Community Supported Manufacturing
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Community supported manufacturing (CSM) is a business model where a production facility - a digital fabrication facility - is co-funded by a large number of individuals interested in a certain product. In this model, product development costs are covered by a collaborative, open source product development process. This development process produces documentation of fabrication procedure, and continues up to creating access to digital design files for Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) using the above digital fabrication facility.
The resulting enterprise is executed as a small microfactory (4000 sf production modules) that can produce a wide range of goods and services, as 1 is a bad number in business. Such a facility competes effectively with global supply chains for market share, by leveraging the value of circular economies and local supply chains.
The Open Source Microfactory-based CSM operation is intended to realize the promise of global collaborative design and local production (leveraging digital fabrication) as promised initially in Fab, but not yet delivered due to the general lack of Collaborative Literacy mindsets.
