OSE Model of Change

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Intro

The OSE model of change involves Distributed Market Substitution as a means and an end to the open source economy. Because optimal design has Degeneracy. Therefore - open design and collaboration is the best means to get there.

This starts with Integrated Humans - integrated education, integrated design, and integrated Enterprise. Therefore each person strives to be a global stewart - not a partisan of a small interest.

This model has guts. It requires the courage to act on what is generally accepted as obvious.

Summary

By guaranteeing material abundance, humans can attain psychological abundance, and thus collaborative self-determination. We propose this as the most potent way to solve political problems as well as any problems involving resources and their distribution.

An argument can be made that it is the other way around: psychological abundance would guarantee material abundance. However, the former is executable, and the latter much harder to execute on a societal scale.

OSE is working on guaranteeing such material abundance - which require psychological and character evolution. We build infrastructures while building character.

Tactical Aspects

  • Generalized global village construction services - tangible creation of infrastructures for prosperity
  • Black Swan Negotiation Services - an NGO that works at the government level on unsolvable problems. This is related to the Open Letters program

Working Doc

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More

OSE's goal is to create something that smells like the Open Source Economy of Affection, though the more accurate description is the Open Source Economy proper. The focus is creating a highly scalable Solution for X that is also a job training program. X refers to all Pressing World Issues. starting with an Affordable Housing Soution That is Also a Job Program. The job training program refers to framing the OSE education programs as Lifestyle Engineering - an apt description of OSE's work where technology is only a small part - though a critical kernel of civilization which today is FUBAR. Lifestyle engineering refers to nurturing financial independence as the most critical aspect to addressing the need for people to do with their life what they want to - not that which is dictated by economic pressure of surviving. This is like guaranteed basic income - where a handout is replaced by revenue from the raw power of open source productive efficiency.

Introduction

OSE's work includes several levels, all of which must exist for fundamental transformation of the human enterprise. OSE's goal is a transition to collaborative, open development of its economies - namely the products and services that we use. That is the superficial, material level. However, our goals are personal and political transformation.

We work on open hardware - the Global Village Construction Set - and its underlying 500 Modules - for creating the entire technosphere. Directly, from the 3 Sector Theory, this is responsible for 30% of all economic output. However, OSE also engages in education/training, which is a significant part of the tertiary sector. If we include the entire service industry, we can estimate that 50% of the service industry is hardware-related - in that 50% labor and 50% materials generally applies to any human enterprise. Thus, 30% of the economy is primary/secondary sectors - and 1/2 of 70% is the secondary sector. The total is that hardware is 65% of the entire economy.

The important point to keep in mind is that life in today's world still revolves around addressing artificial scarcity, or material goods - in the context of general material/energy abundance. By design, scarcity is enforced throughout human institutions, a structural issue - embodied in the various elements of Structural Evil. Solution of structural evil is the resolution of Pressing World Issues. There is in general agreement on what is good for society and nature, but structural issues prevent implementation.

OSE works on hardware - but not specifically hardware - but open source business models, using open source hardware, that brings natural capitalism into the fore, as opposed to finance capital. Natural Capitalism may be summarized as the internalization of ecological issues into the economic equation. The last step, Distributive Enterprise - is the internalization of social issues in the economic equation.

We develop products and education for developing open source products collaboratively.

But that is only the beginning. As the name Global Village Construction Set implies - we build infrastructures of civilization - to produce any enterprise imaginable. But that is also only the beginning: our goal is an enterprise model that transcends the 2 outstanding limitations of modern capitalism: ongoing ecocide and poor distribution of wealth.

OSE Campus Concept

To get to the next level, we must solve the material prosperity issue for everyone. OSE's approach to this is not a theoretical design of human enterprise - but their implementation. To transition from the theory to practice - that means that we build real infrastructures. Our model for this is the OSE Campus.

The closest analogue to the OSE Campus is the university campus. Except operationally much different. The OSE Campus is also a real economy, and circular at that. Why not have the agriculture students provide food for the cafeteria? Why not have the engineers produce cars, tractors, and utilities that run on campus? Why not have the architecture students build the campus? Why not have the computer science department create the autonomous farm rovers and drones that make agriculture easier? Why not have the international relations and business students work on collaborative design processes that make an advanced economy possible? Why not have the 'law students' develop the governance and social contracts that we live by, to correct outdated features of existing systems? Why not have the scientists and medical students develop open source labs and clinics to keep up with modern scientific progress? And best of all - why not have the option for someone to learn all these fields so that they can produce the most integrated and effective solutions possible - free of the silos of modern education? See Integrated Education. And - this all would be impossible if we do not learn to get past our own personal issues - so we need to study applied psychology, Self-Determination Theory, and peak performance - to become Integrated Humans. After their due time at the OSE Campus, students emerge as integrated movement entrepreneurs - ready to tackle pressing world issues. Because the explicit stated purpose of the OSE Campus is to prepare students for solving pressing world issues, one by one. Conceptually, that is simple: learning to share, be true, to plant trees, build open technology, and collaborate with others. In practice, this is difficult - and hence we are creating the OSE program to facilitate this.

The point is - OSE is developing the GVCS - but at the same time - a generalized, collaborative, open source development methodology - to transition the economy from proprietary to collaborative. This means rapid prototyping and experimenting throughout - in terms of building real infrastructures.

The OSE Campus is an instance of such an infrastructure. The roll-out could be a an open source microfactory, which evolves to a full campus. In any case, the facility must embody fundamental productivity. We have identified 9 key enterprises that we would run, to provide a stable economic base for expansion. See OSE Campus Social Contract#Technology.

OSE's goal is to start about 10,000 of these campuses worldwide, after proving and benchmarking the first one, so that open source technology, afforestation, sound governance, end of poverty and war, and the beginning of general Self-Determination become the norm. We can also envision multiple such facilities being developed in parallel, though staffing may be a challenge.

Some of the byproducts of the OSE Campus are:

  1. To serve as a point of light that disseminates free enterprise through its surrounding communities.
  2. Afforestation and regeneration of the environment, ending biodiversity loss
  3. Liberation of humanity from toil - ending the Myth of Technology and replacing this myth with true liberatory technology that frees people to pursue their most important goals, free from the threat of survival
  4. People becoming whole and true to themselves - where psychological integration and maturation is a realistic option for everyone
  5. Introduction of integrated education as the norm, free from silos and disciplinarity
  6. An effective, distributed, circular economic paradigm
  7. Healthy food becomes available to the masses once again
  8. Lifetime Design technology reduces cost of operating capital at least 10x

Meta Principles

  • Approach is material-based. Material needs are determined by one's self-esteem. At the first approximation, material needs are the same for people: x calories per day, a home, etc. Material needs diverge based on one's consciousness (Nathaniel Branden)
  • Economy follows provision of material security in the first approximation
  • Politics follow economy
  • Attempt to make a better world by prioritizing the political sphere is like - 'water will also etch rock to make the Grand canyon' - it takes too long. Material security must be addressed free of rat race and other obstructions to flow. Working on the material front is the most direct route, but it must be accompanied by personal growth
  • Proving the efficacy of social change via material means would you involve creating a replicable OSE campus. If that becomes the new model of human settlements, instead of the cookie cutter suburbia, then we have proven the case. That indicates trillions of dollars of economic value converts to regenerative settlements. This, what does this Village Campus look like from an operational point of view - with respect to feasibility of build, replicability, and 'market penetration' into the current world
  • In the new economy, home and work are the same. Our 'house-keeping', or economics - as that's where the word comes from in Greek, is no longer separated from our house. Because of this historical separation between our house and our house-keeping - we have spawned genocides and ecocides.
  • It's regenerative house keeping, or regenerative economics.
  • Regenerative is easiest when it's in your backyard, as who wants to spoil their own back yard. We have direct feedback looks in what we do, and how that affects the environment. As a Chinese wise man once told me, if you go to bed with an itchy ass, you're going to wake up with smelly fingers.

Overview

Other Aspects

Introduction

Approximately 80% of the world's geopolitics, politics, and economics are driven by the material economy, and 20% is software. However, the 80% of the physical reality is determined by another kind of software - the brains in our heads. The provision of material security to people remains one of the key challenges of humanity, and it is far from optimal. Most of resource conflicts and disparity of wealth are grounded in the material economy. Thems that gots, gets.

Current understanding of human motivation is captured in Self Determination Theory. Yet most people are stuck in making a living instead of thriving via their capacity for self-determination.

OSE believes that the deepest kind of freedom relies on one's individual capacity to convert abundant natural resources to free themselves from material constraints. That is the basis for sound human relations - personally and geopolitically. It is the basis from which thriving arises - or eudaimonia.

There is effectively little choice in today's economy when it comes to right livelihood. People are relegated to military and industrial slots, leaving little room for authenticity.

To allow for a real option of right livelihood, a parallel, ethical, open source economy must be created. It is an economy beyond the fear of survival, made possible by unleashing access to learning and productivity.

OSE believes that the mass creation of right livelihood by distributive enterprise is a possible route to achieve the promise of self-determination, in harmony with natural life support systems, and to slay the Myth of Technology.

OSE also believes that mass production can not compete with open source (production). OSE has been demonstrating this with its Extreme Manufacturing Workshops. This concept has been theorized in the seminal book, The Second Industrial Divide, and initial evidence of feasibility was proven for the open source context by OSE. Specifically, see Ergonomics of Tractor Production.

To this end, OSE is developing the tools and techniques - technical, organizational, social - of unleashed productivity on a small scale that would allow for the conversion of the current economy into an advanced civilization at an appropriate and distributed scale. Operationally, we develop machines, collaboration processes, collaborative build techniques - and produce distributive enterprises that allow for the creation of wealth based on abundant resources. Otherwise, even Krypton depleted its resources and caused a Universal-scale war.

Operational

The concept of distributed economies is not new, but its execution is. Outside of OSE, we know of no other explicitly open source, distributive organizations operating at the level of distributing production. Some candidates such as OpenDesk, MIT FabLab, and WikiHouse have emerged.

Earlier Work

Links