July 2018 OSEmail II

Dear Friends and Supporters,

We have one week left till the application deadline for Open Source Ecology's first ever OSE Fellowship. The OSE Fellowship is an opportunity where you can work with OSE full time developing open source hardware. We start with the open source microfactory, and then move on to larger tools and construction of our Seed Eco-Homes. We have several excellent candidates so far - see Harman Bains from Washington state, our first acceptance. We are also crowdfunding his program costs:

https://www.opensourceecology.org/ose-fellowship/

Applications close August 1, and final selections will be announced on August 14. We look forward to an exciting year ahead with our new team of full time developers - OSE Fellows - thereby addressing the perennial continuity issue typical of volunteer projects. We think we have figured out how to scale our efforts with bootstrapped funding - as our revenue model is running workshops. This has worked for us for several years now, so we are confident that we can expand our efforts based on this model.

We will be running the immersion program for our Fellowship every 6 months - onboarding new candidates biannually. So if you are considering applying - you can apply for the Fall of 2018 until next week - but if you miss that - we are accepting applications for Spring of 2019 right after the August 1, 2018 deadline of the Fall 2018 session. At the beginning of every Fellowship, we will host the OSE Boot Camp. There are 4 weeks left until the Open Source Microfactory Boot Camp:

https://www.opensourceecology.org/open-source-microfactory-boot-camp/

Once we have several Fellows operating in several locations around the US, we aim to host monthly Design Jams in parallel - spreading this effort worldwide with time. Dsign Jams are open source product development sessions where we use the Desktop Microfactory tools for designing and building useful products. Image competitions similar to First Robotics - but ending up with real marketable products that can be made in local microfactories. We think that this model of production can compete with Walmart. In the book on Amazon - "The Everything Store" - there is mention that even Amazon would like to transition its fulfillment centers to on-demand production. I think that OSE has a critical role to play in democratizing production through open source microfactories. Many have conceptualized such production - but to date, the tools and designs for distributed manufacturing are missing. This is the gap that OSE aims to fill.

The OSE Fellowship is currently limited to the US/Canada, but we plan to go international next year.

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Thanks, Marcin

PS. On another note - after seeing Paul Wheaton's Kickstarter on rocket stoves - which has 24 hours left and is doing really well - I am thinking that the OSE/OBI Seed Eco-Home could benefit from including rocket mass heaters. If it is really true that rocket stoves are 2x more efficient than gas heat or 10x more efficient than wood stoves - that is worth it in terms of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. And in terms of efficient heating in general - once again showing how biomass can be superior to fossil fuels in performance and pollution. You can support them at https://kck.st/2LmZpJ7