Joshua's The Plan, Sort Of

I want to develop and refine the ose model and bring it to as many people as possible.

The purpose of the model is to teach people to be able to build anything and grow as much food as possible, even in a small space. Also we want to raise quality of life, save money, and decrease energy consumption.

In order to do that, we need to develop and refine a modular system whereby you can bulid a greenhouse, a house, a workshop, a shed, as well as different systems that go inside those buildings. For example in the greenhouse we would have:

Aquaponics systems Grow towers Grow walls Grow beds Integrated pest management Red worms Black aquatic worms Growing mushrooms in buckets Chickens rabbits, etc

I should build a flowchart that shows the inputs that each of these systems needs, and the waste product and where the waste product is used, as part of this is how we manage our waste.

My theory is to have a workshop seminar. The idea is, people pay to come to this workshop, the s workshops are held at different locations, and there’s a host. And the host is responsible for a certain number of things, like making sure there are enough beds for those at the workshop, and we also have to figure out how to provide food for everyone, whether the host provides it or we all chip it on it.

Either way, people come to the workshop, and we actually *build something* while we’re there, teaching organization, swarm build techniques, and also of course how to build whatever we’re actually building. We also do a set number of smaller workshops throughout the build, such as how to grow mushrooms in buckets, black soldier fly larvae, and build the items needed for them (boxes, chicken coop, etc). This way there are a wide number of different things to learn at every workshop.

In addition, I think that we should integrate teaching how to throw the workshop itself, in other words giving people the ability to leave each workshop and understand how to execute their own workshop, thereby getting something built and spreading this model as much as possible.

How to start doing it:

So right off the bat, I’m thinking that one of the things we need to teach is “conversion”, what I mean by conversion is going from an existing building that is not built to eco-friendly standards, how do we convert that, as much as possible, to a more self-sufficient, eco-friendly space? Why is this important? It’s important because we have a lot of infrastructure already in place, and to just bulldoze all of that to build eco-friendly villages from the ground up, well that would just be insane, and it would be a huge waste and we are trying to avoid waste. If we had to start being self-sufficient today, people would have to “start with what they’ve got” so we might as well give them the tools.

So how do we take an existing structure and convert it to a self-sufficient eco-friendly building? We need to develop and teach techniques to do this and prove that it can be done, and it can be done anywhere and everywhere, and it can be easily adapted to different climates and styles.

I could get started right away by throwing a workshop right at my house in Summerville, for example showing how to convert a front porch into a greenhouse, or put in some self-sustainable systems.

Another idea is to start a hackerspace, which is a space where you find a lot of expensive tools, sort of like a metal-work classroom with all the best metal-works tools, perhaps a 3D printer, torch table, and you pay a membership, kind of like a gym membership, you pay a monthly fee and you get access to a lot of expensive tools that you may not even use that often but you can’t do without for certain jobs, so this way you don’t have to buy them yourself.

In fact I already have a few of the basic tools one would want in a workshop, like a press, vice, drill press, welder, chop saw, things like that. I think that the most expensive tools, like a 3D printer or a torch table, they should be locked in a cage. And then people will use the access cards they have to get into the building to get into those cages, and so you have certain levels of qualification or training required before you can use certain tools. So each individual is responsible for getting that training, using their card to access the cage, and making sure it’s cleaned and locked back up when they’re done using it.

As for a list of tools I think we’d need, a tig welder, possibly a cnc machine, torch table, 3D printer, and this hackerspace would be a perfect place to host workshops. So we could go in there with 20-30 people and teach how to build, for example, the power cube, the compressed earth brick press, the torch table, things like this and we’d have all the tools right there to do it with.

It could be a rented warehouse space, like an automotive shop, we would need the infrastructure for the access cards, the tools themselves, probably try to crowd-fund it, and if I can make this business model replicable then I’ll put up as many of these as I can find.

So the next thing is developing a complete model for an open source ecology workshop, deciding what the curriculum for each of them. So probably there’s going to be a main theme for each of them, depending on what you’re trying to build, but then we can also have several other workshops that we’re going to teach and have defined who’s going to teach each of them. So even if you need to skype someone in, you want to someone how is an authority on the matter to be teaching it. Also I think it would help to make sure everyone is already following along on the wiki notes, or some other visual guide that has been arranged in advance. This way people can actually “see” what the instructor is talking about it and I think would make for better learning. Then we would have a system in place for how to build each of these things.

We could also have a workshop on cooperation, communication, and social systems, it might be a good idea to get some good tools out there so that when you have a lot of people living and working together in a tight space you’re already in the right mindset and frame in which to work. My notes on having lots of people living and working together in a tight space… things that come up when you have 20 plus people living in a small space for a couple weeks... starting at the bottom, waste management. One thing I noticed was, that many people, we produce a lot of waste really quickly. How are we dealing with that and how are we showing with our model that it can be dealt with neatly and in an eco-positive manner? So we need to put a system in place for separating our trash, dealing with compost, taking the recycling, etc, as well as developing ways to cut down on our water usage, and do this in a very clean and effective way so we really set the bar high and impress the point that we are teaching a high standard of living in an eco-friendly way. Just making a pile in the back room… doesn’t look very nice.

Another thing is that we need reliable high-speed internet, a lot of people need to use it so it needs to be effective, plus when we’re using to webcam different seminars we will need the bandwidth.

There should be plenty of hot water for showers! After your workshop attendees have been hard at work all day they deserve a long, hot shower. Let’s make solar hot water one of our workshops and put that into practice as well.

And, the food. So the food is a pretty important thing. It needs to be well-organized, maybe there’s one person in charge of it, maybe they’re the primary cook. We could have a sign-up board where people can sign up to cook dinner for everyone, but whatever we decide it needs to be systemized, it needs to be part of the open source ecology model that we’re teaching.

How do you feel 10 people? How do you feed 100 people? These systems already exist out there, so let’s put them together with our open source model so people have access to it right there and we can refine the system as we go.

Then, housing. The dorm room technique, doing two or maybe three to a dorm room, making sure they each have somewhere to store some things and maybe a desk, that seems to be sustainable, based on people living in college dorms for several years, or military barracks that are pretty similar. Probably couples would want their own room (still 2 people to a room), and I suppose anyone staying for a long-term would want their own room, because, you need to have your own space to retreat to sometimes, and privacy to just be alone sometimes. That can be as simple as a bedroom, with a shared bathroom and common area, but another idea would be a motel-style building where each person gets their own room, bathroom, and maybe kitchenette. This way people have the option to be more on their own if they need the space. So spaces I’ve been thinking about are old hotels or motels, where we could buy it cheap and refit the whole place, and then start doing workshops from there.

Business models

Besides the workshops themselves which I think, if you did it right, could actually work out pretty well. Then there is the product that you actually build (at workshops or all the time) which you can then sell, this will require a marketing and sales plan for the items.

Also we have the hackerspace model, which I think is a really good basis for a place to do these workshops, and I think there’s a way to tie all of these together.

As far as selling things that we build, we are selling open source products. So, anyone can build this themselves and we’re okay with that, in fact we’ll teach you how to build it and not only that, how to teach others. That being said, we recognize that not everyone wants to build everything themselves and having something like a black soldier fly breeding system that you can just buy is attractive as well, especially if we can make them affordable. Or perhaps it’s a 3D printer that we’re building, or a torch table, they want to make something with it but they don’t want to have to build the machine itself.

So, we are going to produce, market and sell each of these products, and we’re going to see how it goes.

It seems to me that the big push right now is torch table. The torch table is needed in order to build the other things. Then we should build the powercube, the compressed earth brick press, and we’d also like to do the 3D Printer. After that we would want to continue building the entire village construction kit.