February 2015 OSEmail

Dear Community,

Welcome to the next installment of OSEmail - our monthly newsletter. The big picture of OSE for the last 4 years is: we have been focusing on technical developments towards the Open Source Blueprints for Civilization. We have shown 6 critical proofs of concept (see notes under Permaculuture Voices Slide 15, and pictures/comments in slides 17-54) - that make the notions of civilization startup realistic. Having gained much experience, while discovering how little we know - we are ready to regroup for the next phase. This is a focus on a strong community with evolved collaboration techniques. Our next milestone is achieving compression of design time 100-fold from 5 years to 2 weeks by using Extreme Swarming techniques. Critics say that only a small team can work efficiently, but we have inklings of evidence that extreme coordination of larger groups is feasible under specific conditions. Now here are specific updates:

Schedule for 2015: We have finally published OSE Schedule 2015. How about a workshop where you build a 36,000 pound, open source bulldozer - in 3 days? This is intended to be our next major accomplishment - demonstrating open source for extreme industrial power. And much more. We are offering a range of workshops - from ecosystems to machines. If you want to be kept up to date - make sure you are signed up for this monthly newsletter - see OSEmail. This year marks the first year with a heavy focus on agriculture, with at least 2 permaculture workshops planned at this point. We are still trying to organize a Master Planning event to generate a Site Plan. Because of our heavy focus on quality workshops, we have decided not to do a summer internship program. We are further shifting our energy to building a strong development and collaborator community worldwide - establishing closer relationships with super cooperators in all corners of the world. As such, we are organizing intense buildouts on site - where most of the development work leading up to build events is done via remote collaboration in Working Teams and Design Sprints. We are building our teams via the Tech Team Culturing Survey for Design Sprints and the Working Teams signup. The Design Sprints are for various development topics, while Working Teams are specific to particular projects - so please sign up to both.

Development Method: We are spending considerable effort revisiting how development takes place at OSE, to fill in several gaps. Facilitating documentation, enhancing our review process, enabling forking and merging, developing coherent working teams, and leadership training are some of our top priorities.

Community Development: OSE has recruited a Community Manager, Jonathan Kocurek. See the Development Team page to learn more about us. We are developing cohesive Working Teams to facilitate continuity, working out effective role allocation, and creating improved orientation materials. We are developing clear team governance - where Diana Leafe Christian (see Team page) has also joined the team as an advisor to help us with Dynamic Governance and other team-building issues.

Open Enterprise Development: See the Distributive Enterprise Blog Post for more thoughts on how to address the global wealth distribution gap. This year, we would like to take the CEB Press, Aquaponics Greenhouse, and 3D Printer to full economic replicability as our contribution to the distribution of raw power. Our approach is demonstrating and documenting how one can start a production enterprise, and training entrepreneurs to run Extreme Manufacturing Workshops. This year (see Schedule above), we will run our first workshop geared specifically at entrepreneurs interested in starting up a CEB Press enterprise. We ran several workshops last year, and will continue to demistify technology this year. Laura Colcord (see Team), a seasoned business consultant, is advising us on enterprise strategy and leaderships development.

Aquaponics Working Team: As a result of the Permaculture Voices Conference, where I gave a Keynote - we rounded up the Aquaponic Greenhouse Working team. Because this team has so much expertise, we believe we can design, build, and test a 2000 square foot facility that can yield $100k per year by March next year. Our new motto is 100k by 100k - can we disseminate 100,000 of these worldwide within 5 years of completing and documenting a working example? That would be $10B contributed to the open source economy.

Replications: An interesting Nicaragua Replication happened without us knowing - 2 CEB Presses and 4 Power Cubes appear to have been built for a compressed earth block block production facility under a roof. I wonder if there are more like this that we don't know about.

That's it for now, more coming in a few weeks.

Thanks, Marcin