Factor e Farm has been building Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) machines since 2008. That year, I announced the Global Village Construction Set concept for the first time in a presentation at the U. Missouri, Columbia.

As of today, at least 62 protototypes have been built in 4 countries:

All entries in the icons in the graphic are hyperlinked to pictures and documentation. You need to click here to access the above document directly and  double click on the icon to go to the link. (note: 3 most recent builds are not shown)

Let us know if you know of any more replications – we don’t know if the above list is comprehensive. See more information on the wiki.

The graph above indicates project scaling towards the open source economy - paper on this forthcoming in the next issue of the MIT Innovations Journal. We are currently recruiting 4 machine designers, and we aim to get our prototyping rate to 4 prototypes per month at Factor e Farm by March of 2013.  Since the success of the CEB Press Collaborative Production Run, we are shifting our recruiting to a focus on machine designers instead of fabricators. We found that production runs with 6-8 people using the Fabrication Diagram swarming method allow us to build a machine rapidly – within 1-4 days – provided that complete fabrication instructions are prepared carefully ahead of time.

More generally, here is a perspective on the evolution of open source hardware – care of the Open Source Hardware Association leadership:

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Categories: Open Source Ecology

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