Remote Collaboration

Remote Collaboration Options

There are many ways that one can participate in the development of the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) remotely.There are 40 technologies. For these we need:

• Webmaster - with the caveat that the person has to assure continuity of their work. Clear presentation is necessary to get beyond the present disorganization on our internet presence.
• Designs, CAD, and prototypes. Most are flexible fabrication equipment items and heavy equipment items, plus agriculture and energy production items.
• Publicity work]
• Architectural drawings for CEB construction - priority for Solar Village 2010
• Assistance in power electronics for an induction furnace and a universal electrical power source,
• Organizational help in producing a 10-15 minute powerful video on our message.
• People to organize speaking and lecture tours
• People to produce and submit articles to different media venues
• People to produce a detailed agricultural open source agroecology plan for our facility.
• We also need visualization modeling for our facility and program
• People to write diagramming software (see the #Computer Support section)
• People to produce 3D CAD modules for Blender or fork thereof
• Alternatively help in the development of a 3D CAD solution (see the #Computer Support section)
• We need to organize a well thought out campaign for recruiting True Fans.
• We need somebody to write a survey course on power electronics, which is the next untapped frontier related to the Global Village Construction Set.
• We need to produce a Product Release CD for The Liberator, but that is primarily work to be done on site with the machine at hand.

Organizational Development

The organizational development component lends itself especially well to remote collaboration - because it can produce substantial resources for our operation, and it can certainly be done from anywhere in the world where someone has access to a computer and phone.

There is a large list of organizational tasks that need doing, from writing articles for submission, contacting publishers of magazines to feature our work, soliciting collaboration with allied groups, organizing lecture and speaking tours, producing publicity materials, organizing the wiki into a coherent whole, developing a workable social contract for resilient communities, and developing a network of collaborators and developers - among countless other tasks.

The key to this is clear communications. Someone interested in doing this needs to have good marketing skills, as well as good writing and technical writing skills. The best person for this job is an actual stakeholder - one who understands our work sufficiently to the point of living by our principles - such that this stakeholder is in a good position to explain the nuances of our work to others.

Computer Support

We need:

• Somebody to run regular backups of the wiki and blog
• An Open Source 3D CAD program.
  We currently use Blender, but for real engineering tasks, a Solidworks equivalent would be much better. FreeCAD seems to be the most promising one, contribute to it. For example with a script that implements exploded parts diagrams.
• An Open Source diagramming application.
  We currently use Dia, but it could be better and it is currently not actively developed. A possibility would be to port Kivio to KOffice2, which should be pretty easy using the powerful KOffice2 libraries.
• In the meantime, for more official documents a task could be to recreate a high quality version of the dia diagrams with Inkscape. Here are some tips and an example.
• Somebody to produce a more complete set of icons for the OS Tech Pattern Language, including not only the 40 technologies but various components.
  The goal of this is to do pictorial design of tools, objects, houses, agriculture landscapes, facilities, and communities. For example, a tree or a bolt icon is ever useful.
• Design of a functional, dynamic content management system for the OSE project, focusing on the specific needs of OSE's GVCS development.
  This system should embody the essential features a scalable, open source product development methodology such as suggested at Open Source Economic Development Method.
• Help in the development of 3D animations by collecting useful, open repositories of objects that can be then processed in Blender. This is an example of taking existing 3D material to make a movie.

Basically, any open source technology that is not readily available yet should be documented and opensourced. Use this wiki and then move on to Open+Pario for technical development. See updates on the blog.

Power Electronics

Power electronics is one of the as-of-yet untapped frontiers for Open Source Ecology. Our approach to this involves generating a Crash Course on Power Electronics, at the same time as we build applications in collaboration with the greater open source hardware community. Applications include items such as the Induction Furnace, for real-world needs at Factor e Farm

Thus, we are looking for people to collaborate on creating the Crash Course, and to help in the actual designs/builds of power devices.

While power electronics might sound like an abstract topic - it is one of the foundations of modern civilization. If you use electricity, you are using power electronics. If you ever used a portable generator - you were using power electronics. If you ever used a welder, you were using power electronics. If you ever drive a car - you are using power electronics - for the charging of the car battery. Power electronics are all around us. Open-sourcing power electronics out of the hands of the priesthood that currently controls them - is one of the active interests of OSE.

Invitation

Are you up to the challenge?

Comments

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Additional Resources

List other resources for open source collaboration and other supporting information repositories that may help with the GVCS