Proposal 2011

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Mon 30 Aug 2010

Steam Engine Prototype 1 Design

Posted by Marcin

Towards the end of yesterday’s blog post, we mentioned our progress on the modern steam engine. This is part of our near-term development program (and part of Proposal 2011) towards upgrading our Power Cubes and the LifeTrac infrastructre to modern steam power. Yesterday we met with Robert Thomas, one of those rare individuals who builds steam and gasoline engines for fun. He built this steam tractor replica (23 hp) of a larger 1920s farm traction engine completely from scratch, including building the steam engine from heavy-walled pipe and cutting the gears:

Steam Tractor – 23 HP from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

We began a design session. Our conclusions from yesterday are to produce a proof-of-concept prototype of a modern steam engine involving Arduino to provide electronic steam injection. This is analogous to electronic fuel injection in cars. The concept looks like this. and can download this conceptual diagram in Dia here to collaborate on the design:

It is a single cylinder, 4” bore, single-acting uniflow steam engine. The inlet port is a solenoid valve operated by Arduino, with a sensor on the flywheel to provide timing. The materials cost is under $200. (more…)

Categories: Proposal 2011, Steam Engine Construction Set

[27] Comments

Sun 29 Aug 2010

GVCS Technical Development Process

Posted by Marcin

Continuing with Proposal 2011 for the rapid deployment of the remaining 39 GVCS technologies in a rapid, parallel fashion by year-end 2011 – here is an overview of the Technical Development Process, which is applicable to the development of each of the technologies. This template is a tactical simplification and further refinement of the Open Source Product Development Pipeline method. At best – after the required developments are made in our collaborative development infrastructure by mid 2011 – the remaining 38 projects can be approached in parallel according to this Technical Development Process. You can also download the source file in Dia and get involved in collaborative development of this Process.

We will climax Proposal 2011 with lucid explanation of our work via Explainer Videos, followed by a clear definition of tasks to be done for each project (as begun in the template above according to the general timeline and budget presented in a former post), together with an explicit procedure for accomplishing the same. (more…)

Categories: Organizational Development, Proposal 2011

[3] Comments

Sat 28 Aug 2010

Organizational Development

Posted by Marcin

What is this new flurry of organizational diagrams, started in the last blog post? We are planning OSE Proposal 2011, with a goal to deploy the remaining 39 technologies of the Global Village Construction Set in a radically rapid, parallel development fashion involving $2M in funding and 1 year in time. You can download this graph source here (in Dia) to make improvements, as this is work in progress, and Proposal 2011 is meant to be a collaborative process. Yes, you can involve yourself directly in building a new world.

The graph summarizes the organizational tasks required for Factor e Farm to build its infrastructure to handle 12 on-site people and to handle widespread global collaboration – by the first half of 2011. Key tasks in this involve explaining our work to a broad audience, recruiting a wider development team, building an internet platform, building additional physical infrastructure at Factor e Farm, and funding the whole package. We have had a major upsurge of involvement and support, and our goals, while admittedly optimistic, are definitely not impossible. (more…)

Categories: Proposal 2011

[5] Comments

Fri 27 Aug 2010

GVCS Project Management

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…)

Categories: Collaboration Platform, Community, Global Village Construction Set, Information Architecture, Open Everything, Open Source Product Development Pipeline, Proposal 2011

[3] Comments