OSE Campus Levels

OSE Campus Population Considerations

The OSE Campus is a modular unit of civilization-creation promoted by OSE. It is a charter-city like entity, a small city-state, special economic zone, or resilient community. It is structured like a mixture of an eco-industrial park, a nature conservation zone, and a university. For widespread replication, it must embody a wide range of lifestyles. Each campus is nominally a square mile, and is capable of producing advanced civilization.

The population question comes in. How many human denizens should such a campus have, in order to fulfill its mission of transforming society to a prosperous democracy? This is an example much needed, to midcourse correct to full regenerative living on earth - across all areas of the world.

The upper population limit is that required to embody the most advanced technology. Such as semiconductors for modern devices. Many technologies, it can be said, cumulate to produce semiconductors. Many of the Global Village Construction Set technologies are basic - infrastructure, food, energy, etc. Semiconductors derive from these basics - at a higher level of refinement, knowhow, and skill. Given that OSE believes in efficiency, we must attempt to achieve things on the smallest possible scale - while retaining industrial productivity on that scale. This is influenced by the message from half a century ago - Small is Beautiful by Schumacher - which proposed that societal order breaks down at a certain scale. We know that this order is currently broken - with centralized production. But what is the smallest successful scale sufficient for advanced civilization? That is the question that OSE aims to answer. It may be said that the maximum population of the OSE Campus is that determined by the minimum required to produce semiconductors - and thus produce an information age tech set.

We currently take 240 people as the basic size of an economy that can provide housing, transportation, food, and technology in a regenerative way. Many such proofs of concept of industrial productivity on a small scale occurred already at Factor e Farm - such as aquaponics, tractor production, Extreme Builds of houses in 5 days, 3D printers, biodigesters, earthworks, and more. But it's a different story to go from proof of concept to an actual, highly functional global village that sets trends in human development and advancement. This is the current phase - how do we operate effectively as a city-state, and how do we spread the benefit to the surrounding community?

If 240 is sufficient for an economy similar to the 'industrial civilization in a box' or like the 'Amish with automation' - how many more people until we have open source knowledge of chip manufacturing? See Cost of Semiconductor Manufacturing. For $10M and in-house cohort of 24 IC makers, we can build earliest microcomputers easily. How much further than this? Ask Luke Leighton.

Rapid Development Considerations

A useful capacity from the resilience and anti-fragility perspective - including Regenerative Antifragility such as post-crisis reconstruction or ecosystem remediation - is rapid prototyping capacity. Such a capacity would nominally involve a 1000 participants engaging in Collaborative Design, prototyping, and productization of complex products - on the scale of one month. For example - developing productizable solar hydrogen energy systems in one month. Such a scale is effectively the minimum required for collating all known knowledge, and making a very tangible forward development via seamless collaboration. This is not a light task, given that humans generally do not collaborate on product development in general, and open product development specifically. As such, reaching such capacity would be an important milestone for humanity, which would address much of the Competitive Waste of business-as-usual 'collaboration.'

This capacity is to be demonstrated by an OSE Campus. Already, the core of the Campus concept is learning to collaborate. It naturally involves the capacity to do three-dimensional computer-aided design. Thus, a milestone for the power of any OSE Campus is to achieve the month-long complex product development cycle. This could be a physical product, but it could also be something far beyond technological hardware ecosystems - such as an institution, governance system, or various other creative initiatives down to the level of hacking culture. The goal is a type of productive capacity that allows resilience and antifragility as a holon in a larger global and Intergalactic Ecosystem, opening possibilities of Type 1 and higher civilizations on the Kardashev Scale.

Levels Summary

• Zero - we have the base level - the infrastructure that any village should have. The General Store. Grocery store. Hardware store. Garden & Farm store. This can be implemented with the open source microfactory consisting of Basic OSE Workshop with melting of low temperature metals up to ZnAl Alloys, a forge, Open Source Nursery, bakery, dairy.
• One - like the Amish + microchips. Any less than this and we remain at religious toil. Open Source Microfactory produces just about everything as found on Amazon.
• Two - Amish + making microchips. This goes beyond what can be found on Amazon. Including the Solar Hydrogen Economy. 1000 person rapid design-prototyping teams delivering productization of complex products in one month, including things like cars or new special-purpose OSE Campuses

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