The Bigger Picture of OSE
also blog post - https://www.opensourceecology.org/the-bigger-picture-of-ose/
The First Seed Eco-Home Is Now for Sale – And a New Era Begins
We’ve just reached a milestone: the very first Seed Eco-Home is now available for purchase, and we’ve developed eight different pathways to make it accessible to people around the world [1].
This isn’t just a house—it’s a launchpad. Each sale helps bootstrap the full development of the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS): a complete toolkit of open source machines required to build a modern, sustainable civilization from the ground up.
From This First Step to a Global Shift
This moment represents more than a building—it's a real step toward our broader vision: an open source economy characterized by near-zero marginal cost and high-efficiency productivity. In practice, that means:
- Lower cost of living
- Greater financial independence
- A shift from survival to purpose
- A culture of productive freedom, where people are empowered to do good work
- Delivery of the promise initially uttered by the Founding Fathers: Freedom and Liberty for All
We believe this shift will spark a move from scarcity-based business models to abundance mindsets, and that it will resolve the productivity paradox: why—despite exponential technological power—society still struggles to deliver real human well-being.
Our Strategy: A Hybrid of Education and Production
Our revenue model is simple but powerful: we combine education and production. This begins with our new four-year institution, now enrolling its first cohort of 24 students. These students will swarm-build a complete Seed Eco-Home—from foundation to rooftop photovoltaics—in just five days.
After years of development, we’ve validated the build. Now, we’re launching the school to scale this model—to train world-builders, to rebuild broken infrastructures, and to fund the GVCS through house sales.
The Vision: From $50M to a New Civilization
My TED Talk hinted at the GVCS’s potential. We now estimate that finishing the GVCS will cost $50 million over four years. This projection is based on our actual development costs per machine to reach product release. The development can be achieved by talent that we create - via the Future Builders Academy. This aligns with our OSE Apprenticeship tuition of $15,000—representing the investment needed to gain the integrated skills required to launch and thrive in a sustainable village. This is not a college-for-debt swap: we include work-study so that students can pay their way and finish debt free.
Without this training, nothing else moves. This is why we built the school - The Future Builders Academy.
But our ambition doesn’t stop at 50 machines.
We estimate that open-sourcing all hardware technologies foundational to civilization would require around $50 billion—roughly the cost of 20 years of global R&D in new products (about the length of a patent cycle). That doesn’t include organizational redesign, but we believe open collaboration will naturally evolve institutional structures as part of this transformation.
Even so, $50 billion is less than one ten thousandth of the global economy (when spread over the proposed 12 year timeline). It’s a doable number. Hundreds of corporations have such a disposable budget - and could execute if they had the mindset. Meanwhile, we’re bootstrapping our way there. Feed a hungry person for less than a cup of coffee per day. Better yet, fix the system that deprives most of the population from full nourishment - literally and metaphorically.
Lessons from the Past. Tools for the Future.
When I spoke at Bioneers in 2011, the open hardware movement was peaking. We had industrial productivity on a small scale, with a dozen replications of our machines globally in one year. But the momentum faded. Why?
Because productization is hard. Because skill cultivation is harder. And because a scarcity mindset runs deeper than we realized.
Most people have never experienced the cognitive override needed to escape fear-based thinking. But that’s what we teach—not hippie optimism, but disciplined, productive abundance built through skill and collaboration.
This work has never been more urgent—or more possible. The Seed Eco-Home gives us our first real taste of zero marginal cost in practice. And the deeper we go, the more we realize that universal basic assets—not just income—are key to unlocking abundance at scale.
That’s our next challenge: building the infrastructures to deliver those assets through open hardware and collaborative production.
The OSE Response: Scale Through Purpose
Mainstream industry avoids the problem of complexity through specialization and mass production. But most products—and most systems—are mediocre at best. Sturgeon’s Law applies to civilization. It also applies to us.
Our answer is the OSE apprenticeship program - now re-branded as the Future Builders Academy. It's a bootstrapped engine of deep learning and production, combining build skills, collaborative design, and entrepreneurial training to liberate productive potential. We embrace the paradox of rapid learning and lifelong growth.
Because I believe: we can scale this.
The Roadmap: A Timeline for Transformation
Here’s what we’re doing:
- We’ve created a financing model—through a combination of education, production, and homebuilding.
- We aim to generate $50 million in revenue by 2028 from home sales, other open source products we release, and some assistance from the nonprofit sector - funding the full development of the GVCS and unlocking $11 trillion in potential productive power.
- We will seed experimental prototype communities of tomorrow, built around GVCS infrastructure.
- By 2036, we aim to open source the entire technosphere and its institutions.
This leads to the ultimate goal: an abundance-based economy rooted in distributed production and collaborative literacy.
All Hands on Deck
This effort requires everyone. Every house build funds the school. Every cohort fuels the GVCS. Every machine open-sourced distributes power—real, productive power—to the people. Swarm collaborative development events fuel expertise and prototypes.
This is how we build a world where nobody is left behind—a future where freedom, collaboration, and prosperity are not the exception, but the rule.
Paradise at scale. Not just for the few.