Proofs of Concept

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Introduction

The build goal of OSE is to produce a replicable city center, in the form of an educational-research facility - the OSE Campus. There is no modern analogue of this, but it can be described best as a combination of existing institutions. It is a mashup of the following:

  • University - an institution of learning, except that quality education is provided to develop practical skills along with critical thinking ability
  • Factory - a center of production, except by flexible fabrication, immersion hands-on training, and social production
  • Farm - except not a factory farm, but a Factor e Farm - where we transcend norms and produce integrated, regenerative ecosystems that give birth to advanced civilization
  • Lunar colony - an autonomous settlement except that it's on Earth, where infrastructure is built and maintained with few imports, but instead - with a predominance of local resources
  • News station - in that it broadcasts its developments continuously to educate the public about its cultural creative work
  • Sanatarium - where people are rejuvenated, driven sane, and inspired in a life-giving environment. Only by attaining a good measure of health and peak performance can individuals begin to solve much larger problems.

The enterprise model for the above is based on productive enterprise that includes education and production, while developing 8 Forms of Capital.

Required Proofs of Concept

In order to attain the above, a number of Proofs of Concept are required to make the above package feasible. These proofs include the costs involved, time to build, social contracts and governance, productivity, teachability and understandability, quality control, crowd development processes, energy considerations, land use consideration, legal restriction, and so on.

Scalabuility In order for development to meet or exceed industry standards, we need to cultivate ~2000 strong development teams that compress 2 decades of development into a single weekend. This is the idea behind our Extreme Enterprise concept. Part of this involves funding million dollar budgets with these collaborators. This is an interplay between development effort, enterprise training, and customers based on Projects that are near product release


Cost In order to make the above feasible, low cost must be obtained. OSE's goal is to achieve this: (1) via open product and system design, which is free from competitive waste, (2) use of local resources, including training the people themselves in Extreme Manufacturing to build things as teams with high levels of quality control and rapid learning.

Complexity The complete infrastructure for running civilization is required for the OSE Campus, and our way to reduce the complexity and cost is to use modular design. Using modular design, similar flexible components are used to create many parts of the infrastructure. This simplifies design, reduces time of build, and makes the entire process more understandable.

Simplicity The design of the OSE Campus enterprise community is intended to be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Design/Build Time In order to be executable and replicable, the OSE Campus model must follow timelines and budgets for completion. To facilitate this, we are producing open, flexible design, and optimizing build times via Extreme Manufacturing. Extreme Manufacturing is the optimization of build for teams working in parrallel. Success of Extreme Manufacturing is attained when the build time of X with one person is can be reduced to X/N (or even less) when the number N of people are avalable for the build. We are currently designing the number of participants to be on the order of 100 in parallel. This provides extreme efficiencies of production that can outcompete the factory production model - becuase the build process is enriching to the individuals that engage in it.

Value Production Model The Extreme Manufacturing model brings with it the possibility of social production - where the production experience is social, educational, and rewarding. The big point for OSE is that we help people break through the limits of what they think they can do. As such, we are changing society's consciousness towards autonomy - and creating more people who believe that OSE's mission can be accomplished.

Replicability, Quality, and Scalability In order to move forward with OSE's work - our designs have to be quality and easy to replicate. To achieve this, it is critical that we gain a critical mass of development that will provide the necessary quality improvements over time. At a certain point of quality and service, the designs have a chance of going viral, leading to high replicability.

Education, Access, and Democracy In order to make our work highly scalable in terms of group builds - we need to train and educate people on the use of common and accessible tools. To this end, we use as much of open source software and hardware as possible. In fact, we belive that society will regain control over its technology only when people are widely involved - thus democratizing the production process. Our work revolves around technological democracy - as technology is power - so democratic technology is the only way that we can foresee democratic power becoming a reality.

Swarming In order to promote masses of people from the top 20% of the world (1 billion market) getting involved in development on a large scale, we are developing crowd-based techniques of collaborative development. These areas of collaboration include collaborative CAD, video production, site design, graphics design, open source nursery, aquaponics, and crowd prototyping.

Goverance In order to achieve an effective organization, innovative governance models for the development process, land tenure, facility management, conflict resolution, and other aspects of the social contract have to be developed.

Open Enterprise In order to fuel the project with revenue to continue improvements, we promote the concept of the Distributive Enterprise. The distributive enerprise a regenerative enterprise which shares its know-how freely with others to promote the distribution of wealth. To promote mass parallel involvement beyond the limits of voluntary effort - we need to promote livelihoods that contribute to further development of the GVCS Campus.

Complete Set The GVCS is intended to be a complete set that allows any community to build an advanced civilization wherever there is access to air, water, sunlight, rocks, and plants. Can we really use the GVCS to provide a modern standard of living from local resources and solar energy? That is what our experiment intends to discover as all of the tools are built - at which point we will evaluate if the GVCS is a universal constructor capable of the task it is designed for.

Open Organization In order for the OSE campus to be replicable, all of its design, including enterprise design, must be open source. Thus, we are documenting the organizational aspects of OSE campus development in our Development Template.

Proofs of Concept Achieved

We have attained proofs of concept:

  1. Module Based Design - we have shown that modular breakdown into dozens of modules allows large teams to work in prallel on designing and building complex products, just as has been demonstrated in open source software. We have reduced prototyping times from weeks to days with our Construction Set Approach based on proven Part Libraries that can be reused in different builds.
  2. Product Ecologies - We have demonstrated that we can build product ecologies based on interchangeable parts at the module level, with devices such as the Universal Frame, Power Cube, Universal Rotor, and Universal Axis.
  3. Extreme Manufacturing - Building upon the module-based design and collaborative swarm builds, we have demonstrated the feasibility of large, complex builds on unprecedented time scales. We have initial evidence that a microfactory can produce higher efficiencies than large corporations. See Industrial Productivity on a Small Scale. single-day heavy machine builds in 2012 (OSE Christmas Gift to the World 2012), and weekend house builds in 2013 (Microhouse 1, Microhouse 2, Microhouse 3), as well as 5 day builds of a 1400 sf house in 2016 (Seed Eco-Home), and 5 day builds of the Aquaponic Greenhouse in 2015.
  4. Inudustrial Productivity Can Be Achieved On a Small Scale - We have shown that our open source machines can easily meet or exceed industry standards - and can be built in a 4000 square foot microfactory. To name a few: our CEB press can press more bricks at lower machine cost than any other CEB machine in the world. See CEB Press. Our 3D printer has the lowest unique part count of any 3D printer in the world, and is the only consumer 3D printer in the world that has an insulated heated bed. See more about [D3D Pro - OSE's 3D printer]. Our Seed Eco-Home is the only temperate-zone house prototype with a built-in biodigester. Our Power Cube has more power per dollar cost than any other commercially-available hydraulic power unit.
  5. Replications - people download our blueprints and replicate our machines independently. Autonomous replication from our plans has been demonstrated in dozens of cases (we are aware of 12 replications of our CEB press alone) around the word
  6. Workshop Revenue Model - We have shown that our Extreme Manufacturing Workshops can generate $10k revenue from a weekend workshop. We are working on making this replicable and scalable by training entrepreneurs. Metric of success: number of regenerative livelihoods created.
  7. Collaboration Architecture - we have demonstrated that we can maintain the organizational infrastructure for a complex project spanning the entire human technosphere, by using a simple and scalable OSE Collaboration Protocol.

You may observe that we emphasize Extreme. Why? Read more about Why Extreme?

Next proofs of concept for technical development are open source CAD toolchain, open source collaborative video toolchain, open source landscape design toolchain, collaborative graphics design, collaborative house design, collaborative nursery design, collaborative Tractor Construction Set design, outsourced production model, replicable training workshop model, and replicable production permaculture model. Not to mention Distributed Market Substitution.

Our next milestone for organizational development is Extreme Enterprise - creation of enterprises over a weekend with a swarm of 200-1000 people in real-time spread across the globe.

Specifics