NoVo Update 2025
Summary
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oTziFCDY1jLyiKwmJ7x8VAn5VbmceS3MeLk69975P_k/edit?tab=t.0
P&L
2025 Projection - [1]
Source
Ladies and gentlemen, we are taking the next major step towards scaling the work of OSE. We are starting a 4 year program for civilization re-design/build. Forget about trade school or college – we are offering a radical, transformative alternative.
In 4 years or less – you will learn to build seed eco-homes as 24 person crew – in only 5 days from start to finish. This part will pay the bills – but the skill set you will learn is much broader. Apply today.
See the background about this work in the Global Village Construction Set TED Talk:
Now you can acquire a Seed Eco-Home in one of 8 ways.
By building Seed Eco-Homes, we are funding much broader, public-interest OSE development – allowing apprentices to participate and sustain themselves in this work. Until the GVCS is completed in 2028, when a much more level economic playing field will be born, and the OSE movement swells to numerous campuses in other locations around the world. Take a look at the bigger picture of OSE. We are a nonprofit organization – so if you like what we are doing, donate to our True Fans recurring donation – or help us find foundations that can help support the OSE Apprenticeship by helping us to develop the affordable housing aspect of our work where we sell eco starter homes in the $120k range – based on the Habitat for Humanity model – except where we can build much faster in our swarm build. See the next post on this.
With the completion of the open source Seed Eco-Home, and the final step of selling the house on the open market – we can now offer a number of ways that you can build or acquire a Seed Eco-Home.
But let’s talk about solving housing first. The problem is an under-supply of housing. This is not controversial. The answer? Build more housing! This is controversial. Because there is plenty of land, but regulations monopolize access. This is how it is. Why? Because people want it this way. Houses in the USA do not serve the primary function of a ‘home.’ Houses serve the primary function of an ‘investment.’ This outlook incentivises artificial scarcity in housing – both through land access, regulations, and through build costs. This is just another part of scarcity-based economic systems that OSE aims to address. NIMBY is real for homeowners scared of the ‘bad element’, or the other way – a nice new house increasing their taxes if they are in a poor neighborhood. YIMBY is an answer – with some cities adopting ordinances allowing the building of a second smaller house on a lot. A better answer is more people building their own house, but society today is far removed from this. Even when somebody says ‘I built my own house’ – that typically means that the person themselves did not even lift a hammer – they hired all the work out. More owner-build element is required, and we aim to facilitate this. As long as nobody builds their own home (the current reality) – the playing field is seriously biased towards under-supply and speculation. It seems to us that the solution must include more people going DIY, regardless of the scaling of turnkey, production builds.
With these considerations, OSE’s solution is (1), to build an ample supply of housing, to reset market prices. (2), to promote more access to true DIY builds. And (3), to produce subsidized housing – but with sweat equity of the homeowner providing a major contributing to the actual build. Here is how.
Option 1. Build the 1300 SF, 3 bed/2 bath Seed Eco-Home model for $60k in materials. You are welcome to build this, it is open source and we will file the OSHWA Certification soon. This is called the Rosebud model, which was finished in Maysville, MO in 2025. Rosebud comes with 6kW PV and a number of energy and water saving features. It is incremental design – meaning it has 2 pre-framed, hidden doors for an addition towards the back, and any of the window modules can be converted to another door if one is interested in expanding to the front. The flat roof and deck allow for ready expansion up, with framing that can sustain a third floor. The complete CAD model is here in FreeCAD. Various detail files which cover individual modules, assemblies, and sub-assemblies are also found in this same folder. Even more exhaustive detail is found at Seed Eco-Home 4#CAD, including water, plumbing, outlets, electrical system, PV system, and more. The bill of materials, at $60k, is here. You can see details of the build – a total of 22,000 pictures. During the build, we kept design notes and procedure details in 9 work docs for about 1000 pages of build details (start at Doc 1, finish at Doc 8). Build data shows the time it took to build every single part of the house (missing detail to be read from photo time stamps). And, you can see the original engineering drawings from a structural engineer here. The overall documentation is found at Seed Eco-Home 4, including business development and organizational insights for the same business model that we are using in the Seed Eco-Home Apprenticeship. You can also see Seed Eco-Home 2 documentation and the Seed Eco-Home 1 documentation for reference. The suggested procedure if you would like to replicate – is to use FreeCAD to open up the file – and the document tree allows you to navigate through all the layers of the house. You can study the house in full detail and come up with a build procedure by hiding and un-hiding parts. You can create technical drawings for any part, if we don’t have it already on the wiki – in which case you can get a wiki account and add your technical drawings to the wiki. If anything is grouped and you would like to see more detail – use other more detailed files found in the documentation. The work docs for build details are useful in so far as they explain procedures, tools, and techniques used in the build. You can see how the actual build progressed by examining the photographs. Between the CAD, build drawings, build documentation, and photographs – you can trace and replicate the build completely. If you are a top-rate builder, the house can be built in about 1000 hours. If you are a novice, the build will take you 2-4 times as long. To help you reduce this time, we will be offering more crash courses for DIY builders.
Option 2. Affordable Housing for Low Income Households at ~$120k – We are modeling our work after Habitat for Humanity, which builds an impressive 11.5 thousand new homes for low income families.Announcement: A World-Changing Opportunity
Open Source Ecology (OSE) is pleased to announce the OSE Fellowship, a four-year program providing a $100,000 work-study grant to empower young people to re-imagine and re-build civilization.
About the OSE Fellowship
The OSE Fellowship is a unique opportunity for individuals aged 18-24 who are seeking a radical alternative to traditional education and career paths. Fellows will dedicate themselves full-time to OSE’s on-site campus in the Kansas City area, working to reinvent civilization and create a world that works for everyone – a collaborative, open society.
This program is designed for those with an exceptional desire to:
Change the world through open collaboration. Promote a collaborative and open society based on abundance, rather than artificial scarcity. Develop essential skills in learning, design, and personal growth. Cultivate character and leadership abilities. Unleash their innovative potential. The OSE Fellowship, introduced in 2025 to accelerate the shift towards a sustainable future, supports young people in gaining the skills and experience to become effective change agents. We are currently offering four (4) OSE Fellowships grants, and are actively fundraising to offer at least four more in 2025. The first cohort of Fellows begins on September 1, 2025. We are recruiting a total of 24 Apprentices and Fellows. See more about the Apprenticeship here.
Program Structure (Fellowship and Apprenticeship)
Both the OSE Fellowship and the OSE Apprenticeship programs involve:
Two days of work-study per week, combined with a curriculum focused on: Learning how to learn. Designing a wide range of systems and technologies. Developing integrated personal skills. A competency-based pay scale for work-study, both during and after the program, that rewards student initiative. The option to build a micro-house for on-campus living after six months (contingent on meeting required competencies), as part of a micro-civilization experiment to gather feasibility and replicability data. A two-week humanitarian service trip abroad each year. Two hours of community service each week. The option to participate in special projects or work opportunities for six weeks during the summer. OSE Fellowship Details
In addition to the core program structure, OSE Fellows receive:
A $100,000 grant over four years. Free tuition. Compensation for any work-study time that exceeds the $100,000 grant amount. Placement in the Leadership/Enterprise Track. A course load of 12-15 curriculum credits per semester. OSE Apprenticeship Details
The OSE Apprenticeship offers a similar immersive experience, with the following details:
Tuition ranging from $5,000 to $20,000, depending on the chosen track. Work-study compensation ranging from $14 to $40 or more per hour, based on competency. A course load of 9-12 curriculum credits per semester. Open to all age groups, with a preference for college-age individuals. Our Vision OSE is committed to providing radical re-skilling to empower individuals to rebuild the world through open, collaborative approaches. Both the Fellowship and Apprenticeship programs offer a pathway to participate in an “accelerator for accelerators,” equipping participants with the vision and skills to establish startup cities focused on creating universal basic assets. This includes learning how to perform a 5-day swarm-build of affordable eco-homes.
We recognize that our approach is unconventional. We’ve seen nothing quite like it, and we believe it represents a necessary step towards a more sustainable and equitable future.
Apply Today
The application process for the OSE Fellowship is the same as for the OSE Apprenticeship. Please begin the five-step application process by submitting your Video of Interest, and be sure to mention your interest in the Fellowship in your introduction. Habitat provides homes to low income households that make 60% or less of area median income (AMI), at a price that they can afford, with affordable financing. Habitat builds 3 bedroom houses, 1000-1200 sf, at a cost between $135k-$165k. Why don’t we just join Habitat? We can – if they are open to faster, highly optimized swarm builds, reducing build time and cost. Habitat works with donated materials and volunteers, under the guidance of professional construction managers. Client families are required to put in 200-500 hours of sweat equity – for each family member above 16 years old. If materials and house lot are donated, and labor is free (sweat equity + volunteers), then the equivalent model within the OSE framework would consist largely of providing effective construction management. If you are interested in a house like this and qualify as low income, we are open to pilot projects that will be part of the enterprise education in the Seed Eco-Home Apprenticeship. There are numerous practical details to work out – a normal part of enterprise development.
Option 3. Buy a Turnkey Seed Eco-Home in the $200-400k range. This depends on specifics, including features, size, and location. We just put our first home on the market, so you can see the type of work that we do. If you would like us to build a custom home for you, note that we plan on building 6 homes this year, and scale up to about 50 by next year. This depends on how successful we are with the OSE Apprenticeship.
Option 4. Financial Independence Package – This may be the more practical version of Option 1. This option is dedicated to allowing a person to build their own home at the lowest possible cost – thus addressing the single highest cost in one’s life: housing. Hence we look at this as the Financial Independence package – you access a house that you build under our close supervision for a total of around $80k including materials. This costs more than Option 1, but is much more doable – as in reality most people will not have the time to learn the 20 trades it takes to build a house by themselves and attain a high quality product. Given that the lowest cost way to access a new home is to build it yourself – but the blocks are time and skills – we are offering this package starting in the summer of 2026. The value is significant – you get a highly-likely-to succeed route to build your own home – requiring solid guidance from OSE – but you do the work and pay for your own materials. In this package, you are the builder – but we avail our facility to you. You join us and live on site for 2 months, while building the core kitchen/bathroom/utility module – the same systems as in our production Seed Eco-Home. You can use our facilities, learning facilities such as the Rapid Learning Facility where you can learn about all the build technique, microskills, materials, and subsystem design, and participate in any crash courses that we have going on at the same time. You drive away with a 16×10 foot module, which is self-contained and structural so that it can be lifted with 8000 lb forks onto a trailer – contains the kitchen, bathroom, heat pump, electrical, plumbing – all done ready to be transplanted onto a simple, code-compliant foundation back on your lot – you BYOL (Bring Your Own Land). The 16×10 module contains all utilities, and PV on its roof. The point of this is that under our close supervision and quality control, you will have built this entire module by yourself. Because this module contains all the guts of a house – it is a core starter module, to which you add whatever additional space necessary. Since the hard work of utility integration is already done, all you need to worry about is adding more shell structure – which would be easy as you learn how to build our modules during your stay. Therefore, adding on to this core module should be quite doable, and much easier than building the core module initially. We load you up and help you transport and unload at your own site. In summary, you pay us only a reasonable service fee for build guidance, accommodations, facility use at our site, and transport assistance – which may total around $20k. You cover all the materials – you act fully in the agency of the owner-builder – where you actually lift the hammer and learn a lot in your 2 month stay. We think that 2 months will be ample time to do this – because we have optimized and modularized all utilities to a high level specifically for the purpose of speed, quality, ease, and cost. And you will have just learned how to break the iron triangle.
Option 5. Swarm Builds. We have done this as our core business model for almost a decade in the past. We are known for our swarm builds, which we used, for example, to build Seed Eco-Home 1 in only 5 days with 48 participants. These events are pure edutainment: energetic, educational, and fun in nature – where you will expand your consciousness to new possibilities. One of the highlights is usually meeting interesting, out-of-box people. We will continue these in full effect, to build Seed Eco-Homes in various locations around the country. We will post a schedule within 3 months of starting the OSE Apprenticeship this year.
Option 6. Kit Homes and Micro-houses. Option 4 leads readily to kit homes and microhouses on wheels. We’ll save this for a future post.
Option 7. The Civilization Builder Package. Produce financial independence for yourself, help others attain theirs, and re-imagine and rebuild a world that actually works while leaving nobody behind. This is our OSE Apprenticeship. See the dedicated post and apply today. We are looking for 24 young men and women to change the world as part of the first cohort.
Ladies and gentlemen, the first Seed Eco-Home is now for sale, and we have 8 ways to make it accessible to the global public. This marks a significant step: we believe that sales will bootstrap funding for the full development of the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS).
This achievement paves the way for our broader goal: an open source economy characterized by near-zero marginal cost and efficient productivity. Practically, this means a lower cost of living, increased financial independence, and a shift from economic pressure to pursuing personal passions. We envision a broad transition from scarcity-based business models to abundance mindsets within the next decade or two. This shift should also clarify the productivity paradox – the questionable efficiency gains across the economy despite exponentially more powerful technology – which hinders the creation of a truly efficient and humane world.
Our revenue model is a hybrid of education and production, starting with a four-year school:
Our first cohort of 24 students will begin this year, aiming to swarm-build a complete Seed Eco-Home, from foundation to rooftop PV, in just five days. Having validated each component, we are now launching this school to achieve scale. We aim to redesign and rebuild civilization’s broken infrastructures, with house builds cross-subsidizing the necessary development.
My TED Talk hinted at the GVCS’s potential. We now estimate that completing the GVCS over the next four years requires approximately $50 million, based on our development costs for typical GVCS machines up to full product release. This aligns with the concept of a sustainable village for $15,000 in today’s dollars – the tuition for our transformative OSE Apprenticeship of 2025. This program teaches the integrated skills needed for startup, maintenance, and prosperity in any sustainable village. Without this skillset, progress is blocked. Hence, the school.
We further estimate that open-sourcing all of civilization’s hardware technology would cost around $50 billion, equivalent to ten years of all new product R&D across all sectors (roughly the lifespan of a patent). Details on this estimate are available on our wiki (currently undergoing server migration). While $50 billion covers hardware, it doesn’t include redesigning organizations and institutions. However, we believe that a shift to an open, collaborative economy will naturally lead to the evolution of these structures, thus externalizing that cost in our $50 billion estimate.
While significant, $50 billion is a small fraction of the $100 trillion global economy, suggesting this budget is potentially achievable. Our current work employs a bootstrapping approach towards this goal.
Interestingly, reviewing my 2011 Bioneers conference presentation, presented at around the historical high point for the open hardware movement, reveals an explicit discussion of how large budgets could arise from open source economics work. From tanks rolling down my streets in Poland, to the streets paved with gold in America – it is fascinating to observe how scarcity – both real and artificial – controls peoples’ lives:
The open hardware movement fell. On our side, despite achieving industrial productivity on a small scale and experiencing 12 replications of our heavy machines in a single year after gaining global recognition, the momentum stalled. Over a decade later, having productized the Seed Eco-Home, we now understand the intensive follow-through required for productization – and the necessary cultivation of integrated skills and mindsets for developers – required to get there in the first place.
The largest block to the progress of civilization is the scarcity mindset. Few have attained the cognitive override – over the reptilian brain – that keeps us stuck in fear never to see the light of abundance. Not in a hippie sense – but as a rigorous discipline of productivity and skill that leaves nobody behind.
Our optimism remains, in fact gets stronger. Because there is so much good work to be done. Some of it is low hanging fruit: we simply need to create more opportunity for people to do good work.
While Jeremy Rifkin – social theorist and speaker – popularized the idea of zero marginal cost in a distributed economy, the Seed Eco-Home is giving us a real taste of this possibility. As we progress, our prices will likely decrease as we transform the scarcity-based economics to abundance. This will likely necessitate creating innovative universal basic asset production infrastructures – a far more complex undertaking than open-sourcing a hardware product. We will address this topic in future posts.
Typical companies circumvent the need for integrated skills and high performance through specialization and mass production. This is an unsatisfactory solution for OSE, as many products plain suck. Sturgeon’s Law applies to civilization itself. The OSE Apprenticeship is our response. I believe we can now scale – and transform – through our bootstrapping education-production funding model. However, Sturgeon’s Law undoubtedly applies to us as well. This necessitates rapid, lifelong learning and a growth mindset to overcome this apparent paradox. I’m going back to school, by starting one.
Announcement: A World-Changing Opportunity
Open Source Ecology (OSE) is pleased to announce the OSE Fellowship, a four-year program providing a $100,000 work-study grant to empower young people to re-imagine and re-build civilization.
About the OSE Fellowship
The OSE Fellowship is a unique opportunity for individuals aged 18-24 who are seeking a radical alternative to traditional education and career paths. Fellows will dedicate themselves full-time to OSE’s on-site campus in the Kansas City area, working to reinvent civilization and create a world that works for everyone – a collaborative, open society.
This program is designed for those with an exceptional desire to:
Change the world through open collaboration. Promote a collaborative and open society based on abundance, rather than artificial scarcity. Develop essential skills in learning, design, and personal growth. Cultivate character and leadership abilities. Unleash their innovative potential. The OSE Fellowship, introduced in 2025 to accelerate the shift towards a sustainable future, supports young people in gaining the skills and experience to become effective change agents. We are currently offering four (4) OSE Fellowships grants, and are actively fundraising to offer at least four more in 2025. The first cohort of Fellows begins on September 1, 2025. We are recruiting a total of 24 Apprentices and Fellows. See more about the Apprenticeship here.
Program Structure (Fellowship and Apprenticeship)
Both the OSE Fellowship and the OSE Apprenticeship programs involve:
Two days of work-study per week, combined with a curriculum focused on: Learning how to learn. Designing a wide range of systems and technologies. Developing integrated personal skills. A competency-based pay scale for work-study, both during and after the program, that rewards student initiative. The option to build a micro-house for on-campus living after six months (contingent on meeting required competencies), as part of a micro-civilization experiment to gather feasibility and replicability data. A two-week humanitarian service trip abroad each year. Two hours of community service each week. The option to participate in special projects or work opportunities for six weeks during the summer. OSE Fellowship Details
In addition to the core program structure, OSE Fellows receive:
A $100,000 grant over four years. Free tuition. Compensation for any work-study time that exceeds the $100,000 grant amount. Placement in the Leadership/Enterprise Track. A course load of 12-15 curriculum credits per semester. OSE Apprenticeship Details
The OSE Apprenticeship offers a similar immersive experience, with the following details:
Tuition ranging from $5,000 to $20,000, depending on the chosen track. Work-study compensation ranging from $14 to $40 or more per hour, based on competency. A course load of 9-12 curriculum credits per semester. Open to all age groups, with a preference for college-age individuals. Our Vision OSE is committed to providing radical re-skilling to empower individuals to rebuild the world through open, collaborative approaches. Both the Fellowship and Apprenticeship programs offer a pathway to participate in an “accelerator for accelerators,” equipping participants with the vision and skills to establish startup cities focused on creating universal basic assets. This includes learning how to perform a 5-day swarm-build of affordable eco-homes.
We recognize that our approach is unconventional. We’ve seen nothing quite like it, and we believe it represents a necessary step towards a more sustainable and equitable future.
Apply Today
The application process for the OSE Fellowship is the same as for the OSE Apprenticeship. Please begin the five-step application process by submitting your Video of Interest, and be sure to mention your interest in the Fellowship in your introduction.
