Why Extreme Builds?
Extreme Builds are important in that they allow industrial productivity on a small scale - leveraging a swarm-based, collaborative, immersive, holistic approach to learning and producing.
Many people ask why we need to build a house in 5 days, while it can be built comfortably in a year? Why go through all the rigor and effort of coordinating such ambitious events?
The answer lies in economic feasibility.
Many people will have 5 days to commit to an Extreme Build, so 5 days - or any highly-accelerated timeframe - allows for something that can compete economically with standard options. Otherwise, people will buy the short-term solution on the open market.
Not many people can afford to build a house in their spare time over a year, or to build a tractor over a few months. The long time-frames have an issue: they take long. If OSE wants to help large numbers of people - it can't take a year to help one person. There are practical and logistical reasons why 5 days works - and one year doesn't.
We have not found an economic model that could sustain a build over a long timeframe - while we see a clear economic model for Extreme Builds. Extreme Builds have an audience and market - and they product valuable results - and are thus a model that can be replicated in many different contexts. This makes the Extreme Build model attractive, and that's why we are devloping this model as a viable option for producing cost-effective, state of art, open source products that can compete in the proprietary and artificial (without full-cost accounting) mainstream economy.
