Shuttleworth Fellowship Application - 2013 - Marcin Jakubowski

Preliminary Application - 5 Minutes

Hi, my name is Marcin. I am applying for the Shuttleworth Fellowship extention to 2013. Last year I promised to finish the entire Global Village Construction Set by the end of 2012. This did not happen - we lacked process, structure, and management - and on top - our physical infrastructure broke down this summer as our numbers grew out of control.

To address this , we have spend $110k on physical infrastructure and housing in the last year - and we're building the organization. It is clear to me now that the former ad-hoc development process does not scale without organizational infrastructure . I tried to continue ad-hoc this year - got stretched too thin, and failed.

However, our progress is continuing. This year, we have built a total of 7 new machines, compared to 1 new prototype last year. This year, we have had 13 independent replications of GVCS machines in 4 countries, compared to the single - first independent replication of the brick press last year. To date, we have completed 15 unique of the 50 different prototypes, and 62 machines built in total.

The highlight for this year is - We have demonstrated a build of a complete Compressed Earth Brick press in 4 days - with unskilled labor - as opposed to the months of development for our first machine. Our goal for November - we aim to get this down to 2 days, and down to a single day in December. We are optimizing our production methods radically. We will apply digital fabrication - such as our open source CNC torch table for cutting parts for the brick press in 1 hour. Attaining efficient, distributed production would be a major milestone: which is achieving a boot-strap funding model where we net $5k in one day - based on the $9k sale price of the machine. The implications are- a viable alternative to centralized production.

Action Plan

The present challenge is transition from vision to institution. My goal is to build the team and process until the end of 2013 – and then 2014 - engage a 2 year, rapid deployment phase. Rapid means 6 prototypes built per month, with capacity to scale to 12 on demand upon availability of funding. To get there, we will do the following.

1. Most importantly - build structure. This starts with our strategic plan - and we are now working on positioning, enterprise strategy, streamlined development process, organizational processes handbook, and media strategy. We applied for tax exempt status and are also developing the for-profit side - as part of our hybrid enterprise model.
2. Second, develop collaborative production. Right now we are leaning towards the OSE Microfactory as the revenue stream for scaling our work. Based on initial results of the the $5k/day net earnings approach - we intend to demonstrate that 4 people working 8 hours per day can bootstrap to $20k in 4 days of work - as our funding model - from our 4000 sf production facility.
3. Third - build a team. We have shifted away from hiring dedicated fabricators, as we found that 2 day collaborative production runs in house are sufficient to build out prototypes while building team cohesion. Thus - we are recruiting a Product Lead - who is the operations leader for prototyping + 4 more full time machine designers, in addition to one that we have recruited already. We have also recruited a Development Director, Videographer, Executive Assistant, and farm manager.
4. Fourth - we are clarifying our development process - reducing our complicated 120 step development procedure to 20 Mission Critical Development and Documentation Steps - using Wikis, google docs, Sketchup, and other low access-barrier tools.
5. Fifth, we are Refocusing development strategically around Module-Based design – as opposed to Machine-Based design. It turns out that it takes about 13 modules to build any of the 30 mechanical GVCS machines. Thus, we need to develop only 13 adaptable modules with attention to interfaces between these modules - to build 30 tools. A similar pattern applies to power electronics. This extends our modularity concept radically - accelerating development - while making our tool set more robust and true to its product ecology nature.
6. Sixth, We are continuing the Flash Mob concept – recruiting experts in specific technical areas for our on-demand work sessions. We have 180 people in our database spanning design, engineering, electronics, and other areas. We will continue to recruit until we have several thousand people in our database by end of 2013 – for on-demand solutions to technical due diligence. We plan to integrate this with stack overflow or similar mechanism for upvoting technical answers.
7. Last, We are developing technical review boards of industry-specific experts. These adivors will help us to get our machines developed up to industry standards at accelerated speed - where we leverage our social capital for the common good - in order to recruit advisors.

By developing the GVCS, we are at the same time - developing an open source product development methodology that is intended to become the backbone of the open source economy.The 5 year vision is to complete the fist full OSE Development and Training Facility - which would be our first OSE Incubator - intended to scale to 144 branches worldwide within 10 years - for a $100M/year budget to sustain open product development efforts.

Thank you.

2012 Results Abstract: Rough Draft

Script - 13 Minutes

Hi, my name is Marcin – and I am a 2012 Shuttleworth Fellow – and this is my reapplication for next year. I must start with what I promised in my application last year and what happened in reality.

• Recruit 42 staff in 2 months to complete 13 product releases by 1st quarter
• Secure the $1/2M budget by January
• $80k/month by mid year in bootstrap earnings

I did not accomplish the above, though we did secure $590k by January – if the Shuttleworth funding is included. Regarding the first point – I now understand that scaling from a few volunteers to a full staff is not possible without a well-organized recruiting and on-boarding process – with probably 3 full time recruiting staff – and 3 months of time. We were without a stable development process – which we are constantly evolving. Further, it took us much longer than expected to evolve our shop to 40kW of off-grid power due to unexpected power equipment failures. Because we did not produce the full product releases as said, we are nowhere close to the monthly earnings expected – though our recent results indicate that we are still in a position to demonstrate $5k/day earnings – translating to $20k/month earning capacity – by the end of this year.

So I'm back to the drawing board. Now we did not do nothing this year:

Since the Shuttleworth Fellowship application of 2012, 24 more GVCS prototypes have been built. Please see the Prototypes Built and Cost graph – stretching from 2008 to present – to see our ovearll growth. The first ever independent replication of the CEB Press took place towards the end of last year - followed by 13 were independent replications 4 countries this year since the publishing of our Civilization Starter Kit DVD -v0.01 – with the 4 beta releases – tractor, brick press, soil pulverizer, power unit. We have been scaling and reorganizing drastically by refining our development effort, installing structure, and process – addressing the badly missing component of going from vision to institution. I hired a full time videographer, executive assistant, and Director of Development. 4 OSE Chapters have started in Europe. A major collaboration with a TED Fellow in Guatemala resulted in a commitment to deploy prototypes of 5 Tractors, 5 Power Cubes, and 2 CEB Presses – within 1 year - with the first tractor already completed. On the organizational front - We have incorporated the OSE Nonprofit and our tax exempt application is in process. We have stabilized our population at 6 people at Factor e Farm - up from 2 last winter. Including the Shuttleworth Fellowship, we secured a $590k budget for 2012, which is a considerable jump from the $2k/month budget of 2010. We spent a total of $110k on infrastructure upgrades since last year: HabLab, the 10 person living unit is now finished - we complete our 4000 sq foot workshop, dug a well, installed power infrastructure for 40kW of off-grid workshop power - 1 and 3 phase - got a backup connection to rural water. We spent $73k on GVCS development this year so far. Our overall efficiency of development (eta_dev - defined as total cash spent/number of prototypes produced) decreased drastically from $3k per prototype in 2011 to $8k/prototype this year. Becuase we spent more on infrastructure than prototyping – and because we don't have a streamlined overall process - and because we began paying people instead of relying completely on volunteers - our development costs are rising. The overall process for development and prototyping is completely in development as we are building on our learnings. There were 2 significant milestones in this – development of the Fabrication Diagram Method of swarming on prototype builds via optimized task allocation – and the Collaborative Production Run method – which relies on the Fabrication Diagram for its efficiency. So far – we showed that we can produce a Brick Press in 4 days with largely unskilled labor – and we are on track to demonstrate that we can do this in one day – or a net of $5k generated in one day – as a basis for the $80k/month earning levels that we discussed previously. Based on our results – we are now extending this collaborative production process to participation by the user of the machine – by inviting our next buyer to the production run itself on Nov. 23. In the broader sense – I also published a a scaling plan including OSE Incubators – 144 world-wide - by 2023.

So considering a lack of infrastructure, we did reasonbly well. And we should keep in mind that we are doing technological, social, economic, and organizational innovation – an ecology of innovations - at the same time. For example, we have – as far as I know - the world's only off-grid digital fabrication facility. In terms of social enterprise – we are defining the next level of such enterprise – Distributive Enterprise – where we just introduced this concept in a forthcoming issue of the MIT Innovations Journal. We are not only doing the open product development, but constantly going back to the drawing board on refining the method. We are dog-fooding our inventions – for core operating infrastructure - to build this extra level of acccountability of the true function of our tools. So, for example – this added a bunch of time to construction because of brick quality issues. Our innovative nature adds complexity – and therefore time - but our slow successes of autonomous, bootstrapping, lean, open source organization are positioning us well for viral replicability – our core intent. In fact, I believe that our deep approach is the reason why we will prevail in creating fundamental solutions to any pressing world issues related to material resilience.

The critical missing piece this year was infrastructure – not only physical and organizational: process, structure, and management. It was difficult in the middle of the summer when our power and water infrastructure collapsed – but we have solved these issues by digging a second well, connecting to city water backup – though we can still be compromised if we have further failures of our high-power inverters – further underscoring the importance of open source substitution for power infrastructure – where we are now prioritizing the open source inverter ahead of schedule. This story is just like the one where I have started the whole game after the industrial tractors kept breaking so we just built our own.

So far we have spent $180k this year, of which the largest single cost was infrastructure – so that our living and working structures are sound at this point. Thus, the next question is organizational infrastructure.

My major learning was that we forgot one little detail. In our development budget - we completely neglected to consider that a complex technology development process needs an organizational, management, and process infrastructure if it intends to scale. This was not clear to me because prior to the Fellowship - i was on top of the entire process at the time. Now everything had to be delegated - and we really had no well-defined standards and procedures to make this happen. This was not entirely obvious to me - and quite the opposite in fact - it was counter-intuitive to me - because I have been living out loud, leaving a large paper trail behind me. However, it is clear to me now that an essentially ad-hoc, low-coordination process lacks the rigor to inform strategic delegation and quality control of the development process to a much larger community - because the ad-hoc process works only under the bottleneck of a strong leader - whose part I played before. I tried that again, got stetched too thin, and failed.

Part of this is because we do things quite differently, and in a highly integrated way - primarily - we design a product ecology, not individual products - and then dogfood them. Essentially - we are turning modern industry upside down on its head - while building a community from dirt and twigs up to advanced civilization.

While it was easy to do the one man show - can this open development community scale - in the middle of nowhere, Missouri? This is my next challenge, and here is the platform. My goal is to build capacity and organizational infrastructure until the end of 2013 – and then in the 2014-15 period

1. First, we are shifting our effort from recruiting prototypers to machine designers – as we verified from our Collaborative Production Run success that we will be able to build a machine in 1-2 days given a month of design proparation cultiminating in the Fabrication Diagram procedure. Thus, we can recruit designers, but do all builds rapidly in-house. 2. We are crystalling the Developmetn and Documentation Processes. I am refining the 120-step Flashy XM platform jumble of steps to about 20 Critical Design Steps and Documentation Steps that are non-negotiable – and defining clear ways to each step. 3. Refocus development around Module-Based design – not Machine-Based design. To give an example – it turns out that it takes about 13 modules to build any of the 30 mechanical GVCS machines. Imagine designing for these 13 modules, that are modified flexibly to build any of the 30 machines – instead of building the 30 machines with numerous components each. This fundamentally extends our modularity way beyong the mere fact that some of the tools are already modules – such as Power Cube or Interchangeability of motors. 4. We started our Flash Mob concept – recruiting experts in specific technical areas for our on-demand work sessions. We have 180 people in our database spanning design, engineering, electronics, and other areas. We will continue to recruit until we have several thousand people in our database by end of 2013 – so when we run into any technical development issue – we can solve it immediately. Imaging calling a development session, and having 20 of the world's leading experts at your fingertips who you can access reliably with little or no lead time. 5. We are developing further technical review boards – to get our machines to industry standards. 6. We are refining Positioning by working with a branding expert. 7. Most importantly – we are recruiting 4 machine designers and a Product Lead to run the prototyping operations. The difficulty was communicating our method. But with the refocus around the Fabriacation Diagram, Collaborative Production Runs, Module-Based Approch, and extensive review + Flash Mobs of Experts – we are positioning ourselves for true scaling of the development method – now understanding that it takes an organizational infrastructure and clear process to make this happen.

Explain Shortcomings

• $125k production earnings - crowd, nonprofit, presales, angels. Lack of operations infrastructure sucked me in completely to managing development, and upon getting buried, I buried myself further as we exploded to 15 people with various infrastructure and people issues including exile, mutiny, firing, hiring, and quitting. Serious issues with inverter power delayed full development by 1-2 months of troubleshooting time.
• 36 prototypes, 12 releases in 3 months - or 36 people hired at $4k (3 people per machine - designer - prototyper - documenter) - 36 people recruited in 2 months is not entirely realistic - unless the role description is stabilized and a $300k/year recruiting infrastructure is in place.
• First Quarter - CNC Torch, Iron, Induction, CNC Multimachine + Modern Steam Engine, Inverter, Heat Exch, Solar Conc, + Rig, Dozer, Backhoe, Sawmill (+4). Main setback was Solar Concentrator Project going proprietary. Ironworker took 7 months instead of 2 because of lack of proper review and planning. CNC torch table has been completed after 5 months instead of 1 month because of lack of project management. CNC Machine is in progress, Modern Steam Engine parts are here, Inverter is in design phase, Heat Exchanger is successful, Sawmill has been tested successfully and is ready for Prototype II, Backhoe is successful, and Well Rig + Dozer will be deployed rapidly in the
• Goal - Tractor at $500 (100x lower cost)
• Bootstrapping, low-cost infrastructure - construction
• 4 Fabbers - $20k/month - april - to $80k- July

Details

• 62 prototypes to date in 4 countries
• 15 people on site in height of season
• Stable population of 6 for winter (from 2 last year)
• Secured total of $590k since applicaton in 2011 ($360k Shuttleworth + $100k Stiftung + $65k Kauffman + $63k Kickstarter)
• 4 OSE Chapters Started in Europe
• 13 independent machine replications
• 24 prototypes built since Fellowship award. 15 unique to date
• Critical infrastruture upgrades - water well + city, shop power
• Farm Manager is on site
• Fabrication Diagram Method for Collaborative Production Runs - social production innovation
• Senior TED Fellow, Collaboratorium, Global Insights Network - distinctions.

Scaling Issues Abstract

• Lack of management - no organizational infrastructure
• Numbers Growing out of control - off-grid infrastructure failed
• World's only off-grid industrial facility - scaling power - 1, 3 phase
• Open Source CAD solution issues
• Continued power issues

Scaling Solutions

• Developing organizational capacity: process, structuring, positioning, strategy, sequencing.
  • New emphasis on process and structure to accommodate 144 Incubators by 2023.
• 20 Year Strategic Brief
• Critical Path Development Procedure
• Critical Path Documentation Procedure - tap $35k outstanding from Kauffman
• New Clarity on development budget
• 4 Machine Designers followed by Product Lead. $20k/month bootstrap, $10k/month True Fans goal. Strategic Partnership pilot grants - Guatemala, Bangledesh, Haiti.
• Develop Review Process
• Develop
• Strategic Product Ecology Plan focusing on Interface Design Standards
• Flash Mobs
• Technical Review Team
• Board Development
• Advisory Board Development
• Conflict Resolution Process
• Clarify Positioning (We know it is machines, but how to monetize support: strategic nonprofit partnerships? Production Runs? True Fans upgrade?

4 Application Questions

Describe the world as it is. (a description of the status quo and context in which you will be working)

The status quo is an economic system based on artificial material scarcity. This is defined as a general global condition, where in the abundance of material and energy resources (rocks, plants, sunlight) in the absolute sense, humans fail to distribute and utilize these resources effectively or ethically to meet human needs within the constraints of natural life support systems. This promotes geopolitical compromise - which continues to manifest as resource conflicts, material deprivation such as hunger and poverty, corruption, and a general tendency of competitive waste to compromise genuine human progress.

What change do you want to make? (a description of what you want to change about the status quo, in the world, your personal vision for this area)

My program for addressing the above issues involves open-sourcing of material production. We are addressing this currently by developing the 50 GVCS technologies for creating infrastructures of small scale civilizations with modern comforts. I am committed to removing material scarcity as the underlying force driving human relations, personal and political – by making access to material security a universal human condition, as opposed to a privilege enjoyed by the few today. I am doing this by demonstrating this first-hand: living a life of post-scarcity. By developing enabling tools, I would like to demonstrate that advanced civilization can be build on the scale of any land parcel, using its local resources – starting with me and a community that I build as the guinea pig. By developing open source tools and techniques, I would like to make ethical living the norm, not the exception. This option has deep economic implications post-s carcity economics - where a repository of open design fuels distributed, flexible, digital fabrication on an equal playing field where everyone has access to the best design. I am interested in developing the next economy - in the form of distributive economic systems based on open source principles. I would like to create the Ubuntu of open hardware as the means. (post script: To clarify, the scope is much greater than the 50 GVCS tools. The GVCS is intnded to provide a solid economic base for further development of the OSE Paradigm. The greater goal is open-sourcing of the entire economy. This means making open source economic development an acceptable paradigm in society. Open source economic development is the development of Distributive Enterprise.

What do you want to explore? (a description of the innovations or questions you would like to explore during the fellowship year)

To this end, we're building the GVCS as the enabling tools – a high performance, open source toolkit sufficient to create complete economies. We are focusing on a crowd-based platform for rapid product development, as well as a platform for documentation. I want to explore the limits of the minimum infastructure necessary to bring about a world-class product development method - while maintaining a lean, radically transparent, radically inclusive organization. I want to explore the limits of simplifying design, and using simple, accessible tools for design - where we want to demonstate that wide access to participation and simple tools are more effective than advanced tools of limited access - in terms of providing solutions to open hardware development for solving artificial material scarcity issues. I want to explore branding, open franchising, open business models, and distributive enterprise - as a route to mutually-assured abundance. I want to explore creation of the most collaborative project in the world - how sinple tools promote radical transparency and radical inclusion for making open hardware accessible and a preferred option compared to proprietary research and development.

What are you going to do to get there? (a description of what you actually plan to do during the year)

To get there, we are ramping up the effectiveness of our methods by refocusing on Strategic Product Ecology Deployment - via emphasis on the modularity aspect of the GVCS. This means that we can build the next 26 tools using essentially 15 mechanical, 7 precision, and 10 electrical key modules using our newly revisited GVCS Modularity Pattern Language. Combined with the Fabrication Diagram for design preparation and the Collaborative Production Run prototyping approach - we aim to deploy 1 prototype per week at Factor e Farm starting January 1. We will use significant Technical Review via our newly-created Technical Advisory Board, and we will use a remote Flash Mob to document the same process via image uploads, real-time workshop camera, wiki for documentation, Google Docs for diagrams, and Booktype as the publishing platform for key content from wiki according to Publishing Standards. To facilitate development process, we are using Development Standards, reshifting to modularity via GVCS_Interface_Design_Standards and GVCS Modularity Pattern Language. The processes include Machine Development Process and Documentation Process, and Remote Collaboration Standards have been created for remote design, prototyping, testing, and documentation. Stack Overflow, Flash Mobs, and Technical Review are our key processes.

We are currently recruiting 4 Machine Designers as in 10 Month Rollout Plan, where once 3 of these are recruited, we will sequence in a Product Lead. We aim to recruit these by end of this year.