Factor E Farm Blog

We were invited to present at the Bay Area Community Exchange (BACE) Roundtable on Tuesday, June 15, 7 PM, at Noisebridge. BACE focuses on the creation of alternative means of exchange in the San Francisco Bay Area. I will present a talk titled, Economy in a Box. We will discuss how real goods can serve as the backing of local currency. When we consider the economic potential of the  Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – we think of it as a sufficient basis for an accounting system based on its productivity – or a means of exchange.

The presentation will discuss a subset of the Global Village Construction Set as it pertains to the creation of a prototypical, minimum but sufficient and robust economy based on ubiquitous, local resources. This includes resilience in the basics: food, fuel, energy, housing, and technology. We will propose an economic analysis of such a program, and point to its feasibility using proven and existing technologies. This subset therefore constitutes the substance of a means of exchange, or currency. The program is founded on replicability as the core of its principles.

If you are in the Bay Area, come to the talk, and I would also like to meet any other collaborators on the 15th or 16th. Contact me if you’d like to meet. Our thanks go to Anthony Di Franco from BACE for inviting us. We also recommend this video from The Guardian on the potential of economic swadeshi applied to the modern economy. If you would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to the True Fans.

We were invited to present at the Bay Area Community Exchange (BACE) Roundtable on Tuesday, June 15, 7 PM, at Noisebridge. BACE focuses on the creation of alternative means of exchange in the San Francisco Bay Area. I will present a talk titled, Economy in a Box. We will discuss how real goods can ...

1 Comment

You can view a video of my presentation on building post-scarcity, resilient communities from the Humanity+ Summit here. This is a short summary of applications of the Global Village Construction Set.

This blog post ended up being quite a collection of post-scarcity related videos, not just from the Summit. We begin with some other favorites from the conference: (more…)

You can view a video of my presentation on building post-scarcity, resilient communities from the Humanity+ Summit here. This is a short summary of applications of the Global Village Construction Set. This blog post ended up being quite a collection of post-scarcity related videos, not just from the Summit. We begin with some other favorites ...

[3] Comments

Greetings from sunny California. I’ve arrived for the Humanity+ Summit. I will be presenting on the Resilient Community Construction Set, this time emphasizing the technological aspects for a technophilic audience.

I think that the transhumanists generally diverge from general systems theory that we promote with the work of Open Source Ecology. At the same time, both camps run deep with notions of post-scarcity, open source development, and creation of new systems.

Here is my talk. The message is distilled to the core motivation for the Resilient Community Constuction Set, which goes as follows.

Imagine that we could take all that society has learned to date and apply it to making a better world.  Then we would come up with post-scarcity, resilient communities. This can be done by miniaturizing civilization – or building a complete community on the smallest possible functional scale while retaining prosperity and autonomy. This is a well-defined problem statement – and one worth trying. That is the nature of our experiment. Why is this important? Because the whole world is made up of communities – and if we can get one right – we could get them all right.

I should make a further note on what it means to build a community. The idea is actually radical – the concept that you can turn dirt and twigs into advanced civilization. The prospect is real, with advanced technology – that is now – for the first time in human history – making it possible to use local resources to distill all the trappings of society from immediately available, abundant resources. It takes some time to get used to this notion and take it seriously. It is not easy to do so, because, in general – we lack the technological literacy to assess the possibility in a meaningful way. It is worthwhile to ponder this point, however – because of the real possibility of achieving the naive-sounding goal.

(more…)

Greetings from sunny California. I've arrived for the Humanity+ Summit. I will be presenting on the Resilient Community Construction Set, this time emphasizing the technological aspects for a technophilic audience. I think that the transhumanists generally diverge from general systems theory that we promote with the work of Open Source Ecology. At the same time, ...

[5] Comments

Thanks to Jonas, Bojana, Rikard, Karl, Henrik, Mathias Friman, and all the others behind the scenes – who all combined for a pretty fiery Free Society Conference for 2009. You can see the Live website for the conference here, and the program here. Between the two sites, you will find the uploaded presentations (such as ours), and the videos of all the presentations should be getting posted soon.

Group photo of presenters and organizers (source)

The difference in this presentation compared to our previous work at Oekonux or Linz Counterculture Fair was that half of it was dedicated to discussion of the social contract for a post-scarcity community. This contract is up for complete review and and improvement – so please read it and rip it up here. The essential question in our case is how to attract dedicated developers who want to invest deeply into making post-scarcity living a reality.

It is not possible to mention all that went on but the highlights. On my talk – people had many questions afterwards for at least 45 minutes, so the concepts of building post-scarcity communities with existing technology are well-received. We already have a couple more True Fans signed up from the conference. Combined with new interest from the Product Release, we have 6 new True Fans since Nov. 1, and an overall total of 50.

We sparked great discussion on the open source fab lab, in that hackerspaces worldwide are well-positioned to collaborate on at least some of the pieces necessary. The concept of Industry 2.0 is really taking off – ie., the combination of fabrication literacy, global design efforts shared by computer, and local production via open source fab labs. (more…)

Thanks to Jonas, Bojana, Rikard, Karl, Henrik, Mathias Friman, and all the others behind the scenes - who all combined for a pretty fiery Free Society Conference for 2009. You can see the Live website for the conference here, and the program here. Between the two sites, you will find the uploaded presentations (such ...

[3] Comments

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.

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 ...

No Comments

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 ...

No Comments

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:

How to Build a Post-Scarcity Village from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

Here is a copy of Franz’s talk: (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 ...

[4] Comments

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 ...

[7] Comments

Here is a video of some of the other presenters at the Subversive Fair. There were too many interesting people to record, here is about 10 of them:

Click To Play

Here is a video of some of the other presenters at the Subversive Fair. There were too many interesting people to record, here is about 10 of them: Click To Play Here is more information on the presenters above. You can see further information on all of the presenters here. Mad Housers - Susan Lee - ...

[2] Comments

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…)

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 ...

[3] Comments