Sweden is not exactly sunny at this time of the year, but the Nordic people are lovely.
So far, it’s been a mind-blowing experience at the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS 2009). One cannot explain it in writing – not even by watching the videos – because it is the atmosphere of freedom and high level work around it that makes this conference so interesting. The place is exploding with pure passion on the topic, and its flavor seems less academic than the Oekonux Conference.
Here is the talk that we’re presenting today on the work of Factor e Farm. I look forward to cracking the limits of consciousness with it – even though there’s nothing original in it. It is integration of learnings, and an attempt to put them together to a viable pattern for society.
I’ll report more on the findings from the conference later.
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…)
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*
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.
Inga and I refined a collaboration procedure for development work at Factor e Farm. We are focusing our development efforts on dedicated project visits – a topic that we’ve discussed a number of times, and finally put down on paper.
This is part of our growth as an organization, and is intended fully to provide the much-needed accountability for producing results. Basically, we are moving away from poorly-defined goals and expectations that plagued many of our project visits, by formalizing the clarity in the form of a working proposal. Non only does a proposal have to be made to us, but also to the greater world – in the spirit of open source collaboration. To do this, applicants must blog their commitments prior to coming here. Once here, we are requesting a short introductory video at the onset of the project, and weekly documentation. This proposal will be documented both on this blog and our wiki. We have seen much trouble resulting from poor communication on our side regarding expectations, and we will have no more of that.
Here is our formal initial announcement of the 10-day Compressed Earth Block (CEB) Vault Construction Workshop. It will be held at Factor e Farm, in the Kansas City area, Missouri, USA, at the end of September, 2009.
Examples: Modern, earth-sheltered vault homes made of compressed earth have been built in Germany and other countries, but we know of no precedent in America. This is an example from Germany:
Here is another vault home as seen from the inside:
Workshop Description: This is North America’s first workshop on the construction of vaults from CEBs. This is a hands-on, immersion workshop in which participants will work on the construction of a vaulted house with a living roof and solar design. In this workshop, you will get hands-on experience in the entire process of building a CEB vault with a structural, arched roof made of the same material. We will be building a triple-vault structure similar to the one shown in a previous post. We are calling it Inga’s House. We will use wooden forms as guides for the vault to make this accessible to entry-level builders. There is a limit of 25 participants for each session of this workshop, so reserve your space early by filling out the 2009 pplication. Preference will be given to those with experience in building. (more…)
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.
Here is the natural history of Factor e Farm just at the beginning of plantlife leafing out – May 1 prior to my Austria trip. We go through the wild areas, garden, orchard, and greenhouse. This is a major contrast to what the place looks like right now. I will blog about that in my next post – showing both the full greenness of the place and the permacultural developments that happened in the last month since Ben arrived.
May 16th: at 7 p.m. Marcin was scheduled to meet with people at the Villa Kreativ in Neulengbach – I was not part of the official itinerary but a few phone calls by Franz Nahrada cleared the way and Marcin and I were off to the railway station in Linz.
On the train Marcin made that ‘famous’ video showing my transformation from Inga – The English Trainer to Inga – The Village Elder. Not only the train was moving fast towards Neulengbach and points beyond….
What lovely, dedicated and hospitable people we met at the creative villa, (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
[Open Source Ecology] is yet another example of the many efforts underway to accelerate DIY technology development for Resilient Communities (The RC). As personal fabrication improves, these tinkering efforts will become MUCH more sophisticated at an ever decreasing cost. We (collectively, those of us engaged in decentralized thinking/action) are in the process of reinventing how the global economy is structured at a root level — good thing we didn’t ask permission. — John Robb, Global Guerrillas
