Immersion Program Video
In 2004 I got a PhD in plasma physics - and I discovered - that I was useless. After all my years of scholarly training - the further I went in my education and in my life the more useless I felt in terms of solving pressing World issues. I realized that an integrated, systems-based approach - which I called Open Source Ecology - is critical to making a better world. I started a civilization reboot experiment on a farm in Missouri. This was the birthplace of the global village construction set.
We design and build open source industrial machines and publish the plans on the internet for free. so far we prototyped 18 of the 50 machines - everything from 3D printers, micro tractors, the compressed Earth brick press, microhouses, and then the larger seed Eco home and the aquaponic Greenhouse. (You can see my Ted Talk on on the global village construction set to get a good introduction to the early days.)
Our next step is open sorce business development. We have so far achieved critical Milestones such as the ability to produce our machines in a single day. We have pioneered Xtreme manufacturing - a method of social production - of rapid group-based builds where a team of people works on all the different modular Parts of a build -in parallel -and then assembles the product rapidly into it's finished form. We have seen that there is a clear revenue model in this immersion education and production method -as we can both produce real products and provide immersion training. One of our main challenges to replicating this model has been the skillset required for its replication. And for this reason - we are pleased to anounce our first ever immersion program. It is a 5-week deep dive where we start with the small open-source micro Factory tools. In the program, candidates will learn not only how to build a 3D printer, a CNC circuit Mill a small laser cutter, plus a filament maker for producing 3D printing filament from scrap plastic - but also the skills of product design and development that allow them to design and build new versions of the machines. We focus on a construction set approach, where we use modular, scalable, interchangeable parts - which allow us not to build a single machine, but many different machines of different function or scale. On the culture front we focus I'm teaching a mindset of open learning, with a pragmatic goal of collaborative development to replace the proprietary status quo. We believe that we can have all the technology in the world and still be miserable as our human capacity 4 compassion and love fails to keep up with explosive progress of exponential technologies. we start this by selecting for a deep commitment in a culture of Open Source. We release all designs, Enterprise blueprints, and trainning materials as open source, open source hardware association compliant. We believe in sharing - a concept all of us learned in kindergarten but forgot once we reached the professional world. The expression of sharing - on the economic playing field is expressed by open source. As Jefferson said in his cSe gainst patents -...
How do we remain relevant when all of our materials are open source? Our revenue model is based on training, and we select for mindset of . collaboration. This model of collaboration has been proved Beyond any doubt within the world of Open Source software and our goal is to extend this model to the world of the non-virtual economy - or open source hardware and open source infrastructures for civilization. And, we keep are people engaged as we offer continuing professional development and continuing product development - so we are in effect selling speed of learning. One can either take all our materials and take take a long time to learn them or they can come to us for a rapid crash course.
As such, we remain relevant as we create a collaboration platform for open source development. We hire our graduates so that they can contribute 75% of their effort to further product R&D, and we provide continuing professional development so that our fellows are incentivized to collaborate rather than to defect. We are making the Road by walking here and as we know from the Forefront of Entrepreneurship the future is created by those who are unreasonable in their approach. The critic might find that because we are open source, we will collapse, however we beg to differ and believing that that will be the key to our economic success.
To create a rich learning environment, we identify mentors and guides for our Fellowa, and we look forward to the time when we hold our first developer conferences.
For those who need financial aid, we identify sponsors in their respective communities so that there is real pull on our students side to help them succeed.
As such we are inviting ose fellows to apply for the program. It is a deep commitment on both sides - with the outcome is full-time work with open source ecology. This is our first program and we will continue with one or more programs every year. We we will continue to perfect the open-source microfactory, such that any community in the world can then produce even advanced products such as their own cars, PV panels, and semiconductors. Such an achievement is simply a byproduct of creating the open-source economy.
Our strategy is that open source ecology serves as the training, collaborative product development, marketing, and certification organization. Immersion workshops constitute approximately 25% of work time, and 75% of the effort goes to further development of the global village construction set. And when we're done we move on to other areas such as Healthcare the unmilitary and Aerospace technology.
Our goal at prenest is to create a scalable bootstrap funding mechanism such that development effort can grow as needed until a transition to the open-source economy becomes real. We believe that this is a prerequisite for transitioning the current military economy from a model of destruction to a model of entrepreneurial creation - using open source collaboration. So if you're up to this challenge, consider applying to be one of the first 12.
