Open Source Economic Development

Open Source Product Development

On Feb. 1, 2016, we continue to clarify the 20 year horizon for OSE in terms of creating the next economy, the open source economy. This is from our Roadmap wiki page: A viable Open Source Product Development (OSPD) methododology is critical to this....

Distributive Enterprise

I am applying for the Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship. If successful, this brings in $360k of resources to the project by March, 2012. Listen to this personal intro for the Fellowship, discussing the concept of Distributive Enterprise:

4 Years of Factor e Farm

Factor e Farm, our land-based facility for Global Village Construction Set development, has now been alive for 4 years. We encountered the place as an empty soybean field abused by commercial agriculture. This video shows in 4 minutes what has happened...

Oberlin Videos

Here is a followup from Brad Masi from the Oberlin lecture tour, who videotaped an interview and the Oberlin lecture. These are decent overviews of the latest progress, and the 30 minute Oberlin lecture shows a good flavor of our present status. I’ve...

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Over the holidays, I got a chance to meet Juliet Schor (author of Plenitude) in New York City. Juliet teaches at Boston College, and she co-founded the Center for the New American Dream. She wrote about Factor e Farm in her recent book,...

Honey Extractor Tractor: The Craziest Thing Done with LifeTrac So Far

LifeTrac, our open source tractor, features extreme flexibility by design. We just used LifeTrac as a honey extractor. We mounted our universal rotor on the front-end loader, and used it to extract honey from comb. The process starts with a hot knife...

Full Product Release

Note: We no longer consider this to be a Full Product Release because this is an older version of the machine. Further prototypes and improvements have been made, see update post of Sep. 24, 2012.  We are pleased to announce the official, Full Product...

Economy in a Box

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...

Windpower

Just ten miles from Factor e Farm – 100 windmills of 2.1 megawatt capacity were installed over the last two years – with 100 more forthcoming. It’s quite a sight. I asked a couple of local farmers about them – and they told me...

Bootstrapping and Dedicated Project Visits

We are currently in the phase of fabrication optimization for the high performance, open source, Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) press. This is our route to financial bootstrapping of the research and development efforts. We are looking for people interested...