Talk:RCCS I

One thing that concerns me is the bootstrapping costs of moving to RCCS-I. It's all well and good to think about a community that can fabricate things out of scrap steel, but even reaching that point is difficult/expensive. RepLab is (in theory) capable of replicating itself, but you either need a RepLab outside of the community to build you one (ie, buy it or trade for it) or you have to invest in the tools needed to build it.

To some extent, there is a chicken and egg problem there. How to you start a local community towards a resource based economy (RBE) when you have to spend so much money to even start? Could such a community arise from nothing? Unlikely in the extreme.

It helps for me to cast this into a personal perspective. I would very much like to have may of the machines proposed for the GVCS. In spite of having some personal resources to put into developing the tools, I recognize that many of them will always be out of reach for me, personally (like oh, say, the induction furnace). This naturally leads me to consider how I might start up a local community to form the partnerships needed to move towards an RBE. Does such a community need to be co-located, like Factor e Farm? Can it be distributed geographically? How far apart to members have to be before they are no longer "local"? I will be exploring some of these concepts in my own local community (Ithaca, NY). - User-mjn 5/26/11