Open Source Capital

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Open Source Capital - we define it as million dollar and up capitalization that allows seed funding of distributied enterprise, with a goal of Distributed Market Substitution. Unlike traditional finance capital (banks, VCs), open source capital is a mixture of elements that provide capital, but not in direct-and-simple financial instruments such as promissory notes or venture capital agreements, but instead in a more distributed and diversified fashion, where open source collaboration is invoked as the foundation of the open source capital. Open source cap is a combination of:

  1. Swarming capital - sweat equity of many people engaged in Extreme Manufacturing or Extreme Enterprise events. The important part of OSE's discovery of the Extreme Manufacturing build method - is that swarms can be engaged for economically productive activity on a large scale. We already know of 10-100,000 person events such as rock concerts or car racing - and here we apply mass social gatherings for productive purposes to distribute capital.
  2. Direct, distributed stakeholdership - the customers are also, even if indirectly, responsible for product delivery in a collaborative arrangement. Customers bootstrap-fund the development.
  3. Heavyweight open source product management - to deliver the product, a large-scale, collaborative process is invoked.
  4. Open source machines - to reduce capitalization 10x, open source machinery is used, such as open source tractors, open source 3D printers, and Power Cubes
  5. Collaborative, open source design - the source of any capital-intensive operation is design. We make the design open source, to eliminate competitive waste.
  6. Distributed funding - the enterprise is funded by the customer, not financier

In summary - the concept is that it's not financial capital that is needed to get things done - but instead - it's the things that finance capital can buy - that is required to get things done. And ruther - financial capital cannot 'buy' economic transformation - so any scalable, essentially transformative economics must be bootstrap funded. Here we substitute collaborative effort, open machines, collaborative process, and open design for financial capital to bootstrap multi-million dollar, distributive enterprises.

That is a plan. We are testing it in the second half of 2021 with the Seed Home 2 Extreme Enterprise.

For open source capitalism to work, it must reliably raise funds on the order of at least $1M. It must then be scalable towards Distributed Market Substitution on the scale of 3-5 years.

The Distributed Market Substitution, for example in Housing - refers to not all housing - but any single and multi-family affordable dwellings being made possible. This does not apply directly to mansions or highrises. It's a specific sector that addresses 80% of the entire need for housing in the next economy.