Factor E Farm Blog

I was invited to present at the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit 2009 (FSCONS) – November 13-15, 2009, in Gothenburg, Sweden. This is an exciting chance to connect to the Swedish open source and Global Villages contacts. Please contact me if you would like to meet or if you have any other interesting contacts worth visiting with on the topics of open source ecology. Here is my abstract – Tranformative Economics via Open Source Product Development – with initial discussion on our CEB press product release.

All sociopolitical systems involve a productive economy as a backbone for their existence. General prosperity of the population depends on how well the fruits of that economy are distributed to its participants. The internet age, wherein information can be shared freely, implies that economically significant information should empower the productivity of unprecedented numbers of people. Strong implications emerge for transcending the present economic system based on scarcity. In particular, open source product development and global sharing of digital design towards digital fabrication are beginning to demonstrate the capacity to provide a human development path competitive with centralized, monopoly production. We are proposing that open source economic development is a viable path towards a transformative economy and advanced civilization. (more…)

I was invited to present at the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit 2009 (FSCONS) - November 13-15, 2009, in Gothenburg, Sweden. This is an exciting chance to connect to the Swedish open source and Global Villages contacts. Please contact me if you would like to meet or if you have any other interesting ...

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As part of our development process. Factor e Farm participants are required to commit to a proposal for their stay at Factor e Farm. When participants arrive here, we video and then publish these proposals on this blog. This is part of our measures to bring further accountability and transparency into our process. Lawrence’s commitments are shown in the last post, and here we have Inga’s belated introduction and commitments. She’s been here for three weeks now, and here is an update after all the dust has settled.

Untitled from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

As part of our development process. Factor e Farm participants are required to commit to a proposal for their stay at Factor e Farm. When participants arrive here, we video and then publish these proposals on this blog. This is part of our measures to bring further accountability and transparency into our process. Lawrence's ...

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We just got a copy of this TV interview that we did back on the OSE tour in Austria. Michaela from Earthship Austria organized this particular event. The interview took place at a local TV station in Bad Kleinkirchheim – a well known ski resort town in Austria. Both Inga and Michaela agree that this is a good, brief introduction (12 minutes) to the work of OSE – and in particular the Global Village Construction Set. We recommend it as a good entry level discussion for those less familiar with open source development – but it also touches on the deeper issues. The video was produced by BKK-TV, and we thank Gerhard Reiner of BKK-TV for letting us reproduce it.

OSE TV Interview – Austria Tour from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

We just got a copy of this TV interview that we did back on the OSE tour in Austria. Michaela from Earthship Austria organized this particular event. The interview took place at a local TV station in Bad Kleinkirchheim - a well known ski resort town in Austria. Both Inga and Michaela agree ...

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MicroTrac achieved zero turn motion. If one walks around rapidly, one can turn the walk-behind tractor around in place. MicroTrac is turning out to be a beautiful freak:

Play this freak show.

To do this, we added two small, freely-turning wheels to MicroTrac. This replaced the rigid wheels from the first test run. In that test run, we discovered that we want a greater degree of turning flexibility, because MicroTrac is so long – hence the zero turn wheels. (more…)

MicroTrac achieved zero turn motion. If one walks around rapidly, one can turn the walk-behind tractor around in place. MicroTrac is turning out to be a beautiful freak: Play this freak show. play_blip_movie_2416745(); To do this, we added two small, freely-turning wheels to MicroTrac. This replaced the rigid wheels from ...

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We’ve got some great news on Inga’s House. We have succeeded in inviting Dipl.-Ing. Dittmar Hecken. He is the hands-on instructor from the Earth Building Course that Inga attended at the University of Kassel, in Germany. University of Kassel is the home of Prof. Dr. Gernot Minke‘s group – world leaders in earth construction theory and practice. You can also see Inga’s interview with Dr. Minke in a previous post. We recommend his seminal book on earth construction, Building with Earth: Design and Technology of a Sustainable Architecture, which came out earlier this year. The Europeans are decades ahead of America in earth construction, it seems.

Dittmar will provide us with the needed expertise to build a structure, out of CEBs – that will look like this structure from Tamera. Dittmar led one of the construction groups on this project, and the structure was designed by Gernot Minke:

This is major news for Factor e Farm. A roof of compressed earth block is a high technical accomplishment. The roof is the most expensive part of a house, so this makes economic sense as well – as our friends from Africa will tell you with respect to Nubian vaults. Plus, earth-sheltered housing like this is king of ecological biotecture, if you ask me. Here we’re combining ancient wisdom of earth building with modern CEB machines – open source, under one roof.

We’ll be offering North America’s first workshop on CEB vault construction – end of September, 2009. We’ll get Inga’s House out of it, and we aim to attain a basic level of mastery on CEB construction technique. The world gets full documentation of the process – including open source machinery – for replicability. Inga and the team are doing their homework. Stay tuned.

No, you don’t have to know that the catenary shape of a vault is actually a hyperbolic cosine function. But I bet there will be a large number of these structures popping up all over the Americas. We need to catch up to the rest of the world on this one.

We've got some great news on Inga's House. We have succeeded in inviting Dipl.-Ing. Dittmar Hecken. He is the hands-on instructor from the Earth Building Course that Inga attended at the University of Kassel, in Germany. University of Kassel is the home of Prof. Dr. Gernot Minke's group - world leaders in earth construction ...

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Inga and I have fused since she arrived to translate at one of the events on the trip through Austria. Meet Inga. She’ll be joining us at Factor e Farm, and this is growing to be a bigger story than expected.

Click To Play

Right now, we are begining an open source architecture process for building Inga’s House. A showcase of comfortable living. Local materials. We’ve got a contact for arched CEB roofs – we’ll see if we can pull them in. We’ll use Andrius’ method of organizing around a person – and Inga is project leader. We cater to her needs through global collaboration.

Here is the design process beginning – Franz, Marcin, Inga, Dustin, Michaela – as instigator, stakeholder, leader, architect, translation – respectively. See our initial planning session:

Click To Play

This fits into the context of Solar Village.

See further coverage of the Austrian adventure (in German) in Transition Austria.

Inga and I have fused since she arrived to translate at one of the events on the trip through Austria. Meet Inga. She'll be joining us at Factor e Farm, and this is growing to be a bigger story than expected. Click To Play Right now, we are begining an open source architecture process for ...

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Last weekend we took Marcin Jakubowski (http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Marcin_Jakubowski) from the Subversive Fair in Linz (http://subversivmesse.net/) to Carinthia. On Tuesday evening we had the event “Open Source Ecology & mobility” (http://www.earthship.at/) at the university of Klagenfurt. And on Wednesday we brought Marcin to Weiz. Here you can find an overview of his whole trip through Austria (http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/?p=637).

These have been exhausting but exciting days for us! Inga – the english trainer (http://www.synchro-communications.com/englisch_training.php) has been our very special help. She has done the interpretation of the event but also the host of Marcin in Klagenfurt and his shadow during his trip through Austria. She will be with him until he leaves Austria. Furthermore she will visit e factor farm in Missouri during one month in summer this year to see what the have built up there and to work with them. Gorgeous!

There have been so many people at the event in Klagenfurt, I never expected. (I was afraid, that we would stand there in front of 5 to 10 people, but there were about 50). I liked to see many people in the audience, I have never seen before, many of them are part of the bartering circle. For them OSE is a big opportunity.

Andreas Exner (http://transitionaustria.ning.com/profile/AndreasExner) has written a great report about the event (in German) (http://grueneug.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/open-source-ecology-commons-solidarische-okonomie/ ), big thanks! After the event Transition Klagenfurt was founded (http://transitionaustria.ning.com/group/transitionklagenfurt), a community open for all persons interested in energy policy!

We hope, that many common projects will follow. We are planing a project for OSE with a technical school in Klagenfurt. Also OSE wiki pages in German will be set up. My husband Erich (http://transitionaustria.ning.com/profile/ErichSchneider) will do the coordination and asks for help from all of you.

Best wishes to you
Michaela

Last weekend we took Marcin Jakubowski (http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Marcin_Jakubowski) from the Subversive Fair in Linz (http://subversivmesse.net/) to Carinthia. On Tuesday evening we had the event “Open Source Ecology & mobility” (http://www.earthship.at/) at the university of Klagenfurt. And on Wednesday we brought Marcin to Weiz. Here you can find an overview of his whole trip through Austria ...

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How does one reinvent corporate R&D by using open source methods? We missed a couple of details in yesterday’s hairy diagram and explanation. Now it should all be clear:

Now a couple of words on the above. (more…)

How does one reinvent corporate R&D by using open source methods? We missed a couple of details in yesterday's hairy diagram and explanation. Now it should all be clear: Now a couple of words on the above. Yesterday's post covered the left part of the diagram, which includes primiarily the technical due diligence steps necessary ...

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Yesterday, Mathew, Nick, Jeremy and I participated in the conference call on extending our collaboration ability. One major issue that we face is the large scope and difficulty of explaining the process of building the world’s first, replicable, off-grid Global Village, via the Global Village Construction Set.

We made 2 conclusions in the conference call.

1. We are going to focus all of our energy on just the CEB press for now, because we can demonstrate the complete Product Development Cycle by example only. We can’t explain the product cycle – because we don’t even know ourselves what it is until we go all the way through Product Release.
2. To help others understand the integrated ecology of the Global Village Construction Set, we’ll start moving on to ecological diagrams of operations, and how the different technologies fit in that ecology. The first diagram is the Solar Energy Cycle. You can see the rough sketch.

We have updated the Global Village Construction Set – so read about the changes that have been made. The same functionality still exists, with minor refinements and simplifications in the way we present the entire package. Still, we make the bold claim that the set, along with a few other readily-accessible technologies – is sufficient to provide an infrastructure for advanced civilization. The items mentioned in the GVCS constitute a package of items that are currently not open source or replicable, therefore fraught with high costs – such that creating a replicable global village from existing components is difficult and expensive, if not impossible, in practice.

Here is the updated Set:

And here is the set rewritten in pictures:

From now on, I shall toil you less with diagrams of words, and more with diagrams of pictures. While we have already shown a simple set of component icons for an open source technology pattern language, we’re going further with pattern language concepts to explain the individual, integrated technologies. We’re moving from components more to integrated technologies, and from the integrated technologies to ecologies thereof. Different infrastructures and ecologies, such as solar power infrastructure, fabrication ecology, or waste resource cycles – may be explained now by using icons.

I have to go now and write my Oekonux 4 presentation (coming up next weekend in Manchester, UK) using some of these icons. If you are interested in meeting up during the conference, let me know as well.

Yesterday, Mathew, Nick, Jeremy and I participated in the conference call on extending our collaboration ability. One major issue that we face is the large scope and difficulty of explaining the process of building the world's first, replicable, off-grid Global Village, via the Global Village Construction Set. We made 2 conclusions in the conference call. We ...

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We have previously introduced an open collaborative product development process. Developing an effective open source product pipeline – as a worthy competitor to corporate research and development (R&D) – remains one of the hottest topics of the peer-to-peer economy. We know of no other comprehensive product development pipelines, with well-defined, applied methodology – outside of our own. That’s sad but true, and we welcome insight if we’re missing something here.

We have begun a process to get to world-class, open product R&D with the Global Village Construction Set – a set of infrastructure technologies for building the world’s first, replicable, off-grid, open source Global Village.

This process is in its infancy. The problem statement of reinventing the essence of civilization is not a light task. It’s a topic equivalent to hundreds of Ph.D. theses, combined with the hands-on work of thousands – nothing short of a social movement. It’s a social technology and process that massages existing technology into a more human-friendly form – also in harmony with natural life support systems. To us at Factor e Farm – developing an effective process for collaborative product development – is the most pressing issue that society faces today. That is because it is a tactical approach whereby people actually share. This concept has been discussed previously in scripture, pick your book. (more…)

We have previously introduced an open collaborative product development process. Developing an effective open source product pipeline – as a worthy competitor to corporate research and development (R&D) – remains one of the hottest topics of the peer-to-peer economy. We know of no other comprehensive product development pipelines, with well-defined, applied methodology - outside ...

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