Wed 16 Jan 2008
P2P Economy and Permafacture
Posted by Marcin
We need to take this P2P economy seriously.
A new financial system is waiting to emerge, with power at the bottom of the pyramid.
As international boundaries begin to crumble, local and bioregional economies take over. People learn from torrents, not mass media. People want to give more and more things away. Open source is already real for information. Information is the new oil field of the 21st century. The last frontier is permafacture: open source technology for sustainable living; digital fabrication; breakthrough economic systems;lifetime design and design-for-disassembly. Absolute scaleability. Absolute replicability. Mainstreamability.
That’s a peek into the future. Today at Factor e, we’re focusing on the Open Source Product Development Cycle, which can be scaled and paralleled, for accelerated development of OS tech. First 3 test cases are CEB, Solar Turbine, and advanced Sawmill. Testing the waters. If we can raise $3k/month, that cranks out the 9 products by year-end. If this mechanism can scale or parallel, then we can crank out products on a weekly basis. That would be a technology development pipeline, and substance for a world-class research and development facility for the open source economy.
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May 4th, 2008 at 10:04 am[...] We are proposing the creation of Global villages that contain: (1), permanent agriculture, (2) 100% renewable and local energy production, (3), biofuel production, and (4), permafacture. [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 12:56 am
Marcin,my impression of the p2p economy side is that it sees the peer to peer economy as an assembly of small entrepreneurs.
I’m not sure how well they cover the interplay between open design and that distributed physical economy.
See here for some thoughts on that intersection: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-intersection-between-the-immaterial-and-material-economies-how-can-it-work/2008/01/17
January 17th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
The answer to the p2p link of immaterial and material economy is integration. This is what we’re testing at our lab, http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/. The key summary is: 1. Develop open source design for products voluntarily. 2. Develop fabrication facilities, voluntarily. 3. Optimize everything, voluntarily. 4. Provide goods for market from an open source, optimized, replicable production facility.
Step 4 leads into self-funding mechanism – one production is real, proceeds can support further work.
How to do this voluntarily? Funding is needed. That’s where a funding mechanism (prior to the bootstrapping funding of Step 4) is needed, and that, to me, is the cutting edge of open source economic development. With this funding mechanism, we fund production facilities, optimize, and everyone benefits: low cost, high quality products, that cannot be matched by standard businesses because the open source variant is lean, mean, and optimal. This is what we’re working on, see notes on the process at:
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Main_Page#Deployment
and application to our compressed earth block press at:
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=CEB_Press
The challenge is absolute integration. The development of the new production model requires that we integrate open source product development with productive earning from that development. At Factor e Farm, we’re going a step further, and contributing our time and facilities to make the process a lean, mean business model that breaks through all types of preconceptions of what business should look like. We envision voluntary, on-demand production, via advanced and affordable flex-fab facilities, as a replicable and even mainstreamable form of production, as the scale of economies is reduced by advanced technology and information flows.