systems. By 2048, we would like to move on to the health system, as open collaboration becomes a norm and people no longer get sick. So we may not have much work left there.

In the meantime, one major gap remains in our work. Nobody has yet shown the unambiguous power of open development when it comes to open hardware products changing entire industries. In truth, the open source 3D printer has shown this already, but nobody noticed. And large numbers of distributed enterprises have not really been created to show the potential of distributive economics. Re-distributive economics are alive and well - but Distributive Enterprise [3] is rare to nonexistent.

Our cunning plan is to change this by next year. We are planning to run a HeroX [4] incentive challenge to produce a professional-grade, open source, 3D printed cordless drill. As a world's first distributive enterprise where the stated goal of the challenge is to put 100 people into business producing such drills in their own community - by 2021. What does it take to do this? We are thinking hard.

In the meantime, we are running more workshops. In the next one, we plan to teach some really useful skills. Ever have an idea and not know what to do with it? Ever wish you could build something to solve a problem that no one else has solved? But you did not know where to start? Well, you are 9 days away from being able to do that.

https://www.opensourceecology.org/open-source-microfactory-stem-camp/