You may have heard us talk about recasting civilization from scrap metal. Metal is the basis of advanced civilization. Scrap metal in refined form can be mined in abundance from heaps of industrial detritus in junkyards and fence rows. This can help us produce new metal in case of any unanticipated global supply chain disruptions. This will have to do until we can take mineral resources directly and smelt them to pure metal.
I look forward to the day when our induction furnace chews up our broken tractors and cars – and spits them out in fluid form. This leads to casting useful parts, using molds printed by open source ceramic printers – these exist. This also leads to hot metal processing, the simplest of which is bashing upon an anvil – and the more refined of which is rolling. Can we do this to generate metal bar and sheet in a 4000 square foot workshop planned for Factor e Farm? We better. Technology makes that practical, though this is undeard-of outside of centralized steel mills. We see the induction furnace, hot rolling, forging, casting, and other processes critical to the fabrication component of the Global Village Construction Set.
We just got a $5k commitment to open-source this technology.
We are starting biweekly OSE Global Conference Calls – beginning Wednesday, October, 14, at 11:00 AM GMT-6 (Central USA time zone). Why? Because we are nearing critical decision forks in this open source project. Read on.
These are exciting times as we near product release for the high-performance, open source, Compressed Earch Brick (CEB) press. Just as a heads up, we’re getting interviewed by Time Magazine next Tuesday, and we have a 2 hour interview with the Venus Project next Monday night, which has quite a global following in the form of the Zeitgeist Movement.
Along the lines of Product Release – we will be releasing CEB Press Beta Version 1.0 – with as much development as we can accomplish by November 1, 2009. (more…)
I wanted to say a little something about what this one month project experience has been like. Its hard to describe to people just how different living here can be. I understood that coming in, but what I didn’t understand completely was how much the project itself would be the complete focus of my time here. I had grand visions of finishing in a week or two, and here I am with almost all the parts on the ground struggling to get the accuracy on the rails that I wanted.
Forgive the length of the post, I usually strive for brevity.
“It takes about three weeks to get use to living here.â€
The first day you’rr filled with a grand passion to finish your project right then and there. The preceding weeks were a back and forth refinement of the project visit proposal, till you are so sure you could blow through the whole thing in a week, two weeks at the most. After the second week, if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll realize how even the best laid plans will take longer than expected. At some point when things stop looking so rosy you begin to condense into your pure objective, The Project. It becomes the singular measurement of success, and thus the swells and troughs of expected success continue, so does your mood. In short, it takes an objective outlook to see past the details and understand how to salvage the core of the project from unrealistic expectation.
“If life isn’t interesting enough to make up your own quotes then you’re doing something wrong.â€
By the second week you’ve come to grips with the living conditions or you’ve already packed up for home. This place is built upon the dreams of the men and women who come here. Each of them leave a little part of themselves here in what they contributed. By the second week you’ve also realized what this place is and what it means. Its a dream made manifest, kept alive by the people who volunteer their time and a measure of their vitae. Like all dreams, the meaning of this place twists and turns until the daylight hours blow away the mist and leave in their place the fixed stark reality of once lofty dreams. In short, you either get it or you don’t.
“All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.”
By the third week you’re terribly shaken. Events out of your control degrade the living conditions, distort the project you’re so focused on, and inevitably it is the nature of humanity to rub each other raw somehow. If your lucky you will learn, re-learn, or learn anew the meaning of perseverance in the face of adversity. It is this forging of the spirit with the hope of self betterment that makes enduring hardship – and in truth life itself – worth it. Our peers and mentors can help or hurt us, but it resides in each of us the capacity to overcome any obstacle if we are willing to submit our body and selves to the tasks before us. In short, it took three weeks to master the composting toilet, and let me tell you what a relief that was!
“I will say though that there is such a thing as too interesting a life.â€
By the fourth week, you’re thinking about what you want to do next – and if another project visit or going home are on the agenda. Either way you go, you wake up feeling liberated. The major trials are behind you and all that’s left is to buckle down and finish what you can of your one month project and look forward to the time left. This place, this catch of dreams, draws forth the most interesting of people. In the beginning you come here for the chance to work on an amazing project, but you remember most of all the people you meet and the experiences you take back. In short, the aspirations of the people at FeF dictate the flavor of the place.
~~~~~
It is still an open question as to the contents of the rest of my stay here. Keep us all here honest with your feedback, as the value in this sort of work lays within its utility to those who come after. In exchange I will continue to keep everyone updated, and look forward to the day my contributions find use.
Lawrence Reed Kincheloe III, On-site Torch Table Expert
P.S. My benevolent Overlord wants me to pump the Torch Table funding basket shamelessly. Funding the Torch Table project and projects like it help ensure that the selfless, unpaid, volunteer work done here can continue. *nudge nudge*
This is Austria Day 2. The highlight of today, in addition to more interesting people visiting our booth, was contact with one fellow presenter working on a physical production-based distribution of Linux. This means the guy, Florian Stoffelmeyr, of openartisthq.org, is integrating the multitude of open source tools for 2D, 3D design, hardware interface, and other aspects of collaborative, physical production – and putting it into a unique distrubution of Linux. This is much needed integration work, just as we’re doing on our integrated on-the-ground approach to open source, physical product development. This has great potential to increase our ability to scale product development via global collaboration. Sam Rose is equally excited about this, and it synergizes with his collaboration tools. I’m hoping to post some video on this by tomorrow.
Meanwhile, in the background, positive developments are happening in terms of collaborative development between Factor e and heavy-hitting social hackers at Minciu Sodas and Global Villages, led by Andrius Kulikauskas. Here I repost yesterday’s post by Andrius, which is informative in terms of describing an evolving social ecology between Factor e and other players of Global Village development. (more…)
Before reading this post, we invite everyone to write a message about what you feel Open Source Ecology means to you, and your ideas on how this can be communicated effectively to others. How do you feel about Open Source Ecology?
Open Source Ecology’s latest core message is “Building the world’s first replicable, open source, modern off-grid global village – to transcend survival and evolve to freedom.” But what does that mean? Here are some explanations of what we think the message of Open Source Ecology means:
Replicable means that the entire operation can be copied and ‘replicated’ at another location at low cost. (more…)
I posted the updated technology set in the last post, but how do we actually develop the Global Village Construction Set in a timely fashion? What is the elusive, scalable methodology for open product development? It’s obvious. It’s this;)
If you would really like to understand this very important but messy hairball, give yourself a half hour and read on. (more…)
For the record, we keep log books/journals at Factor e Farm. Anyone visiting for more than one week is required to make a notebook for records, data, pictures, numbers, etc. This is useful for keeping track of Factor e Farm history, passing on work to future team members, and for other development streamlining. See how we make a sample book – a video from last summer with Bob:
An OSE presence has been established on many popular social networking sites, and we are now looking for someone to manage them and direct outreach and community development. They are all updated with ping.fm. We welcome everyone to direct people to whichever of these sites you think can help spread the word about OSE. Remember, we’re looking for people interested in building the world’s first replicable self-sufficient technology for ecology permaculture ecovillage!
We are carrying on fiery discussion on an integrated strategy towards the world’s first replicable, open source, global village. We started an OSE Development Network for True Fans and dedicated collaborators at the Global Swadeshi forum. A diagram is below, and you can go to the wiki for further explanation of the diagram.
People, we’re going through some major organizational development at Factor e Farm. We’re struggling with an approach and method for delivering the open source village. The Factor e Live Distillations are complete – though I will publish another summary and call to action in the near future – once we settle on a core organizational approach. We are starting an organized marketing campaign for the 1000 True Fans.
To begin with, we can say that our problem statement is not easy. We’re aiming to build an open source village prototype, with a population of 30 real people. We’re trying to reinvent a viable route to civilization, for tribes or towns. With unprecedented prosperity. Within two years. With no money.
One may say that there are some challenges on our path. (more…)
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
If people see that [Open Source Ecology] is relevant to Africa as well as USA it could make [this] work even more attractive to givers. Most people recognise that “something needs to be done” in rural Africa to address issues of poverty. — Pamela McLean, Learn By Doing
