Fri 27 May 2011
Posted by Chris
Greetings from Factor e Farm.
Life has been busy around here.
We’re in the middle of a production run, so we’re working pretty much round the clock. What’s cool is that as we’re building things, we’re finding all these things to improve about the process. There’s a lot of room to grow, and we’re pumping out a lot.
Here’s a few photos of the past week. (more…)
Mon 14 Feb 2011
Posted by Marcin
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.
4 Years oif Factor e Farm in 4 Minutes from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.
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.
Wed 24 Nov 2010
Posted by Marcin
Meet Dave Garrett, who is an early adopter and a True Fan. He dropped in for a surprise visit from 350 miles away – so we could finally meet in person while we were doing our modular CEB construction. Dave is supporting our work by a purchase order for a complete package of The Liberator CEB Press (full product release), LifeTrac open source tractor prototype III, and Soil Pulverizer prototype III. Hear our discussion on other early adopters, such as Columbus and Edison.
Early Adopters from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.
Fri 27 Aug 2010
Posted by Marcin
Devin from Sarapis Foundation for post-scarcity economic development has informed us of Scrum, an agile project management process for developing complex projects – which we could apply to our open source product development pipeline method.
Our response to this is this burndown graph for deploying the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS). See a larger picture on the wiki.
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…)
Fri 6 Aug 2010
Posted by Marcin
The Buckminster Fuller Challenge from Buckminster Fuller Institute on Vimeo.
Sat 31 Jul 2010
Posted by Marcin
We have proposed the scalable, Open Source Product Development Pipeline methodology over a year ago. It’s merely a formalization of an actual process, which was not high.
What are the challenges to a scalable, open product development methodology – which has the power to transform the entire globe to an open economic system – within a few years, if not months? Open-sourcing the entire economy is a well-bounded problem, if done collaboratively. (more…)
Sun 14 Feb 2010
Posted by Marcin
The open source induction furnace project discussed previously is moving forward. 
We are currently evaluating bids, as you can see at the induction furnace project management site. This marks a point in our organizational history where we are beginning to outsource work, consistent with the proposed open source development pipeline process. Outsourcing is an industry standard for mainstream enterprise, but it can also be useful for scaling open source economic development. In particular, it appears that we found bidders fully capable of handling the project, including possibility of building the actual system. Read the bidding negotiations at the project management site for details.
In its limit, this type of outsourcing process can be an effective route towards open-sourcing the entire economy. All it takes is an organized and funded effort. The technical skill is available, but conversion of technology into open source form requires the nurturing hand of many technologically-literate generalists.
The concept for the OS induction furnace is:
The concept embodies a universal power source for induction melting and heating. The founding principle is (more…)
Mon 1 Feb 2010
Posted by Marcin
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…)
Sun 31 Jan 2010
Posted by Marcin
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:
(Credits: Aigars Bruvelis in Blender)
Here is a CEB floor example from Abe at Vela Creations:
See more of his photos here.
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.
Thu 28 Jan 2010
Posted by Marcin
Hats off to our collaborators from Poland for open-sourcing a manual, dual-block CEB press. It is in the pre-alpha v0.1 release stage.
Open Source MANUAL CEB PRESS beta I from Cohabitat Platform on Vimeo.
You can download the existing CAD files here. The files are in Polish, so they still need to be translated for the broader audience.
Meet your developers from the Co-Habitat Platform: Pawel Sroczynski and Remik Karbowiak.
These guys are pretty good. They also developed a model open source, prefab, straw-bale house design, and they will be buildng it this year at a budget of $7k. I always thought that straw bale is too exotic in practice because of the huge labor requirements, but these guys are showing otherwise with OpenSTRAW:
Here is the building sequence. Click on the following images to enlarge:
Both the manual CEB press and the straw bale work are a major contribution to open source economic development – and to humanity. See their website for more information. Congratulations to the Co-Habitat team. We’d like to add the manual CEB press to the Factor e Farm product line as soon as the machine is tested in the field, and we may end up building some straw bale here after all.
