Strategy Notes - 6 Month Plan of July 2011

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Statement of Intent

OSE is currently prototyping the GVCS - the 50 industrial machines that it takes to create advanced civilization with modern comforts. All efforts of the project are currently dedicated to the prototyping of the machines, by building the capacity for rapid parallel development. To this end, we are improving the infrastructure at Factor e Farm, and for the next 6 months, we are proving the concept of the base open source agriculture and construction infrastructure aspect of the GVCS - while building up our infrastructure. This is aimed at closure of the prototyping cycle and complete documentation of the first set of machines- tractor, CEB press, hydraulic power unit, and soil pulverizer. All global assistance is welcome in developing and documenting these prototypes. Other prototypes may be developed as our capacities to handle more projects increase.

Strategic Summary

The focus shifts to the OSE Christmas Gift to the World 2011 - completion of infrastructure buildout at Factor e Farm - involving the construction of low-cost, super-insulated housing. The Kickstarter campaign is thus reorganized for the completion, extended field testing, and documentation of the Tractor, Soil Pulverizer, CEB Press, and Power Cube, providing a firm closure of our first main prototyping cycle of the base agriculture and construction infrastructures. To this end, we are recruiting a Fabrication Manager and Construction Manager, and producing a site survey and architectural plans - assuming a budget of up to $100k dedicated to construction. We are further securing a rental unit in Maysville to house 1-2 onsite participants. We further have a documentation team on site, consisting of 2 dedicated people, who are working on full fabrication procedure documentation. We are currently securing our own server for video uploads, CiviCRM, and the ability to handle a large number of hits from Kickstarter. On video, we have almost 1TB of video footage from this production run, to be deployed to a remote video editing team - with a goal of professional quality instructionals on the CEB Press, Tractor, Soil Pulverizer, and Power Cube to be delivered as part of our Christmas Gift. On the legal front, we are trade-marking our identity and donating our land holdings into a trust.

Immediate Action

  • Reorganize Kickstarter
  • Search for a rental unit in Maysville
  • Get Viveik in on the loop to secure architecture plans after July 20 survey
  • Secure baler/mower/rake
  • Recruit Fabrication Manager and Construction Manager - blog post
  • Transfer $60k donation
  • Define Job Descriptions for people desired on-site

On-Site Development Team Requirements

The basic team of ~8 onsite at Factor e Farm should include these people, all of whom are required to cross-train for a basic level of proficiency in the other areas of expertise towards becoming Integrated Humans

  • Project Manager - executive director of GVCS prototyping
  • Custom Fabricator - on-demand fabrication all equipment needs of the community
  • Master Builder - enables on-demand production of housing units on the time scale of 2 weeks for building a 200 sq foot basic living addition
  • Equipment Designer/CAD draftsperson/CAM - on-demand rollout of prototype designs ready for fabrication
  • Open Source Agroecologist - or farmer - maintains all aspects of the agricultural/forestry/ecology operations with the assistance of the GVCS toolset
  • Site Manager - maintains infrastructure (power, water, waste, fuel) and takes care of the site
  • Cook/Food Manager - feeds the on-site population - plans agriculture crops, processes food, cooks
  • Documentor - documents all of the above using multimedia tools, creates instructional videos and documentation for replication
  • Power electronics expert - designs and builds the power electronics infrastructure

Construction Manager

Requirements

  • Master builder
  • General Contracting experience
  • Expertise in carpentry and basic proficiency in plumbing & electrical
  • Their own tools and a truck for transporting materials
  • Basic proficiency in cement work

Duties

  • Develop techniques for building on-demand, 4-season housing in a period of 2 weeks - as owner-builder model for new members of Factor e Farm
  • Guide new team members in construction to generate on-demand housing for FeF expansion

Fabrication Manager

Requirements

  • Mastery of welding and custom fabrication operations
  • Familiarity with hydraulic fluid power
  • Ability to follow fabrication drawings

Duties

  • Management of production runs (ongoing, for producing equipment kits)
  • Buildout of workshop, living units, meeting room, kitchen, bathroom, and tornado shelter

Open Source Agroecologist

Commonly known as an integrated farmer - with the addition of savvy in equipment operation and custom fabrication.

Requirements

  • Familiarity with tractors and their operation
  • Experience in hay baling operations
  • Experience in fruit tree propagation
  • Experience in forestry

Duties

  • Lumber production from on-site trees
  • Square bale production from on-site hay crop
  • Wet baling development for large-scale mulching purposes
  • Generation of woodchips from hammermill
  • Open source bulldozer build by gear-down of LifeTrac for tripling the torque.
  • Berm and pond digging with the bulldozerng
  • Field cropping and harvesting
  • Operation of Agrocircle
  • Maintenance of raised bed garden
  • Provision of 100% of essential food needs for the community

Civil Engineer

Requirements

  • Familiarity with power electronics
  • Familiarity with wind, solar concentrator, CHP, and biomass power infrastructures
  • Familiarity with living machines
  • CAD and prototyping experience
  • Familiarity with microcontrollers

Duties

  • Development and maintenance of the on-site power microgrid
  • Development and maintenance of a living machine for wastewater treatment
  • Development of robotic agriculture systems such as Agrocircle
  • Design of water runoff and catchment systems

Documentor

Requirements

  • Expertise in video-editing software
  • Ability to shoot video documentation
  • Technical writing ability
  • Willingness to cross-train with all other core team members towards basic functional proficiency
  • Ability to synthesize large amounts of media and information into clear instructional materials
  • Expertise in CAD modeling software to produce animations, exploded part diagrams, bills of materials, and others

Duties

  • To produce professional quality build instructionals for GVCS tools
  • To produce produce release DVDs with instructionals and other supporting information for replication

Designer/CAD/Prototyping

  • Expertise in 2D and 3D CAD design using a professional CAD package
  • Mechanical

Power Engineer

Requirements

  • Expertise in power electronics

Duties

  • To design, prototype, and field test all the components of village power electronics infrastructure: inverter, welder, plasma cutter power supply, battery charger, charge controller, induction furnace, and stepper motor controllers

CAM and Robotics

Requirements

  • Expertise in CAM

Intro

See also Factor_e_Farm_Infrastructure_Buildout_2011

Planning session with Viveik, results:

Using existing resources, we should focus now on infrastructure for the next 5 months until the OSE Christmas Gift to the World 2011: Tractor/Construction product releases + documentation; plus infrastructure build

Midcourse Correction

  • Kickstarter for Tractor, Pulverizer, Power Cube - Product Releases - for documentation
  • Do not focus on training as core competency - that can be done by anybody; we focus on prototypes and their documentation to enable such training
  • My primary job - identifying and grabbing people who are smarter than I, 3-4 hours per day
  • Development pace is defined now, could change any second
  • Leave production scaling to others, under the assumption that prototyping is funded otherwise
  • Definitely focus on product testing - field use in construction and agriculture duties.
    • CEB construction + soil pulverizer
    • Sawmilling
    • Baling
    • Trenching
    • Backhoeing
    • Cement mixing
  • Main addition - Sawmill of 3 day design + ousource to Sweiger?

Midcourse Expansion

Under the assumption that we identify a Fabrication Manager and a Construction Manager, I should be liberated to study baler/cutter/rake industry standards and outsource prototyping of the Sawmill - to largely complete the superinsulated housing option at minimal cost.

Timeline:

  • July 16 - completion of air-cooled Power Cube
  • July 20-21 - ETA for James Clark, surveyor, coming to Factor e Farm - Google Earth + USGS + Geological Samples
  • July 20 - ETA for Marshall Smith, construction logistics organizer
  • July 20 - Identify Construction Manager
  • August 1 - Complete Power Cubes and CEB Press
  • August 1-30 - Build of cement mixer (2 day), trencher (2 day), shakedown of backhoe; buy and shakedown baler,rake, haycutter; have Sweiger build Sawmill after 3 day design session ($4k + $5k labor)

Other

  • Texas Terry as fabricator lead

Construction Preparations

  • Shake down bucket

Team

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