OSE Clubs

Open Source Ecology’s goal is to create the open source economy. What does that mean? It means simply an economy where collaboration is the norm – where access to knowledge, informaiton, and design is free and public – as opposed to the industry-standard system of competitive waste.

We build 3D printers and tractors. In One Day. And we build houses – in 5 days.

We just finished our first ever immersion training program, hired two people, and plan on doing the next immersion program in May of 2019. Our goal is to double every year until we reach 1000 full time developers by 2028 – having completed the entire Global Village Construction Set by that time.

Our current strategy revolves around Extreme Manufacturing Workshops as the revenue model, and we are just adding kits to our funding model, starting with the 3D printer and moving onto tractors, houses, etc. We are not funded by foundations – but via a bootstrapping route – which we think is more scalable. The vision is public design for the common good – and to achieve that, we need developers.

We have an active development team – reflecting about 4 full time equivalent effort as of the end of 2018 –

Fig. 1. Development effort from January 2017 to the end of 2018.

This is a small but ongoing contribution, and to meet our 2028 development goals we would need to grow significantly. Our current effort is far from the 100 full time effort that I would like to have seen by this time, and further still from the 1000 full time effort that is required to achieve the same level of impact that Linux was able to achieve.

One way we can get closer to our goals is OSE Clubs – and we have just started our very first club at the London International Academy in London, Ontario, Canada. William Neal is leading this club. William first came to the OSE site in 2010 – and has been infected with the OSE method ever since. He built our compressed earth block press in China, and has been promoting OSE work in his classes.

The main requirement for OSE Clubs is a strong stakeholder – a mentor to maintain continuity. We train the mentor in an intensive 3 day program, for which the mentor can also receive professional development credit. This program is open to anyone worldwide who can commit to running an OSE Club.

The main focus of OSE Clubs is continued development on the OSE Roadmap for 2028. We meet with mentors on a weekly basis, and the mentors provide the leadership for their club. Every 3 months – we do an Extreme Build Competition – which is really a Coopetition – a collaborative competition. Teams meet in real life for an Extreme Build of a project that they have been designing and prototyping over a 3 month period. This is similar to FIRST Robotics Competitions, except the goal is explicitly on design for public good rather than preparation for the military industry.

In the OSE Coopetition – the reward structure is based on the level of cooperation, and we are considering build speed as one of the main judging criteria. This is consistent with our vision of Extreme Manufacturing – where swarm builds can produce industrial efficiency on the small scale. We are developing this social production model to revitalize communities worldwide. We’re far from Nobel Peace Prize material at this time, but we have to start somewhere.