Introducing... OSE and the Global Village Construction Set

And so we come to the topic I promised to explore when I first sat down to begin writing this blog: Open Source Ecology and their Global Village Construction Set. I know that my thousands of followers (or at least several occasional readers) have been dying to hear about this crazy project, so this week I will at least introduce what Open Source Ecology is doing and hoping to accomplish.

Open Source Ecology is an endeavor of epically ambitious proportions, much like RepRap in its avowed scale. Its goal is to assemble online via open source a full system of designs, how-to-do's, and material lists for building and operating the fifty machines they believe are necessary for a modern, civilized lifestyle. Well, that's cool you're thinking, couldn't any average joe engineer with some close chums in John Deere and Caterpillar Inc. do that? Not so fast, these machines and their designs are special. They have to be, because eventually they're all supposed to be able to be built and maintained long-term in places like say, rural Ghana.

Whoa, okay, how can that be done? There's like, practically nothing modern in rural Ghana, is there? I mean, how are you supposed to put a tractor together and keep it running in a place like this? ---->

Good question. That's the one that the consortium of engineers, farmers, designers, producers, and other supporters of OSE are trying to solve with the Global Village Construction Set platform. The entire system of production and machines has to be modular, DIY, low-cost, high performance, user-servicable, heirloom design, flexible in fabrication, and, of course, completely open source. With direction and a certain amount of skilled labor guidance, anyone has to be able to make this system work, bootstrapping their way through the various machines and support production from the bottom up.

Currently, they're not anywhere near this point and they don't expect to be for at least another four years, at which point the organization will feel comfortable looking to entrepreneurs in developing countries such as Ghana. After all, until they have the entire package put together, there is no point of looking to export outside the developed world- there simply isn't the technology base necessary to put these machine together in these places one by one yet. Still, the possibilities merit further examination, and I plan to spend a good bit of time looking at this later.

So, for the near future at least, OSE will look to the developed world. That's not to say that this has some interesting implications in itself. Although it is mainly the Portland hardcore DIY crowd that is interested now, the potential of these open sourced designed machines is intriguing, even if it never accomplishes the sort of massive paradigm shift in the means of production and distribution to which OSE, like RepRap, eventually looks. I'll be looking deeper into this area next week– until then, I encourage anyone interested to watch the above 2 minute video and check out OSE's wiki at http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Main_Page