Positioning

timeline-scale-retention

Are you ready for a moonshot? We are embarking on ending artificial scarcity over the next 20 years - by creating the open source economy. For the first time, we are offering immersion training in our techniques of open source product development. The open source economy is where open economic development replaces the hegemony of proprietary development.

We are looking for those who want to embark on a hero's journey over the next ten years. We are offering an immersion program where we train you for doing open source ecology work full time. We train you to run Extreme Manufacturing workshops with us, while continuing work on further open source product development of the Global Village Construction Set. We are starting with training on the small tools of the open source microfactory, then moving onto larger machines and houses. You can read the Book for the greater picture of what we're doing. Our current roadmap is:

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Introduction

We are currently planning a 1 month immersion training program for September. The goal of it is to train OSE Fellows, who then work full time with OSE on its mission of creating the open source economy. OSE fellows run immersion training workshops, and then spend the remaining part of their time on open source product research and development, documentation, and maintenance of the Global Village Construction Set. Participants in the immersion program are called OSE Fellows in training. Fellows Emeriti are those Fellows who are no longer actively involved on the Critical Path of OSE.

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Goals

Increasing OSE's open source (hardware) product development capacity related to the GVCS by funding development effort via immersion education workshops.
Create the open source, ethical economy by making open collaboration the norm in human endeavors. Quantitatively speaking, our 2-decade goals are to attain $940B market share of open hardware as a means to a tipping point to the open source, ethical economy. From $100k/year at present, this means $100B mark in 20 years, and 24 years to the tipping point. See discussion on the Tipping Point.
Our approach is 'the means are the end' - not 'the end justifies the means.' This means that the approach is fully open source, distributive, and ethical. This means we encourage others to compete with us, instead of seeking monopolistic advantage. We believe in a pragmatic approach - as opposed to idealism or realism. Pragmatic means we include long-term, comprehensive strategy with the understanding that economic feedback loops are important. We diverge from the mainstream in that we do not believe in protectionism or monopolies. The only protectionism that we apply are trademarks - which means that we do not allow other parties to steal our identity, as the identity of any entity is unique. We are not idealistic in the sense that we believe attaining world peace is not idealistic - it is simply a requirement for human evolution and survival. We are not guided by realism - which in general takes a 'glass half empty' view of the world instead of a 'glass half full' approach.

Value Proposition

Here are the values provided to different stakeholders:

OSE Fellows - entering the ethical economy of open source R&D&T (research and development and teaching/transformation) + entrepreneurial lifestyle. Entrepreneurial in terms of producing valuable goods effective and converting market share to open source. We provide continuing education for Fellows to continue their skill building.
Customers for machines - both education + production, as well as hobby markets are served. Education is key as we believe that a better world comes from productive and creative people, and we provide the tools of such productivity. A big part of our value proposition is the Construction Set design of our machines. When we provide Design Guides, Design Workbenches in FreeCAD, and the construction sets themselves - people can ready build variations and adaptations of our machines.
OSE: Rapid Prototyping Jams - first day we build machines, and then second and third day we use them for rapid prototyping in prototyping events.

Cloning

We encourage others to replicate our work. However, they cannot use the OSE brand unless they are collaborating with OSE. The value that OSE Fellows receive is access to continuing professional development, including the Summer of Extreme Design/Build - which includes Fellows as well as summer-only participants.

Incentive Structure - Deeper Discussion

Based on the Goals - we invite participants to the immersion program to join with a serious commitment to attaining the 24 year goal of OSE. We invite those who see that as possible. However, we recognize that retention is a serious issue for any organization, and as such we are aware that only a few may rise up to this level of commitment.

Our ideal candidate would see the open source village experiment as not only possible but desirable and therefore life-giving - to themselves and to the world. We are looking for those who are willing to commit their energy to making it happen. At the same time - we believe in life-work integration: a balanced lifestyle that includes health, sleep, and diet and does not compromise these for its goals. That means the mindset of participants is a growth mindset - and even a transcendence mindset. A growth mindset is one of constant learning to become more effective - and therefore to improve their ability to live a balanced and healthy life.

Our goal is to align people towards open source development towards the completion of the GVCS - creating a viable Civilization Starter Kit. This Starter Kit is also a productive set of tools that allows for high productivity and liberation of one's time for complete freedom - towards cultural and scientific advancement. The Definition of Done - is transforming the economy to Open Source as in the goals. That means that all of the critical infrastructure elements for human existence and thriving on earth are open source and accessible, as opposed to leading to destabilizing inequalities of wealth and power.

While the 50 tools of the GVCS are specific points of development, the more overarching goal of OSE is to create and normalize an open source product development methodology, such that startups on Earth begin to favor open, collaborative development - as opposed to proprietary development.

The current governance is BDFL, with an open invitation for Lieutenants to become stewards of the many modules of the GVCS.

Why the Open Source Village?

The open source village has a chance to reinvent the world. If follows principles of cooperation, regenerative Development, and a peacetime economy - then it could provide a structure for a new form of human existence in harmony with natural life support systems. By combining high productivity on a small scale with a bootstrapped approach, the experiment can be highly replicable if we demonstrate a practical and fun existence. That - is up to us as the co-creators.

Basic Approach

The goal of OSE is large, and to realize it, the subject matter of the OSE enterprise must be important - it must fill real needs. Those needs revolve around material production of common-use items of economic significance. Unlike a lot of the mainstream economy, the fruits are intended to be life-giving and regenerative.

The approach of OSE is founded on efficient productivity on a small scale. Our approach is distributing open source microfactories, regenerative agriculture, and open source villages around the world. We build on industry standards, and open-source them. We see that there is a need for regenerative development in the current world where many people are at a loss of meaning. We intend to fill that need.

People who join the first immersion training program (Sep. 2018) are called OSE Fellows in Training - and upon successful completion, they become OSE Fellows and join our family of open collaborators. The expectation is to create a movement of people who transform the world to a peacetime economy.

In the inaugural class of September 2018 Fellows will learn the basics of an open source microfactory starting with a set of small production tools. These tools in themselves can already make a wide array of consumer products, and in themselves are valuable products:

3D Printer - for plastic, metal-embedded filaments, and rubber.
Filament maker - for producing 3D printing filament from the waste stream. With small electric-hydraulic power source.
CNC Circuit Mill - for producing circuits
Laser Cutter - an interchangeable 4W head for the 3D printer with enclosure - for rapid prototyping in card stock and up to 3 mm wood.

The rationale for these products is:

They are products in themselves
They can make other products.
They can be modified and scaled to make different or larger machines such as CNC torch tables and heavy duty precision machining centers.
They are used to produce parts for other machines, houses, and other products
They are sufficient to create billions of dollars worth of economic value, as they can be used as core tools of production
They are the basis of a design system for larger machnes, such as the CNC torch table and heavy duty CNC machines.

OSE will hire successful OSE Fellows full time, with the following responsibilities:

Running 1-4 build workshops per month with OSE covering the organizational and marketing role, and the Fellow doing the execution of an Extreme Manufacturing build/education workshop. Each workshop takes 2-3 days to execute - 1 day to prepare the workshop materials, background parts printing on their 3D printers, and 1-2 days to execute - depending on the type of workshop. The first workshop day includes a build, and the second day includes training on designing and producing other products. The options are typically either 2 five hour days, or a single 10 hour day - or custom options as needed
Spending the remaining time on continuous quality improvement of workshops, and open source product development, along the roadmap of OSE. The approach of OSE is essentially to bootstrap fund its entire development team, such that the development team can grow in size as needed to meet the goals of transforming the economy to open source. This means that at any point in time, we may execute a workshop that is already developed - while expanding our workshop menu by developing new workshop offerings.
OSE develops and tests products for the open source economy. While the main revenue stream may be immersion training, we will also engage in product development and marketing of other products. The intent is to develop and test various enterprises that are released openly to the public as Distributive Enterprises.

Nature and Scope of the Open Source Lifestyle

Applicants are expected to join a lifestyle dedicated to the transformation of the economy to the open source, collaborative, peacetime economy. The day-to-day activity revolves around research, development, education, and production activities. There is a strong focus on continued learning across all disciplines of human endeavor. As such, the lifestyle is intended to be a mix of jobs typical of education, research, product development, production, marketing, management, and other activities. However, the big distinction is that all that we do is based on the open source ethic. We are a pragmatic social experiment at arriving at worldwide peace, simply by being open and vulnerable in an economic sense. We believe that world peace can be achieved only via nonviolence - meaning collaboration and sharing. We learn that sharing is good in kindergarten, but after college, everyone goes to war - as global economic warfare and military economics are the norm. We think that it's time for humans to take the next step of evolution. This means a break from current culture, which means that we take that responsibility upon ourselves to behave in a peaceful way.

Specifically, we teach and produce in immersion workshops where people build things. Here we start with the 4 machines, and these are extended to other products. We believe that the future of production is the open source microfactory - a community-based enterprise which produces all the essentials for a city-state economy. The market for the open source microfactory is large - it can be as large as the current manufacturing sector ($23T). Our proposal is to capture a portion of this market. This pie is large, so there is an opportunity for many livelihoods to be created.

The 2018 edition of the open source microfactory can produce many consumer goods, and part of the OSE Fellows lifestyle is continuing on product development to convert all production to open source. The logic is to distribute wealth far and wide, such that startup barriers are lowered and prosperous city states emerge all over the world. In practice, we collaborate on open source product development, such that anyone in the world can take our products and make a living from them. This includes ourselves - as we test and improve the business models around all the goods and services that we develop.

Time Budget for OSE Fellows

We expect that our graduates strive for a 5 day work week. This is along the lines of getting sufficient rest on rest days - a precondition for being effective at work by letting the mind rest. There may be crunch times when more than 5 days are required per week - but we like people to evolve to a well-balanced lifestyle with 5 days of work per week.

The workshops are designed to take 2-3 days to execute. This means that it takes between 2-12 days per month to do workshops - and the remaining 8 to 18 days per month - out of a full-time effort of 20 days per

Candidate Criteria

Ideal candidates are people with a growth mindset, who are aiming to become integrated humans. Ideal candidates have the capacity to grow to become powerful change agents as movement entrepreneurs. To get there - we think that being a balanced, integrated human is important.

We are looking for generalists with an entrepreneurial mindset. Since we are developing the Open Source Microfactory and the Open Source Everything Store, we are looking for people who are interested in diversified production related to the creation of city-state economies.

Retention

The intent of our immersion program is to make the OSE development platform on-demand scalable - or scalable upon successful immersion training of new Fellows. The inaugural training is 5 weeks, and is a significant investment on both sides.

Since the beginning, OSE relied on volunteers for development. We continue to work with volunteers - mainly as OSE Developers. There are limits to a pure voluntary effort for a complex project - as financial feedback loops must in general be created to support and retain developers. To date, retention of developers has been a significant roadblock to growth. A significant amount of infrastructure needs to exist to manage volunteers, just as there are significant costs involved with managing employees. What is a typical cost? It's typically in the millions for any world-changing project. For example, in 2015, Wikipedia had a $60M budget to manage its open collaboration process. Linux Foundation had a $6/M/year budget in 2017. The point is, there are significant management costs. The OSE immersion training is intended to generate the financial feedback loops to grow our efforts. To date, OSE has operated on an average budget of around $100k/year - which is not sufficient to scale our work to large economic impact.

To retain its contributors, OSE's approach is to provide continuing professional development, events, priority access to OSE teaching and production infrastructure, and other opportunities. We intend to organize a Summer of Extreme Design and Build on an annual basis, where all Fellows and other developers descend upon Factor e Farm to engage in prototyping, training, builds, and workshops. We would like to add an, annual retreat or conference. These opportunities are intended to be team-building opportunities.

We encourage anyone to replicate our work in different locations, but at the same time - some attention needs to be given to retention. What attracts someone to continue with OSE rather than to defect? Our approach to this is that OSE has to do a good job at providing access to rapid learning.

To this end, Fellows will have priority access to learning opportunities. Learning occurs via engagement with other Fellows and the development team, as well as via special events, workshops, webinars, etc. The main incentive for continuing must be the rapid learning opportunities and continued training. Anyone who defects is by definition removing themselves from the development community, which means losing some of its support.

Continuing Training

Fellows are expected to continue developing their skill sets. To this end, they are required to participate in continuing training. The current schedule starts with the basic micfactory, which covers basic open source development procedures - and the small tools of the open source microfactory. We will hold one month immersion training programs at least once per year, so that we can continue to build the OSE Fellows team.

August 25 - Sep 31, 2018- Basic Microfactory - 3d printer, cnc circuit mill, laser cutter, filament extruder + recycling. Basic tools of production that can produce many consumer goods and electronics from off-the-shelf materials, while recycling plastic from the waste stream to make 3D printing filament.
August 2019 - Microfactory Continued - CNC torch table, heavy duty CNC machining center. We move into mastery of the heavy duty metal working infrastructure that can be used to make all kinds of metal parts, up to engines and hydraulic motors.
Sep 2019 - Seed Eco-Home and Aquaponic Greenhouse - immersion training for replication of the Seed Eco-Home and Aquaponic Greenhouse.

We will then move on to training in other areas:

Integrated Agriculture - adding open source nursery and perennial polyculture to Aquaponic Greenhouse
Open Source Materials Production Facility - making diverse raw materials from rocks, sunlight, plants, soil, and water.

Making the Road by Walking

The best way to learn something is to teach it. As such, Fellows will be involved in developing training materials for future immersion training programs. This will involve research, prototyping, and documentation.

Recruiting Strategy

Select from candidates with necessary skill-sets, such as Mediawiki, FreeCAD, and systems architecture - where we teach them about the Bootstrapped Revenue Model as they enter

Tracks

OSE Fellow

While all Fellows will be trained as integrated human generalists, they can pick a more specific track of activity for which they serve as points of contact and maintainers. These tracks include:

Incentive challenge track - we will run regular incentive challenges (such as HeroX on a quarterly release schedule. This Fellow will act as the contact person, wiki maintainer, and lead organizer of incentive challenges. Other Fellows are expected to collaborate according to their capacities.
Summers of Extreme Design and Build - here is where we build the open source village. Every summer for three months, we will have an immersive session of builds and XM workshops together with OSE Fellows, internships, and the general public. One Fellow will be the lead maintainer/coordinator of this project.
Extreme Design Jams - these are global coopetitions combining the Incentive Challenges, school programs, and place-based hackathons into regular, coordinated events. These events leverage crow design, and can be bootstrap funded by running Extreme Manufacturing workshops right before this event. The first day would be an XM workshop which builds the micro-factory tools, which are subsequently used in the Extreme Design Jam for rapid prototyping of GVCS tools, or for open source product development. Structured as coopetitions, these provide a healthy environment for collaboration and competition - where collaboration is incentivized by design.
School Programs - schools are a great place to expose kids to open source culture - while learning important STEM, STEAM, STREAM, and XTREAM skill sets. As we provide curriculum in 3D design, manufacturing, engineering, computer programming, microcontrollers, electronics, product design, lasers and much more - we are well positioned to provide valuable education. The distinguishing features of our work are two: we provide training on real product development, not toys, and we provide a Construction Set approach - where our students can not only build their own machines, but also design their own based on our Design Guides, part libraries, and open source CAD. The latter us a specific value proposition of the open source approach. The School Programs track organizes school clubs and teams to participate in the Extreme Design Jams - thereby creating a vibrant community of developers - even at the high school and elementary school level. The Schools Program may also be extended to university clubs.
Open Source Nursery - 3dp + tree guards, aquaponics, glazng, water fittings, water motors.
Writing Track - blogging, vlogging, social media, publishing, layout, graphics, marketing
Video Track - instructionals, learning materials, documentaries.

Each Fellow will maintain a wiki template for seeding new Projects, so that these are readily searchable on the wiki. This allows the effort to scale

Workshop Instructor

Instructors do not participate in core Development work, but run workshops only. Training for this involves familiarity with OSE technology, and the ability to teach - but does not include the R&D aspect. This is for technically skilled teachers who work with OSE on a part time basis. 2 week Immersion training for this involves basic collaborative literacy and Bility to teach the 3D printer only - including design in FreeCAD.

Curriculum

See OSE Immersion Program Curriculum.

Product Release Schedule

Clear Roadmap for the next 10 years needs to be shown with budget.

Year 1

1 meter print area printer. Printing of polycarbonate glazing, nylon-reinforcedrubber tracks, belts for transmission + baler. cordless drill. etc. Monthly Extreme Design Jam. Printing of parts and kits.
Laser cutter
CNC Circuit Mill
Filament Maker

Year 2

CNC Torch Table + Heavy Machines
Open Source Agroecology

Year 3

Open Building Institute
Microstate Construction

Other

Video 101 - Kdenlive + Title Screen + Green Background + Hime Film Studio with Equipment + Open Source Digital/IR camera + Open Source Microscope Camera + Open Source Aerial Drone Camera + Subtitles + Music + zoom + Google Maps Zoom + screen capture + Pointer + sound Control + Blender Rendering + Linked Annotation in YouTube + Camera Rail + camera stabilizer + self-video stabilizer. Indoor aerial drone camera. Documentation station in the workshop. FB build documentation. Real-time collaborative picture/Video documentation in Google docs.

Infrastructure

Year-round accommodations - new floor + heat in HabLab.
Storage in old greenhouse by covering it up?
Gigabit internet - for next summer
Aquaponic food - person to run it
Gary for food - growing anywhere or on site
Indian Food delivery
Admin person for marketing. Cost of acquisition should be 10% of net.
Gina - Octoprint Enterprise

OSE Financial Model

1 Month Immersion Training

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