Open Source Ecology

From post-scarcity communities, open business models, open source tractors, land stewardship, to starting some serious building this year – here’s the latest:

If you are liking what you heard in the video, don’t forget to subscribe to the True Fans to help make the work happen sooner rather than later.

Remember that we’re not there yet – the village still needs to be built. One year after initiating the True Fans campaign, we are at 60 subscribers, and you can read some of their comments here.

We used Kdenlive for the video edit above, which is the open source industry standard for video editing on Linux. I heard rumors that Kdenlive is better than iMovie on the Mac, and we’re migrating to Ubuntu Linux around here. This Kdenlive adventure was plagued with errors at every step, so here’s a transcript while we upgrade to the latest Ubuntu and Kdenlive:

Happy New Year, dear True Fans and all our supporters. What is the single most important highlight from 2009? The world’s first high performance, open source Compressed Earth Brick Press is now in production. Orders have already started, and we are currently working on streamlining production.

I think we’re just getting started here. Our immediate goal is a $10k/month budget. One route to that could be with CEB press production – 50 presses over the next year would do that.

This year we’ll be doing lots of building. We are currently modeling and designing the autonomous house prototypes for the village, and our goal is to build 4 CEB modules this year. We’ll be taking LifeTrac, the open source tractor to production, and we hope to do the first prototype of the combined heat power system based on pellet biomass, at the same time that we continue on the digital fabrication.

The visions of post scarcity communities are clarifying, and we’ll be putting together another proposal. This will turn to about a 100 page book, filled with essential post-scarcity substance. We’re including the technology work, community building, and land stewardhip. We’re also putting our land in a trust as a site of human heritage. I think we’ve got substance for generating significant support, plus the beginning of viral replication, and taking over the world – namely, with transition to post-scarcity, open source, resilient communities. Stay tuned, and evolve to freedom.

Dear True Fans,

The next major step to take for Factor e Farm is to put the land in a trust – for creating a permanent site of human heritage. The goal of creating the world’s first, replicable, post-scarcity resilient community is more clear than ever. See the last presentation from the H+ Summit if you haven’t already.

The issue on land is practical and timely. Our goal is to establish a new model of land tenure based on a resource-based economy. We’re giving our land away to a trust to protect the integrity of all that we stand for. What’s unique? Just the provisions for ensuring a resource-based economy model of operation in practice. What exactly does that mean?

The initial thought process behind the land trust was outlined in this blog post. Now we need to:

1. Find a Board of Stewards (or Board of Directors), which oversees the functioning of the resilient community in-the-making, where this Board would help refine the governance document
2. Find technical consultants who can help draft the corresponding legal language for a suitable legal vehicle for holding the land.

The qualifications for the Board of Stewards are at best that the potential candidate has ongoing experience with land stewardship, and deep interest in creating post-scarcity economies. Demonstrated leadership in strategic, ethical decision-making is a must. If you are interested in serving on the Board of Stewards, contact us so we can continue the discussion. The point is to build the common vision and trust that allows the Stewardship entity to function well. We will hold our next conference call on the land issue, and we will come up with a plan of action for refining the governance, legal language, and make headway on identifying potential Board members. We would like to make significant headway, and possibly complete this process by identifying at least 3 qualified Board members – by end of February, 2010. Who of you are up to the challenge? Do you know people who could help?

Our goal is to create a global network of such resilient community nodes, by inviting others to participate in a simliar land-holding mechanism. The difficult part will be establishing governance, but we believe that private contract can succeed in defining roles and expectations. We think that the Board of Stewards must be an external oversight party, ethically sound and free from conflict of interest, and it must have absolute power to ensure integrity and continuity regardless of the day-to-day events on-site or political events outside.

Along with this call-out for assistance in drafting the governance document, we are also publishing the Lifetime Investor announcement to those who are interested in being full-time, on-site developers at Factor e Farm – those individuals who are the creators of the world’s first, replicable, post-scarcity resilient community. Please read the Lifetime Investor document and comment.

This is a beginning of the discussion. What we’re doing here can have profound effects on the future. I think it’s time to nail down the land stewardship issue at this time.

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.

The program for delivering an induction furnace involves a high frequency, high-power supply (between 20 and 50 kW (the latter can be gotten for $1600 on Ebay), and the melting chamber proper. Well, we could buy a turnkey system perhaps for $5k total used, and run it from the LifeTrac generator. The only disadvantage to this route is that if it breaks we’re dead-in-the-water – either with the impossibility of fixing closed-source technology, or a high repair bill. A single component which blows and is inaccessible for fixing could in principle turn a working power supply into worthless junk. Thus, it is worthwhile to tame this technology by open-sourcing the design.

It is more robust and cost effective to open-source the high power induction power supply. We would like to exactly this – which is mature technology. The question is finding a consultant or developer. We are thus making a call for bids. We are offering between $100 and $3000 for a design – depending on its level of completion. We will post this on eLance and other outsourcing sites.

If you are qualified to produce a design, please submit a bid by emailing opensourceecology at gmail dot com. We’re open to other suggestions on tactical and strategic aspects.

The bids will be judged on the demonstrated competence of the bidder, and upon the extent of design completion. The complete design would include all of the following:

1. Design of an induction furnace circuit scalable up to 50 kW in units of 1 or 5 kW
2. Design allows for power and frequency selection
3. Power source may be either 1 or 3 phase electrical power.
4. Specifications of a cooling or heat dissipation system
5. Adaptable design specifications for primary coil windings
6. Geometical design of melt chamber and basic power transfer calculations
7. Melt chamber includes provisions for loading and pouring.
8. Complete bill of materials
9. Fabrication files for circuit and other components
10. Sourcing information for components
11. System design and process flow drawings

Serious bidders only, please. Naysayers on feasibility of this proposal will be either dismissed summarily, or our design criteria will be modified accordingly.

With up to $3k allotted for design work, we believe that the remaining $2k would suffice for parts for the actual device: about $1k for the electronics, and $1k for the furnace chamber.