OSCOMAK BFI Contest entry
Paul D. Fernhout
mentioned, I've just submitted a contest entry to the Buckminster Fuller
Challenge.
http://challenge.bfi.org/
The prize is $100K to put towards your project. In my case that might mean
about 3 years of half-time work on OSCOMAK. I've included the text of the
latest proposal at the end. I had written up something similar for last
year's contest, but I misread the entrance deadline as the end of the month
when it was the 30th, and missed the chance to submit it. I did post the
previous proposal to the OpenVirgle list though:
"Towards Improving Design Science by using Design Science"
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/93d306d211e1c467
I think it highly unlikely it wins. Last year's winner, John Todd, was so
experienced and at the top of his field, how can anyone compete?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Todd_(biologist)
Apparently Appropedia was a similar entry last year that was not selected by
BFI (and Appropedia has for more people and current success behind it that
OSCOMAK),
http://www.appropedia.org/Appropedia_submission_for_BFI_prize
so the odds are not high that OSCOMAK will produce more interest at BFI,
even with its somewhat different focus and a different panel of jurors. But
in any case, it is some publicity for openmanufacturing ideas.
By the way, here is something I wrote about open manufacturing licensing and
John Todd's prior work decades earlier at the New Alchemy Institute:
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/de1a99ede7e0e615 )
"For example, I have a large selection of publications created by the New
Alchemy Institute on things like compost pile management, indoor fish
farming, and geodesic dome greenhouse construction. I paid for those
copies both for the information and to help support the institute. The
New Alchemy Institute is now defunct. I have no right under copyright
law to put these materials on a web site or to improve them, as much as
I would like to do so (until about 100 years from now). Quite possibly
obtaining such rights might cost more in time and money than creating
such materials from scratch or completely rewriting them. Even if I got
permission from someone previously affiliated with the New Alchemy
Institute or its successors to do something with the materials, how
could I be sure their information was accurate and their permission
meaningful and legally binding? Sadly, decades of innovative and
alternative non-profit R&D work done by dedicated and hardworking people
at NAI is effectively lost as far as the internet audience is concerned.
And that means, that R&D work is effectively lost to everyone in the
world as the internet continues to supplant other forms of content
distribution and use (like using inter-library loan). ...
For me, the deepest tragedy of the New Alchemy Institute is somewhat
personal. I visited NAI around 1989 and later gave an invited talk there
to some interns, while a graduate student at Princeton. I wanted to make
a library on sustainable technology and related simulations, and NAI had
an extensive library on such topics and an interested member base and
even some Macintosh computers. But we never connected -- in part because
I was too shy and couldn't think of something coherent and fair to
propose as a way out of my boxes of being a PhD graduate student and
thinking in terms of a for-profit company selling proprietary software
requiring a substantial investment, and out of their boxes of being
mainly an agricultural technology R&D facility, selling products and
papers via their catalogue, and giving interns room and board for doing
manual labor. I was very saddened by the newsletter announcing their
demise around 1991, because I felt that working together on a digital
library of alternative technology we might have prevented that. [And
ironically Richard Stallman with his Free Software vision in Cambridge
was only about seventy-five miles away from NAI.] "
Next I will send a note on current OSCOMAK directions on the desktop and
cooperation possibilities.
--Paul Fernhout
============= Main text of the BFI contest entry ===================
OSCOMAK: Open Source Communities Organizing Manufacturing Knowledge
* Summarize the purpose and key elements of your strategy:
What would Bucky have done with the computers of today?
There are various online and offline collections of information about how to
make things. But these collections all suffer from similar problems. They
have too little metadata about the artifacts and processes involved to do
comprehensive analysis of designs. The licenses of various contributions are
often not clear or the archives cannot be freely distributed. There is
little support for simulation or analysis. OSCOMAK aims to create tools and
standards and online services that make it easier for communities to add
metadata to design information and to use that metadata to do "cradle to
cradle" design and take part in the emerging Semantic Web and related Social
Semantic Desktop and to cooperate with other free and open source
communities with similar interests.
For example, building a greenhouse might require plate glass windows, a
metal frame, a concrete foundation, insulation, a furnace, clay pots,
fasteners, tools for assembly, and many other things. Making plate glass may
require a furnace, sand, a rolling mill, and many other things. A furnace
may require coal, iron, and other things. The increasing complexity rapidly
exceeds what the unaided human mind can easily follow. While one should
never underestimate the power of the unaided human imagination, tools can
still help in supporting and amplifying that imagination.
Imagine having a digital library of designs and procedures with lots of
metadata about each item or task and its dependencies. One could look up
information on all the diverse component parts of a greenhouse like the
plate glass, frame, foundation, and fasteners. Then one could explore
components such as the plate glass in detail (or alternatives like plastic),
and all the technology required to create them. The software would display
graphical networks of such relationships and provide opportunities to try
"what if" scenarios of different designs to analyze environmental footprint
or risk of failure.
With powerful enough information management tools, one could invent
technological webs that are simpler, more robust, or more sustainable. Such
a web might consist of products that were more secure, self-reliant,
self-replicating, durable, low cost, non-polluting, energy efficient,
evolving, and pleasant to use. For example, it might have at its base solar
collectors, windmills, renewable fuels, and organic farming. The system
could help answer questions like, "What do we need for such a technology and
what don't we need?" One could analyze the implications of technological
zoning guidelines like the Amish have within their communities or of a
society that is "Carbon Neutral".
Imagine what Bucky would do with tools like that. Or the rest of us.
* Describe the current stage of your initiative and your implementation plan
over the next three years:
OSCOMAK currently is running as a Halo Semantic MediaWiki at
http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Main_Page but it has little content. A solid
effort needs to be made to add content to the point where it reaches a
critical mass to be useful worldwide (the same as Wikipedia needed before it
became useful and interesting enough for others to improve). From using the
OSCOMAK website, it is clear that a client desktop application is important
as a next step, because of issues like liability, privacy, scalability,
simulation, 3D graphics, analysis, and ease of development.
The BFI prize could support me for about three years working half-time to
improve the software, add content, and help manage the community. Beyond the
money, the attention from receiving the BFI prize would boost the project as
a hub of open manufacturing collaboration. After that, donations, grants,
and perhaps offering related services or advertising could help support the
effort.
Ideally, in the very long term, OSCOMAK would contribute to a change in the
entire economic landscape to become more of a post-scarcity "gift economy"
where it could easily be supported by society out of universal abundance. In
any case, since all the work will be done under free licenses, anybody will
be able to continue to expand the work. That's an important part of being
free -- anyone can take the ideas forward to the next level.
I will build the initial software infrastructure for design and simulation,
add content, do some promotion of the idea, provide technical support, and
manage the software and databases through multiple versions of improvements.
But this project will require partners to play an active role to help manage
a growing community of communities. I feel confident I can "build it", but I
will need organizational help from more extroverted people who like running
communities, to keep things going when "they come". There are several
related projects which have been building collections of content; it is my
hope to reach out to them to provide a more advanced technical
infrastructure than they currently have.
* Describe how your strategy meets the entry criteria ("What We're Looking
For"):
OSCOMAK would make Design Science easier. So, it indirectly meets all the
criteria by supporting others who are working towards those goals, whether
on BFI supported projects, Appropedia or other previous BFI Challenge
entries, or OpenVirgle and other "open manufacturing" initiatives around the
web. Each project could help define new requirements for OSCOMAK.
A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next few decades:
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/1313223
TV watching is consuming 2,000 Wikipedias per year.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/27/1422258
Clearly, money and time are not limiting factors for "Humanity's Option for
Success".
Information about how to make things is like encyclopedic information was
before Wikipedia became popular - either in people's heads, on paper, or on
scattered web sites in incompatible formats with incompatible licenses. The
information is not readily useable for simulation or network analysis.
OSCOMAK is about using a small amount of money to leverage trillions of
dollars worth of volunteer labor and charitable dollars to rebuild sustainably.
Information about, say, semi-autonomous homesteads will help build the
semantic web of manufacturing information captured in OSCOMAK. Eventually,
bigger things like networks of semi-autonomous space habitations can be
worked on, to house trillions of people in the solar system in style.
* Describe the qualifications and experience of you and/or your team and
your ability to execute your implementation plan:
I have been programming since the 1970s. I have co-developed several small
and medium-sized pieces of software from idea to implementation to new
versions (CAI, garden simulator, evolutionary design tools, story networks,
the IDE -- all the images linked here were drawn from these projects).
I received an undergraduate degree from Princeton in (Cognitive) Psychology,
and a Master's degree from SUNY Stony Brook in Quantitative Applied Ecology.
I have participated in several open source communities. I have been working
towards the ideas outlined here for about twenty-five years, mostly inspired
by the idea of designing a self-replicating space habitat. That challenge
led me to consider a variety of design and sustainability issues, while
gradually broadening the scope of my efforts to shorter-term, down-to-earth
projects, culminating in developing a garden simulator as a first step
towards space settlements (since we all have to eat).
While I have worked towards the OSCOMAK vision for a long time, it has
always been a side project as other things got in the way. Along the way I
have worked on ideas (Pointrel)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
which are now talked about in terms of RDF, the semantic web, WordNet, and
the social semantic desktop.
Here is a related paper presented in 2001 at the Space Studies Institute
conference:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html