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What is Factor e Farm?

Who

We are an experimental facility. We are engaged actively in building a real-life village for demonstrating the feasibility of a sustainable , autonomous civilization thati is based on using local resources and global interconnection. By using ancient wisdom, permaculture principles, and modern production technology - we aim to demonstrate that unprecedented quality of life can be attained in a modern, off-grid community.

What

We are engaged actively in building the infrastructure for replicable, prosperous communities by developing and testing the tool set that can enable the effective building of such communities. This toolset is called the Global Village Construction Set. This is a bootstrapping set of tools that builds one technology upon another to produce a limited but sufficient set that can make building of the set, and of entire communities - not only replicable, but self-replicating. Welcome to Viral Village - a virally replicable community development pattern applicable in the first and third worlds alike - which focuses on skilling people to use knowledge and resources effectively. The focus of such an effort is developing a robust economy. To this end, we are developing, optimizing, and open-sourcing the production technologies in the Set - as a basis for a sound, local economy that is capable of trading in a global network of free enterprise.

Why

We believe that we can create a post-scarcity economy where anyone interested can trascend the struggle for survival - or material, energy, information, and intelligence scarcity.

How

Our core team and experimental facility intends to provide an infrastructure where people join the team on a per-project basis to deploy and test the overall Global Village Construction Set. To assist in this process, we are developing a scalable method whereby resources and talent can be pooled collaboratively, such that we can invite the required expertise for bidding on and building prototypes and products. By publishing results and technical designs openly, we are contributing to a collaborative development of Open Business Models - a foundation of post-scarcity economics. We are interested in transcending monopoly capitalism, which enforces artificial scarcity. We are also developing immersion training curriculum for producers, and are offering training workshops.

When

The time to act is now. We believe that we can build a post-scarcity village, with a fully functioning economy, within a period of 2 years. The assumption is that we achieve a $10k per month investment level in our project, and a countless number of volunteer collaborators to organize the collaborative pooling of resources towards product release of our development items.

Where

We are in the heart of the USA, in Missouri, one hour North of Kansas City.

Invest!

We are looking for codeveloper investors interested in using the products of the Global Village Construction Set. We are looking for people interested in becoming active developers and funders for prototyping and product release efforts.

Subscribe!

If you are interested in putting your money where your mouth is in supporting this important work, consider subscribing with $10/month for 2 years - until GVCS completion. This will be the best 33 cents a day that you ever spend in your life. You can also make one time contributions. See http://openfarmtech.org/index.php/Support_Open_Source_Ecology

Accomplishments

(as of 4.12.09) To date, we have produced and tested the first prototypes for a high-performance tractor, LifeTrac and a high-production (4-8 bricks/minute) Compressed Earth Brick press (CEB press). We are aiming to have the CEB press ready for product release within 2 months.

Why You Should Invest in this Work

This is not our work, but work to benefit everybody. Our near-zero overhead, off-grid operation and completely volunteer effort allows us to commit 100% of all donations and investments into prototyping, building, and the creation of Open Business Modles that people can replicate worldwide. This is a rare level of efficiency - but our strong commitment to the project, wide base of private donors, and non-governmental organization (NGO) status of Open Source Ecology International - make this possible. Moreover, we are well on our way to developing a world-class, Open Business Model development capacity to move the economic system towards post-scarcity principles. See Transparency for more information.

What Others are Saying About Us

Interesting ideas. I don’t know of anything quite like it. — Noam Chomsky on Open Source Ecology
[Open Source Ecology, which] combines permaculture with permafacture, i.e. sustainable manufacturing, is perhaps the most important social experiment in the world. — Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation
In “The Unplugged,” Vinay Gupta wrote of a movement of people “buying out at the bottom” by using “Buckminster Fuller’s means to promote Gandhi’s ends.” This is the largest and most advanced single project I’m aware of for putting that philosophy into practice. — Kevin Carson, Mutualist Blog
Other interesting initiatives include openfarmtech.org where they are developing open source ecology including building eco-villages… — Victor Keegan, The Guardian
Factor E Farm is quite possibly the most important project in the world. - — Josef Davies-Coates, United Diversity
(Open Source Ecology) is yet another example of the many efforts underway to accelerate DIY technology development for Resilient Communities (The RC). As personal fabrication improves, these tinkering efforts will become MUCH more sophisticated at an ever decreasing cost. We (collectively, those of us engaged in decentralized thinking/action) are in the process of reinventing how the global economy is structured at a root level — good thing we didn’t ask permission. — John Robb, Global Guerrillas
The mind-blowing thing about this project is that anybody who wants to start a similar community can do so virtually for free on the outskirts of many cities in the United States… I say to all those who are actually taking up this opportunity, all the power to you. The idea is, if you can generate the money to create the system, you will reap the benefits forever. — Camilla Padgitt-Coles, Arthur Magazine
Marcin Jakubowski, a person I met through the excellent P2P Foundation, is blazing ahead with a very real, implementable “Global Construction Set” of open-source tools, platforms, and knowledge sets to empower a future of sustainable, vernacular, and decentralized food production, energy generation, architecture, and social structures. — Jeff Vail, Blog
I think this is a fascinating project, and one that John Robb has highlighted as an example of the potential for community fabrication. — Jeff Vail, Blogger
This is the bright iridescent future of a global sustainable village, un-tethered by the soul sucking vacuum of neoliberal globalization. Combining ecology and open source ideas, the folks at Open Source Ecology seem to have hit the nail on the head…a well articulated vision for enabling communities all over the planet to partake in global trade of information goods and services, but not be forced into the prisoner’s delima of globalized corporate capitalism. — Greg Landua, Global Village Institute at ‘The Farm’