Looking for Fabricators
Marcin Jakubowski
We're looking for fabricators at Factor e Farm. If you are interested, please respond, and pass this on.
http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/2011/04/looking-for-fabricators/#more-2952
Marcin
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marcin Jakubowski, Ph.D.
TED Fellow, 2011
Global Village Construction Set TED Talk
Open Source Ecology
http://opensourceecology.org
Skype: marcin_ose
Key Links:
- New! Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) in 2 Minutes - 2 min video
- How to Build a Post-Scarcity Village – 5 min video
- OSE featured in Plenitude: New Economics of Real Wealth – 3 min video
- Economy in a Box presentation – 45 min video
- Progress on the ground – tractor, CEB press, hole puncher, torch table, crowd funding
Nobody said that building the world's first open source village would be easy.
-- Anonymous, 2009
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
NOTICE: All discussion in this communication is in the public domain, unless otherwise noted. If you are sharing proprietary, confidential, or otherwise privileged information, you must make that explicit. Otherwise, this discussion may be copied, republished, and otherwise used in the public domain - respectfully and with proper attribution.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu
Bryan Bishop
Let's think beyond classical structures like the corporation, the cooperative, the partnership... Let's build a new economy.
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507
Marcus Wolschon
What kind of "fabricators" is he talking about?
Marcus
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Open Manufacturing" group.
To post to this group, send email to openmanu...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to openmanufactur...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing?hl=en.
Leo Dearden
Leo
Marcus Wolschon
How would you ever promise a customer some thing with a consistent quality at a given time.
Marcus
Paul D. Fernhout
> On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 9:11 PM, Tiberius Brastaviceanu<
> tiberius.br...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Let's think beyond classical structures like the corporation, the
>> cooperative, the partnership... Let's build a new economy.
>
>
> is this spam? If anyone else has an opinion I'd like to hear.
I don't know anything specific about what Tiberius is doing but the
general comment makes sense to me. :-)
Here is something related by me in the context of the recent LENR (cold
fusion) demos by Andrea Rossi (which seem to be gaining more and more
evidence, but in any case, this applies to any sort of increase in
technological capabilities, whether solar cells, industrial robots,
MakerBots, or CubeSpawn or SKDB or whatever):
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
"The key point here is that breakthrough clean energy technologies will
change the very nature of our economic system. They will shift the
balance between four different interwoven economies we have always had
(subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange). Inventors who have struggled
so hard in a system currently dominated by exchange may have to think
about the socioeconomic implications of their invention in causing a
permanent economic phase change. A clean energy breakthrough will
probably create a different balance of those four economies like toward
greater local subsistence and more gift giving (as James P. Hogan talks
about in Voyage From Yesteryear). So, to focus on making money in the
old socioeconomic paradigm (like by focusing on restrictive patents) may
be very ironic, compared to freely sharing a great gift with the world
that may change the overall dynamics of our economy to the point where
money does not matter very much anymore."
Incidentally, on cold fusion, though this still is not general "proof":
http://pesn.com/2011/04/07/9501805_Rossi_Cold_Fusion_Validated_by_Swedish_Skeptics_Society/
I think the general issue that everyone here has, whether Tiberius,
Marcin, you, or me, or most anyone else here, is that our socioeconomics
is undergoing a widespread change, a change mostly unacknowledged (or
even fought when noticed). We are transitioning from a heavily
exchange-based economy back towards emphasizing a gift economy and local
subsistence (as well as better planning using computers). Kevin Carson's
and Patrick Anderson's comments have also been illuminating to me on
this. That transition is made possible for a lot of reasons, whether
cheap mobile computing, MakerBots, ShopBots, general purpose robots like
Willow Garage, fancy free software, alternative energy breakthroughs in
solar, wind, or maybe cold fusion, other cultural changes, or whatever.
So, we all keep trying to come up with plans to survive economically in
an exchange-based economy during that transition, but we all have one
foot in the old exchange ways while trying to have one foot in the new
gift/subsistence/planning ways. So, in that sense, everything we try is
important, but it is also mostly absurd in the long term as far as
emphasizing exchange aspects. :-) Example, again by me: :-)
http://www.artificialscarcity.com/
Still, for real scarcity, I can imagine we may still have some
exchange-based economics down the road. And those real scarcities may
even include things like "attention", because you can have a real local
scarcity of something (for example, a busy person with limited time)
even when overall there may be no global scarcity of something (for
example, lots of people globally).
So, when one looks at business models, one has to ask, is it based on
real scarcity or is it based on artificial scarcity? And how will real
scarcity change in the future (as a moving target with technological
innovation)? I was glad to hear Marcin mention the concept of artificial
scarcity and moving beyond it at the end of his TED talk.
It seems to me that Marcin, for example, like many of us here, is often
trying to fund work in the gift economy by production of real scarce
goods in the exchange economy. So, that creates a tension. I imagine
Tiberius might have the same tensions in whatever he does. There are
other ways to work in the gift economy, but they entail different
approaches. For example, Marcin also gets donations, so that is more
being entirely in the gift economy. Some people get grants, and there
you are getting funds from the planning economy (government, and backed
by government threats in relation to taxes) but then directed to enable
individuals in an exchange economy to make gifts to the public. One way
to cut through this set of problems would be to have a basic income, but
we don't have a global one yet, and even then, a basic income connects
to propping up an exchange economy, and eventually also might seem absurd.
Here is why exchange-based "incentivized" production is problematical in
the information age, which cites research by the US Federal Reserve
showing the ideological underpinnings of exchange-based economics are
absurd in the 21st century:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Note by the way that in the USA, agriculture has passed the point where
it is done for direct profit in most cases for individuals, given
agricultural machinery is so effective. Most farmers in the USA barely
break even or even lose money on their farming, and most need off-farm
jobs to survive. What pays for farming in the USA, if anything, is the
tax-breaks for farm land, and also that the land might appreciate and
eventually be sold. Basically, by widespread competition and automation,
US food prices are too low to support farmers. About 50% of the US
population was farming a century ago, now it is more like 2%. A lot of
people like to grow stuff (gardening is the most popular hobby), and
that leaves a lot of people who might farm if the could, and so the
surplus labor pool keeps costs down.
We may well see the same for manufacturing as automation, better design
drive the percent of people who are in "manufacturing" down towards 2%
farming levels (which is the trend). So, then we are left with
manufacturing as the next "gardening". :-) I had a previous post with
that title. So, if you look at the people who are being successful in
the open manufacturing field, whether MakerBot or Make Magazine, they
may have parallels to successful gardening supply vendors? Make Magazine
might be like the Rodale Press of open manufacturing? And MakerBot might
be like the Burpees Seeds? I don't know, I'm just trying to put out a
metaphor for thinking about these business models. I don't think Burpees
and Rodale made most of their money off of trying to sell stuff to
conventional farmers? Instead, they sold stuff to garderners?
In general, there might be some business models there worth exploring.
Ted Hall has managed an intermediate niche with ShopBot Tools, bringing
down the cost of CAD/CAM for woodworkers by a factor of ten or so, but
still producing for the exchange market. That is the more conventional
way to run an innovative business, and he is not totally "open source"
in what he does, either. Everyone can try to find the niche that works
for them, but there can still be various conflicts over ideology and
approach, etc..
To the extent Marcin's quest for fabricators looks like Burpees or
Rodale, or Tiberius' SENSORICA ends up looking like some gardening tool
company like Smith and Hawken, maybe they will be successful in the long
term, even as our economy changes a lot? Otherwise, it seems such
ventures would need to look a lot more like mainstream exchange-based
ventures or otherwise face quality issues like Marcus mentions, or
governance issues like Leo mentions.
I think this is a general problem in this whole area, where projects try
to live in multiple realms. People can feel disappointed because there
expectations in one realm were not met, even if the project does a lot
in another realm for someone or some group or the whole world.
Doing stuff as a hobby remains an alternative for many people who
already have a source of income that is enough to live on, such as a
student, employee, or retiree, or even the independently wealth (there
are something like six million millionaire families in the USA alone,
probably more). But not everyone falls into one of those categories. And
then, you must also face trying to run a business in the face of such
people doing things as a hobby or labor of love. It's not always easy to
decide what makes sense to do commercially in the exchange economy in
relation to open manufacturing, given all that. Still, I'm glad to see
so many people, more and more, trying so hard to figure something out to
get us from where we are now to some future that we think will be better
in some essential ways.
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.
Giovanni Lostumbo
themselves and expect similar results.
Rob Myers
Franchises have long addressed this. Open Logistics can learn from them
and from free software/free culture projects and from other systems such
as review and search websites.
- Rob.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu
"_I_ wouldn't adopt them exactly as is."
...this isn't something that OSE would benefit from (for the clearly forseeable future)....
One big problem ... the reward sharing model. ... a lot of work up front to asses a Value Proposition, for both the DN participants and the proposer.
A specific problem is with the proposed deadlock mechanism. I gives dangerously unfair weight to the minor participants.
"How would you ever promise a customer some thing with a consistent quality at a given time"