Factor e Farm, our land-based facility for Global Village Construction Set development, has now been alive for 4 years. We encountered the place as an empty soybean field abused by commercial agriculture. This video shows in 4 minutes what has happened in the last 4 years – and points to the plans for the next 2 years. These are exciting times indeed.
The current plan is 50/2/2 – the entire set of 50 Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) technologies to be completed in 2 years within a $2.4M budget in a scenario of rapid, parallel development. By year-end 2012, we want to be done with the basic GVCS shown above, so we can move on to applications – such as the infrastructure for a real community. This is a big, hairy, audacious goal. It requires that a large parallel development team is recruited, that a scalable development process is realized, and that the organizational infrastructure to support this task is established.
We have about 200 True Fans now – including two at the Angel level. Subscribe.
The left axis is work remaining, and the x axis is time. 2012 is approaching, so it’s high time to tidy up the GVCS. It’s only two million dollars. RepLab is the open source Fab Lab. If you would like to improve the above Burndown Graph, please download the source file (in Dia format; both the file and source images must be in the same directory) from our repository. (more…)
OSE is teaming up with Gaia University to offer Ph.D. programs related to post-scarcity, resilient communities. As you may have read in a previous post, Gaia University is beginning its Ph.D. program offerings this year.
The OSE-Gaia program is geared at developing the rigorous theory and practice necessary to support the development of post-scarcity economics. The goal of the Ph.D. offerings is to set new ground in interdisiciplinary studies, by offering projects that combine academic rigor and hands-on experience. Factor e Farm is a working lab that can be used for this purpose.
Gaia University is not the only route for you to get involved if you are interested in charting new territory in applied studies. If you are considering post-graduate studies, and if you are savvy, you can arrange to define your own program even if you are at a traditional university. You would have to find a professor at that university willing to be your academic liaison, and you would have to convince your institution that your proposed undertaking merits an advanced degree. Details of these arrangements depend on the university – and if you are enterprising, you can definitely arrange a workable scenario. I don’t think schools typically advertise this option too much, but it certainly exists. I would have done that myself, if I were aware of the possibility.
Here are 5 Ph.D. program statements as immediate offerings – for those brave pioneers who want a real, interdisciplinary challenge. The topic areas are allied closely with the work of OSE, and Gaia University will be providing the organizational infrastructure and promotion of these programs to its prospective students. (more…)
We are now officially using Open+Pario as our project management and design repository for Open Source Ecology. The most active project at present is the CEB press, and we are beginning project management of the Open Source Induction Furnace. Anybody can view any of the projects – including design files, technical discussions, etc. The content is entirely transparent and open to the greater community.
If you want to get involved in any of the projects, you can sign up as a Project Member by registering and joining a given project. (more…)
William Cleaver will be joining us at Factor e Farm on May 1 for a Dedicated Project Visit. He’s coming from across the big pond – from the United Kingdom – and we are planning for a 3 month stay.
William is not a novice to creative dexterity – he’s involved in repair and demolition of industrial chimney stacks and natural draught cooling towers – at heights. See for yourself:
He has experience with various tools, welding brickwork, ropework, woodwork, and general shop. He’s traveled the world, studied Romance languages, taught English in Chile, and is certified to teach high ropes courses. He is now showing great interest in the deeper message of post-scarcity, resilient community creation.
We discussed the following tentative plan, with both of us working in the shop and as needed:
May – Work on finishing or building Sawmill/LifeTrac II/MicroTrac II/ anciliary implements for construction – all in preparation for building.
June – begin building autonomous, zero energy housing with solar space. Experiment with CEB floors, CEB masonry stove and chimney, stabilized bricks, stabilized reject lime bricks, stabilized brick walkway and driveway, stabilized retaining walls, and others. We plan on winter food garden and sprouting in the solar space. If progress on the steam engine goes well, we’ll aim to install combined heat and power on the masonry stove.
July – continue building until comfortable accommodations for the winter are ready for several people.
We’re looking at building zero energy homes that look tentatively like this:
Other than this, William is learning Kdenlive on Linux for movie editing, as well as and QCad for CAD work. These are staple tools now at Factor e Farm. William will begin preparing some of the technical drawings for the sawmill, so we can collaborate on making that happen over distance until his arrival.
We do want to consider bringing in additional help from the CEB general contractor, Floyd (see last blog post). We will consider hosting a CEB workshop if progress is good. If the CEB fabrication is going well – there could be resources generated to really get things moving forward, and continue to build more structures. I think now is the beginning of really settling into the land – and getting the place to look half-way presentable. We’re open to all kinds of ideas, such as the proposed CEB vault construction and others – but we’d need other people to get involved to push those projects forward. Otherwise, we’re sticking to basics and all types of experiments in the process.
I would like to share today’s letter to our True Fans with the greater world. It provides the latest insights on the Factor e Farm experiment.
Dear True Fans and Supporters,
First of all, thank you all for your unwavering support. You have all demonstrated commitment to our work by putting your money and your time into moving us forward. Your support is essential to a baseline level of funding for our work at Factor e Farm.
I’d like to announce a conference call for this Friday, 11 AM GMT -6 (Chicago and Kansas City – USA time). If you’d like to participate, please refer to the conference call procedure and policy – http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Conference_Call_Policy . This will be a weekly call, and it is our second to date.
The topics are several, focusing around the exciting prospects of perhaps the most important day of Factor e Farm to date on Nov, 1, 2009 – product release of the modular, high performance, open source CEB Press – The Liberator. Here are the items for discussion.
Initial product release – a Beta Version 1.0 – will include a manual machine, with a large, tractor-loaded hopper and grate, that can produce between 5-7 bricks per minute. The power source is external and modular, and so it the Arduino-based controller for automatic control. Both are not included in the initial release, but will be offered as modules in further releases. Product Release means formulating the hardware license, and associated enterprise, PR, and marketing strategies. This also provides a chance to refine OSE Specifications – for branding our products in a groundbreaking way. We are prividing thought leadership and practice on the creation of post-scarcity economics. (more…)
Today, an Open Everything event will take place at the Paraflows Festival in Vienna, Austria. Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation is the main speaker. Franz Nahrada and Ralf Schlatterbeck will follow up with the hardware side of open production, with Factor e Farm and Open Source Ecology as a case in point. We prepared a short video – which Ralf will present – on creating a post-scarcity village on the scale of 30 acres. The essence of such a village is open technology and knowhow. This video is intended to be the shortest, most comprehensive introduction to all of our work to date:
We are farmer scientists - working to develop a world class research center for decentralization technologies using open source permaculture and technology to work together for providing basic needs and self replicating the entire operation at the cost of scrap metal. We seek societal transformation through interconnected self-sufficient villages and homes. This is a stepping stone to transcending survival and evolving to freedom. Factor e Farm is the land-based facility where we put this theory, Open Source Ecology, into practice. More
Marcin Jakubowski, a person I met through the excellent P2P Foundation, is blazing ahead with a very real, implementable “Global Construction Set” of open-source tools, platforms, and knowledge sets to empower a future of sustainable, vernacular, and decentralized food production, energy generation, architecture, and social structures. — Jeff Vail, Blog
