May 2013 Vision Update

Today I had a small breakthrough regarding scaling of production.

I see all these examples of open source products, like Sparkfun Electronics, or lulzbot.com - and they all go through the pains of 'scaling' in that they rely on 'mass outsourcing' of much of their work - which gets rid of the human element of Social Production.

It was my impression, that as we scale production - it will lose its personal character of social production.

But I think we can keep the personal aspect. So we don't have one production facility that does 100,000 units per year, but more like one facility that can produce 1000 units of something, and in its spare time, it teaches others to produce the remaining 99,000 units. So we focus our business model on education, R&D, and leanness - where our marketing is based on ethics and meaning.

This way, we promote the true distributed nature of production, retaining the element of Social Production. If we build up such Collaborative Production - communities will re-weave their fabric towards responsibility and re-connection to their life-support systems - via local sourcing. I think that the open source industrial revolution is ultimately about reconnecting humans to nature, and to themselves - so the product is not better machines, but better humans. So a game changer.

If we can communicate this in any way to the audience, that would be a great achievement.

Today I spoke to Jeff Moe, CEO of lulzbot.com, and a hardcore open source hardware advocate. He is interested in helping us add the 3D printer to our product line, and I suspect we will strike a major collaboration. But we discussed this issue - that his plan is to increase production to 10,000 3d printers per year. I told him about my vision of our 144 Open Source Ecology Incubators by 2019, each netting about $1M a pop, for a net of $100M+ for funding the new paradigm of the Open Source Product Development Pipeline. As such I update our scaling plan from this to:

1. 2013-2015: GVCS done by year-end 2015 - initial evidence of this coming out of recent Design Sprints. FeF becomes the first OSE Incubator. 2013 focuses on development of Collaborative Development protocols - towards achieving One Day Collaborative Design by December 18, 2013 - just as we achieved One Day Collaborative Production by December 18, 2012. 2014 focuses on enterprise development and continuation of Development Method refinement. 2015 focuses on Curriculum Development for Immersion Training. Curriculum funded by bootstrap production developed in 2014.

2. 2016-17: After 2015, 12 OSE Fellows go through an immersion program of 2 years duration in which the last 6 months is a buildout of a new OSE Incubator (elsewhere) with earnings from production gained by Fellows during their stay at OSE. Tuition is $25k/year (we may want to jack this up and make it affordable to the poor via some form of sponsorship). Students spend 25% of time in production to generate about $1k/day of production (say it takes 5 people to build one machine in one day, with net earning of $1k/person). (How long can we stay in business if others will catch up to us? It appears the answer is that we do stay in business, because design is a small part of enterprise - and we are really selling our values, purpose, and meaning-creation - so there are very few people with the boves to compete. Ie, we are so far ahead of the game that we will enjoy primacy for a long time, and when we lose it, we will have reached a condition of post-scarcity and it won't matter - as people are then driven by autonomy, mastery, and purpose - not money. Here we need an economic study of earning potential of machines sold at 3-10x below market rate - ie, how long does it take for the entire economy to attain Efficiency Saturation (that is my term), ie, the point where inefficiencies are removed from the free market - ie, when things begin to reflect their true cost. If Heavy Machines really go down 3-10x in price, what is the savings upon society, and how does that reduce taxes (by virtue of things like infrastructures being lower-cost to build and operate)?. Is there any serious work that has been done on the "Effect of Open Source Hardware on Taxation via Reduced Cost of Maintaining Infrastructures in Advanced Civilizations")

3. 12 OSE Fellows build out their 12 new OSE Incubators by 2017 - and OSE serves as the administrative/recruiting branch to help the 12 new incubators recruits 12 students each. Ie, OSE International at FeF is the talent search organization - based on all the contacts that we accumulate over the years.

4. 2018-2019: Repeat Fellows cycle until there are 144 OSE Incubators around the world. Attrition may take it down to only 100 worldwide. These incubators become production, training, and R&D facilities for the Open Source Economy. The concept is that the 144 Incubators are my predicted limit for how many exceptional leaders there are (about 1 in 10 million) who have the right mindset, and the capacity, to carry forward the true mission of OSE. So the selection process is the One Most Selective Fellowship in the World.

5. 2020-21: OSE International (FeF) continues to pump out OSE Fellows of the Extended Family - where we go until every population of 100,000 people has an OSE Facility or similar operation (or 20k facilities in the industrialized world). 1200 OSE Facilities reached.

6. 2022-23: 3000 facilities reached, and about 1800 new ones per Fellows Class. This is approximately the same rate as the current rate of MacDonalds (about 1000/year), and appears as easy to attain - because we appear to have a better product. Therefore, we have reached market saturation by 2040 with 20,000 facilities worldwide.

So essentially - by 2020 we build out all OSE Incubators, and I can retire for the third time, and market saturation for OSE Facilities occurs by 2040, so I can retire for the 4th time. My first retirement is graduating with a Ph.D. and checking out. My second retirement is now, as I finally appear to have a team pulling for me.

So that's my Tuesday night inspiration. If we can capture some of this excitement for Glimpses, that would be great.

MJ