One Full time facility for open source hardware development I the whole world

[Anthony Douglas]

I have been searching for this for many years, and made some attempt to built it.  

For every project posted on here, it seems clear to me that there is far more right around the corner.  Including actually finishing or doing a good job on whatever is mentioned.  Because let's face it, a lot of our projects are not finished, or the very limited amount of labor time going in really shows.

Open source ecology is the only thing that seems to have been even trying to do this.  But not any more.  They have gone down a different road, focused on holding workshops a free times a year, while the buildings and equipment sit idle.

There was an initiative back in 2013 to start what the founders called an open source r&d factory.  It was also a spinoff of ose.  In previous history, ose had been intending to become a virally replicable 200 person village of basically people doing development work, for things directly needed, like housing etc. And building, to deploy and pout straight to work that development effort.

The big picture of such a village is really just people doing what they always do, but with a much higher level of knowledge and skill, especially I the technological domains, collaboration, and with a certain emphasis on directly meeting needs rather than trying to engage in so much market trade, with focus on these things stemming from essentially just more and broader understanding of what is going on in society and how things work.  Market trade, in reality mostly ends up being doing what the rich people tell us to do, then paying all the money back to them for half assed approximations of what we actually need.  Grossly, severely inefficient, thereby squandering the power that technology and the built equipment base gives us in other ways.

Many people have announced or tried to start satellites of ose.  Almost all failed.  I went to one project, open land lab, but they are no good. The guy is the manager of a fab lab, that's where his enthusiasm is from.  But he is really not doing anything.

There is a project called reset society.

  There is one called one community, but they seem to lack explicit interest in really embracing technological development, which is critical because the technology we have is not suitable for our purposes in many ways, to effectively implement a village with small scale manufacturing, for instance.

There are various attempts at hack bases which have some tangential application. But not much really.   Same deal with maker labs.

If I am to ever be a part of such a thing, it looks like I am going to have to build it myself.   And it seems to me like most of the most interesting projects are not going to get anywhere without it.  

[John Griessen]

On 07/07/2018 05:52 PM, Anthony Douglas wrote:
> it looks like I am going to have to build it myself.

Where are you thinking of building?

Are you thinking of real effort in this direction? So far, your messages with spelling errors
seem just a quick dictation of some fleeting thoughts without bothering to proof read, so
making a chip foundry R&D lab or OSE R&D lab village seems far fetched.

[Anthony Douglas]

I am writing through my phone.  I am indeed thinking real efforts I this direction, but my post was an exercise in emphasising the need for foundation building before we can actually do that sort of thing.  I also perhaps come across as skeptical that ics are the most important thing to focus on.  I don't think they get the most bang for the buck to be honest.

But there is a lot to be said for leveraging what field you are into.  Still, we can't do anything without a facility.  A more promising project, in terms of bang for the buck is probably required for use as a flagship project, I think, though.  It is still very interesting.

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[Anthony Douglas]

Oh sorry, I thought you were the guy who posted about making ics.  Anyway, yes I am very serious. I spent four months at ose, a month at open land lab and more than a year full time at makerspaces?

[Dakota Hamill]

Are you talking about something like Edison's invention park but perhapd without the cutthroatedness?

Locations filled with numerous ppl with skills in various areas all trying to invent and build the future?  

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[John Griessen]

On 07/08/2018 01:03 PM, Anthony Douglas wrote:
> Oh sorry, I thought you were the guy who posted about making ics. Anyway, yes I am very serious. I spent four months at ose, a
> month at open land lab and more than a year full time at makerspaces?

That is super serious! Have you heard of a group that attempts to put valuations on work as it is done,
but not in dollars, more in some barter accounting, and they sell stuff and split it according to some corporate
or partnership formula? They call themselves http://www.sensorica.co/home and are led by
http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Tiberius_Brastaviceanu

They have this that I might join in on:

http://www.sensorica.co/home/what-we-do/projects/sensor-network-project

[Anthony Douglas]

In a way, yeah :). But there are more modern and applicable examples.  Have you read about open source ecology? They have existed for ten years, and they used to be a lot more interesting than they are now.

I am actively looking at tax sale land, and put the deposit down on a truck.  I have a comrade Devin, in the US, who has a friend with land and is also an ose vet, and very interested.  His friend with the land is trending towards focusing on agricultural stuff, but I see far more potential in the general case of hardware. The reality is vey few people can actually apply agricultural tech.

There are a lot of interesting projects out there, but especially the hardware ones rarely get anywhere.

[Anthony Douglas]

Yeah, I have visited Sensorica a couple times. They are in Montreal.  They are interesting.  But you still can't get much done there.   It doesn't compare to ose during the summer deluge.  It used to be that some twenty to thirty people would descend on ose and do full time work a couple months each summer, usually students though (not all), and rarely the same people.  We can do ten times better per person per hour, I saw that happen sometimes, but we can do it all the time.

And ten times better teamwork, again we did at times, and it is highly repeatable (more respect for actual engineering, better communication and teamwork etc., which will form as people get to know each other and we develop working methods). 

 And for times as long per year.  

And we can have more people.  

We could do four hundred to a thousand times as much, per year, and it wouldn't be that hard or even require much funding, no more than such a team can bring in through reasonable market activities.  It could multiply total world output on this particular subject significantly.

[Dakota Hamill]

Any pictures or links to what was built? Or what the areas or places you are talking about look like?  I'm still a little lost in this thread. 

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[John Griessen]

On 07/08/2018 08:58 PM, Anthony Douglas wrote:
> It doesn't compare to ose during the summer deluge.  It used to be that some twenty to thirty people would descend on ose and do
> full time work a couple months each summer, usually students though (not all), and rarely the same people.  We can do ten times
> better per person per hour, I saw that happen sometimes, but we can do it all the time.
>
> And ten times better teamwork, again we did at times, and it is highly repeatable (more respect for actual engineering, better
> communication and teamwork etc., which will form as people get to know each other and we develop working methods).
>
>  And for times as long per year.
>
> And we can have more people.
>

How would you get students and other drifters to cooperate? How to get that all the time? You're claiming better
than most management consultants. Full time is in your heading, but how to get people to uproot and move?
I'm not so down on Sensorica's distributed style -- want to dig further about them. Why did you say Sensorica didn't compare?

One facility per world seems too few.

I'm going to be doing a little early experimenting with a hybrid tech for plastic molding, which is an essential part
of any hardware to be mass produced. I'll use 3DP sintered metal for molds. They have loose tolerances compared to
machined tool steel of normal injection molding tooling. The other part that will make it work is pressure controlled
slow preheating of molds via air channels in them, (which are only practical with 3DP), and also lo pressure controlled
injection just until the mold parting lines are slightly bulging then stop. The results will have visible parting lines, but be
very good dimensionally and cheap low volume for testing ideas, not exp. low volume like direct 3DP of a part like an electronics
enclosure.

[Anthony Douglas]

Sensorica is great, it just isn't enough, in a dozen different ways. 

Well, I mean, when you proceed to action with trying to implement a system to make injection molded parts using laser sintered molds, you start to see the barriers, I am sure.

 The cost of rent for housing and space, endless imposition of the demands of the city sapping your time, no or few colleagues to get the networking effect with (usually interested people are too busy with the rat race).  Commuting.  Even cost of basic tools you rarely need, excessive shipping and profit margins on parts.  Lack of access to bigger tools. Even problems with the landlord.

I fully, highly agree that we need more than one place, of course.

 I think this could propagate virally, particularly because it is also, I believe quite a nice life for the people of whom the team consists.  You don't have to buy in or commit forever. There is a massive number of people that go woofing, tree planting or whatever, usually getting paid like shit. A lot of these people actually have four year degrees in chemistry, engineering etc.  My brother and several of my friends are in this position. We are not young, even.  He's 32.

I actually directly know a lot of people, and have many times encountered them, who would come.  A lot of people like the idea of ose.  And being out of the city. Being able to focus. An epic undertaking.  

I seriously think we will find a lot of takers if people can make some money while there, and learn and gain experience in such highly applicable stuff.

I personally yearn for such an environment of doing on important things, collaboration, freedom, nice housing conditions, peaceful environment.  If I was a millionaire, I would spend it to go do this immediately.  So, having it is worth much the same as being a millionaire.  It's a nice lifestyle, a nice life.

I have owned a house and had what was considered a decent job, as a machinist. It was total crap. I would rather be at ose and in fact did try to go back, but as I say they are furloughed and going down a much less interesting road now.

And there is quite a bit of money in this sort of business, if you prioritize effectively.

In a way, it's so broad it becomes simple again.  The vision, if looked down on by some alien anthropologist, is that:

You got a bunch of people.

 They have some permission (land ownership is basically permission).  

Some equipment, including housing, internet access, water handling, etc.

Then we do things. To get the housing etc. More cost effectively, improve its quality, retain it over time.  Communicate globally with others to save our work and collaborate. Then repeat.  

Within this cycle, we need to be able to things like injection molding, cnc machining, welding, cad design, 3d printing, software engineering, some chemical engineering, thermodynamics, electrical and electronics. Pedagogical advancements.  Improved collaborative methods.  Make or modify some vehicles and equipment of various kinds, well designed and perhaps of remarkably radical design so different it is hardly recognizable.  The housing might be buried thin shell concrete, fully passive, or we might employ the skin house concept, which is basically a climate controlled, cleverly ventilated full body and head suit, very thin and light and comfortable and not annoying.  The computers might be wearables, not the crappy kind but with high res head, lightweight eye mounted displays (the led micro displays appear to be available), keygloves for input, and lots of computing power.

All very natural and typical. The exciting part comes from the how it can be done far far better than ever before, enabling more interesting stuff beyond. Open source is basically a method of collaboration over long distances and times and sophisticated undertakings.

 Realizing the methods, existing equipment and material supply chain's great potential, the knowledge base.

Within the box of exciting things is where most people hop on this or that, and focus.  Design global, build local.  Micro manufacturing.  Leveraging the vast technological and knowledge base, from drawing upon peered reviewed research  to extensive free availability of online training that was previously confined to university campuses.  

Yeah to all of those things but together, rather than in isolation.

And in the end it starts to look a lot like just being smarter about how you do the eco village thing, really.  But it also extends much beyond, because we can realize many of the things that innovators like you and me only dream of otherwise.  They open doors.

I fear seriously that we may be forever dreaming, without something like this.

[Dakota Hamill]

I mean it sounds like an engineering firm/business but all the engineers live next to each-other on a campus.  Altruism won't buy all that equipment or generative revenue for people to live, but the products you manufacture or the tools you build will, and then, it is a business,  

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[Anthony Douglas]

By the way, I sound tell you about mold sdm, (shape deposition manufacturing)  It's a very interesting approach to creating high tolerance molds.  You can find all the good stuff by googling on Google scholar for that term.

I have been very interested for some time in it. I believe it may be practical, economical, scale up very well, and be used to make plastic, metal including steel and titanium, glass, and ceramic parts to reasonably high tolerances, reasonable surface finish, especially with a little non-abrasive polishing (such as vibration within a bath of ceramic beads).

There are almost no limits on the general geometric form, something shared in common with laser sintering.  But the surfaces of the mold are all milled so they are much more accurate, and smooth. 

Basically, the executive summary is that you deposit a whole planar layer of material A, mill it to shape, deposit a whole lauer of material B, filling any voids left by the previous milling operation, mill it so that the next layer of material A deposited assumes the desired shape on its underside (which you can't machine directly).

Then repeat, until you have a solid block, t with the desired regions material a or b.

Then selectively remove material b. And you have a mold.  Fill it. Destroy the mold and you have a part.

The exact materials and processes, and the things like adhesion of the materials, shrinkage during deposition, process planning software, etc.  Of course need to be done.... Need a faculty for that, though :p

[Anthony Douglas]

Yeah, it being an engineering firm is one part of it. But engineering firms don't usually have onsite housing, or welcome people in to learn as they go and climb up. Plus, they tend to work on much more narrow things.

Although there is always concern that is valid enough, that when you proceed to do something so ambitious, you of course realize why engineering firms tend to focus on what appear to be more humble things. Its hard.

At the same time, there are enabling factors. It's a different ball game in many ways, because while the stuff does have to actually perform, we are trying to do things that are in many ways easier than a typical firm.

It's a more direct application of science and engineering, and techniques, I guess.

Trying to do what wealthy "clients" tell us, then give the money back to them to try to get what we really need, is deeply inefficient. A large fraction of the time what we really need is not even on the market. When it is it may easily be a hundred timed what it should cost.

A lot of us engineering types see in our lives ways to get stuff done that really is not that complicated or hard. But if we proceed to try to do it, you see the barriers we promptly run into. Very basic stuff, just having a place to work or tools or materials that we know all about but you couldn't but for love or money anywhere in a whole city. Or a couple hours of real peace here and there.

Also, there is this middle ground, it's not trivial to make stuff that really works. A lot of enthusiasts seem to think it is. But engineering firms really spend a large fraction of their time on stuff we don't have much need for in this context. When you have freedom, options etc. the ways forward really open up, I believe. We can apply what we know and use what there is a hundred times better. We do need better tools, too, though, like a nice mold sdm system or better 3d printers. Engineering has always been about developing the upstream tools, too.

[John Griessen]

On 07/09/2018 01:59 PM, Anthony Douglas wrote:
> Although there is always concern that is valid enough, that when you proceed to do something so ambitious, you of course realize why engineering firms tend to focus on what appear to be more humble things. Its hard.

Yes, it is hard. I just reviewed sensorica web writings and find their content is on upverter.com (bought by Altium),
so you are at the mercy of a CAD company holding your design data. Does not sound long lasting. Their content seems preliminary
and I found a reference to something like this in their Innovation Network definition documents too. I think they openly publish
very little that is finished or very valuable as a building block. The netlist of an example
sensor node board by sensorica had lots of unintelligible hashes such as

*SIGNAL* fdfb42d94c29b7d0

They may just be for unnamed nets. The BOM had no usual values and more hashes, so not very readable. I misplaced the link
to that and cannot find it by a search for "sensor node board sensorica" so it is published in a kind of hidden convoluted way,
only findable on upverter.com

They don't act very open with tech really. If they did it would be on github like mine.

[Anthony Douglas]

Overhauling and improving freecad would be an excellent project, worthy of enabling.  Right now it's not good enough, I know people often rush to its defense, but it's really not there yet.

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[Tux Lab]

I am slightly altruistic so I came up with some equipment hoping other
people will come up with the other half of the equation and together
we can generate the needed revenue to build a domestic manufacturing
cooperative. but I wasn't successful.

The idea is that manufacturing is fairly capital intensive so why not
pool our resources and form a manufacturing cooperative where people
can mingle and quickly build their prototypes and first batch of
products. The machines are paid for, the facility is rent free, so
is the utility. If the cooperative idea is workable, we can form
alliances with other similar spaces and go on "vacations" in a
different city or country for a few weeks. What we have right now
is very spartan and if we want to expand beyond our meetup group, we
will need to generate the revenue to move to, and build out the
underutilized 6400sqft warehouse across the parking lot. Nothing can
remain free forever, but at least for a few years we're sheltered from
the real world costs.

The space/equipment we have is at www.tux-lab.com/projects/3
The umbrella meetup is www.meetup.com/SGVTech/

Besides holding meetups on topics such as KiCAD, laser
cutting/engraving, CNC machining and etc, I've also helped a few
groups of people with either their business or kickstarter projects.

We have an amazing pool of talented engineers, makers, tinkers, and
business people, however people's goals and motivations do not
necessarily intersect. Most people are also mentally and physically
exhausted from their job and just want to relax and unwind. The
dedicated few who already have their own business/product tends to
focus on their own projects and do not have the extra time, or the
need, to mingle/share with others. The very few left that are
interested in working together on revenue generating projects, are
probably scared off by my rather blunt citing of small business
statistics.

Of course, I have my own idiosyncrasy of wanting to minimize sourcing
from authoritarian countries, which tends to make life harder and more
expensive. I find it hard to work with people who likes to shop at
aliexpress.

Of all the equipment we have, the machine that is easier to learn and
use is the ULS laser cutter/engraver. 3D printers aren't that useful
as a communal equipment because they are inexpensive enough for people
to buy their own if they are interested, and the print time takes too
long. CNC machines has learning curves that most people aren't
willing to climb. The same is true for MIG/TIG welding, and will
probably be true for the pick and place as well. Most people also
never went beyond the soldering station into the realms of
oscilloscope and logic analyzer, which may not necessarily be a bad
thing because if not careful, communal equipment tends to be
unintentionally abused.

Anyway, the last payment on the last CNC machine bought in 2013 is
December of this year and that's the end of my financial obligation.
After 500+ days of living under the Trump presidency, I think I had
enough. I am ready to live overseas as an expatriate.

John

[Nathan Cravens]

I'd suggest having a browse at ic.org and contact an intentional
community in your area that might be interested in hosting you. It
might be wise to contact and make a move to spaces that already have
the space and the talent and experience with ongoing business models
like communities such as Twin Oaks, Findhorn, and Auroville.

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[Anthony Douglas]

Whoa, sounds like you tried hard... I see the stuff about people trending to work on their "own" project in isolation, too a high degree, as I have been a member of many hackerspaces  and maker spaces.

This and a number of other things you mention are a big part of my point.  Nothing significant almost ever gets done at such places, and you can see why.

I have seen it work much better in some cases, like some fraction of the time at ose, and want to build, fast in that direction.

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[Anthony Douglas]

I have looked into ic.org, and contacted a few people previously.  They are generally a million miles away from even understanding the point or promise, so far I can't really get through to them.

The reality is, people who understand the promise of open hardware are rare.  Even among us, most are still pretty skeptical, especially of more radical hopes.

I think mauve I need to write a magnum opus, some kind of seed document.  It could help at least.  And probably even then, but my "own" land and at great expenses and time start my "own" thing, because the people who own everything have no clue what to do with it, apparently, ever.  No clue.  So much land, so much stuff, just look at it all on Google satellite view.

 Yet so impossible to do something so basic, which should have been done so long ago.  Just a community of people working on one of the major things that matters, provisioning of actual needs, which is mostly through collaboration and technology, with some reasonable semblance of brains and freedom and knowledge.

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[Anthony Douglas]

Lol, the only ic showing in my area is morning glory. Pff. I have already lived there for ten days....  I offered to rent a cabin that was sm sitting empty three, and six of the seven people were good with the idea, then this one really horrible guy objected and killed the idea for the dumbest reasons ever.  The cabin sat empty instead.  Totally useless people.

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[John Griessen]

On 07/09/2018 05:15 PM, Tux Lab wrote:
> Of course, I have my own idiosyncrasy of wanting to minimize sourcing
> from authoritarian countries, which tends to make life harder and more
> expensive. I find it hard to work with people who likes to shop at
> aliexpress.

Nice tech-shop-like place.

How do you reconcile your sourcing strictness with
the fact that a large fraction of electronic chips are made in
Asia in places like Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Hungary, Philippines, Japan.

Many are from China like ONSemi, Intel's newest fab, most memory chip makers, one TI plant? ...

China is the most authoritarian, but has connections with the rest, and much economic trade with them also.

Printed circuit assemblies might be higher percentage made in Asia even though some are assembled in Mexico...
Mexico is almost an authoritarian regime... That requirement not to trade with anyone questionable
creates a large hurdle for becoming profitable and surviving.

On 07/10/2018 08:58 AM, Anthony Douglas wrote:
> a community of people working on one of the major things that matters, provisioning of actual needs, which is mostly through
> collaboration and technology, with some reasonable semblance of brains and freedom and knowledge.

They need solid food and shelter and medicine first. They usually need air conditioning and heating
some of the time to be happy also. You'd need to be sure they are the self reliant, build-it-if-needed types, which these days
leaves behind 99%.

[Eric Hunting]

I was recently writing an article relating to this topic --about my proposal to demonstrate an Open Source/Post-Industrial lifestyle through a video series deriving from the narrative of Alone In The Wilderness. Open Source hardware has a problem with the dispersed and inconsistent nature of its development. Enthusiasm waxes and wanes. Projects go through their own Hype Cycle. There are a lot of people involved in it, but most work in isolation and don't keep up on what everyone else is doing. There's a large globally dispersed catalog of open design (as I've argued, enough to demonstrate a functional Open Source Lifestyle), but there is no equivalent of SourceForge or GitHub for it. No standard 'package definition' for the information. Deriving from the hacker culture, the Open Source community relies on a 'demo or die' principle of credibility. People only give lip-service to ideas until one person gets it to some stage of critical mass, usually entirely alone. And when it comes to hardware design/development one person is often not enough. Imagine what it would take to get an open source car to critical mass alone. 

There have been many proposals to found ICs to cultivate nexuses of open development. I've called them Maker-Ashrams and have been evangelizing the idea for over a decade. One project in Lanzarote coined the term Hackbase. But ICs are generally hard to pull-off for a number of reasons. The average IC remains unstable, with high member attrition, for a typical 10 years, often because of a failure to anticipate the challenge, learning curve, and labor overhead of agrarian lifestyles and low-tech reliance. The open development community is a middle-class community, and middle-class people tend to have poor mobility owing to the shackles of personal debt, career, and family. When they are young, they can often go where they please with relative ease. (though this is declining in the US, where we encumber people with life-long debt at ever-earlier ages) When they are retired, likewise but with limitations. But in the middle, where most of the current skill base and productivity are, they might as well be chained to their cubicles and suburban houses. ICs typically choose difficult remote locations because they seek cheap contiguous land and want to use sustainable architecture and farming that bureaucrats object to in urban areas. These places are inaccessible to most middle-class people. They can usually only go where their debts are 'fungible', where jobs are waiting for them, and where their spouses allow. Marriage isn't the partnership it used to be. Spouses won't typically make quality-of-life compromises for sake of their partner's dreams. This same basic problem stymies many other IC concepts, like space colonization and seasteading. In practice, it's really hard to 'unplug', as Vinay Gupta once put it, once you have that monkey in a business suit on your back.

The established IC culture derived from the counter-culture movement of the '60s-'70s and so there is a huge cultural gap between the typical IC folks and the Maker/Open Tech community. Environmentalists continue to demonize technology and most ICs are premised on communal agrarian subsistence living, New Age spiritualism, and an outright abandonment of technology --if not escape from modern civilization generally-- for sake of a more sustainable and simpler lifestyle. (never mind that most of them grossly underestimate what that simpler agrarian lifestyle actually entails...) So one is unlikely to find a receptive audience there for the idea of open technology cooperatives. 

Where it might make more sense is with European cohousing architects whose notion of community is not tied to a notion of total autarky and the abandonment of civilization. Also, there has been a long-term trend of themed communities among retirees focussed on hobbies. Most well-known are the golfing communities where homes are built around shared golf courses and yachting communities built around marinas. But there are many other interesting examples. Fly-in communities built around shared private airports. Amateur astronomy communities built around observatories. Even communities built around shared model train layouts. For a time some university towns flirted with becoming retirement communities as there was an emerging trend of retiree students pursuing 'edutainment' as a lifestyle, until schools refocussed on 'job oriented' education and tuition, textbook prices, and campus crime went out of control. I've long anticipated similar fandom-based ICs, such as ones based on Star Trek or Lord of the Rings. (the giant kitten-head-shaped Furry arcology is only a matter of time...) With the exception of Australia, NZ, and UK's 'mensheds', the Maker/Open Source movements have sort of passed-over the retiree demographic, possibly based on a stigma of old-age computer illiteracy. But the first generation of open source developers is well into that demographic now. 

There is good cross-over between the avant-guard arts community and Maker activity and you now often see emerging community nexuses of open development coinciding with the urban detritus locations stereotyped as draws for hipsters. The makerspace is now a general creative center, as appealing to artists as to those more tech-inclined. Hipsters also tend to have that greater mobility combined with disposable income as well as more coherent community connections in the arts subculture --albeit highly tribal in nature. I've observed in nearby Santa Fe the emergence of one of these nexuses in the once depressed areas of the city. It started with avant-guard artists moving into buildings in the long disused railyard area and then the creation of an arts attraction called Meow Wolf sponsored by some wealthy locals including Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin. (it's interesting to note that while such sponsorship of arts projects is common, you don't see its equivalent for Open Source until after projects have achieved something on the scale of Linux, which looks like a 'market' to established corporations. But I wonder if this is because of the character of software/electronics not seeming to appeal to the vanity or altruism of such sponsors, or because no one bothers to reach out to them because they assume they would never 'get it') Meow Wolf started with an attached makerspace --more-or-less open (with the usual public classes, access subscriptions, and such) but chiefly intended for the artists using it to build Meow Wolf. That then evolved into Make: Santa Fe, associated closely with a commercial workshop Extraordinary Structures. (which sort of messed up my own --probably unrealistic-- plans to do WikiHouse tiny house development in this same area...) 

[John Griessen]

On 07/10/2018 01:07 PM, Eric Hunting wrote:
> Where it might make more sense is with European cohousing architects whose notion of community is not tied to a notion of total
> autarky and the abandonment of civilization. Also, there has been a long-term trend of themed communities among retirees focussed

> on hobbies. . . With the exception of Australia, NZ, and UK's 'mensheds', the

> Maker/Open Source movements have sort of passed-over the retiree demographic, possibly based on a stigma of old-age computer
> illiteracy. But the first generation of open source developers is well into that demographic now.

This analysis rings true to me, but then I resemble that remark, (retiree demographic), at age 60.

USA mensheds, womansheds, everyone-sheds seems like a thing that could happen in urban environments with a little creativity.
Land in urban USA is so pricey the idea of cheap sheds would take some creative use of little used residence garages for instance,
and when one goes up in rent, get the group to move everything to another one real quick and avoid problems. Even that could be
tough in the US, where people have an aversion to "risky feeling" uses of land in their residence neighborhoods.

[Anthony Douglas]

This group is appearing interesting. hopefully move people still will come out of the woodwork. it's hard to find people overtly interested in this stuff.   a major, major, perhaps greatest failure of ose thus far is not keeping track of each other and deliberately networking, thinking and acting together after leaving the actual facility. Although the wiki is full of logs, asost people that go through keep a log, usually with an email...we should have been emailing and discussing things all these years instead of being disconnected.

I do remember seeing various initiatives to have github like repositories for hardware, but don't know if they were online yet. I should dig.

I have read about various hackbases, I think that one is called cyberhippietotalism.  I am not very interested in them, though I used to be.  I want/need something agree Peele actually engage in doing real stuff, well beyond just getting the buildings etc.  And it may ironically help a great deal to solve those challenges of access to buildings etc.

.  I think I understand some of the mechanisms as well, in addition to the ones you mention.  The way people tend to close the door behind them and just get into short sighted water treading or less inspired stuff is also major force, for instance, and occurred at calafou. They have no real higher uniting enterprise to engage in, though.  They collaborate to get permission to use land and buildings, but little beyond that.  Thats not enough.  I have seen this extensively in makerspaces, anf hackerspaces as well.  That acessing a mere nsulated box and fending off the landlord is almost the limit of what people seem to be able to do is a big part of the problem....

I believe it is a good idea to regard it as something more akin to a prototype, or business as all these mechanisms make for a respectably complex system, with many threatening failure modes, but we can still do it, and to understand and proceed proceed proceed is the only way we ever get such things done anyway. 

Most people, in contrast, including engineers, in my experience, tend to treat these people-group collaboration things in a very crude way, perhaps because, for instance, we have been and always are so surrounded by it, and there are not apparently any good textbooks.  It is like some medical things, hard to experiment with due to the cost of the people time... and therefore poorly elucidated.  We all have to fly with personal experience and philosophical things.  That would never fly in other engineering domains, we see that....

I see no major problems with long term instability.  We get done what we get done, and move on.  We can encourage spinoffs, hopefully seeding the world with next gen stuff by the time this one collapses.

 And what we do cannot be undone by all the bullets in Mexico.  We have to steer in order to ensure that it's true, focusing on the right things and exporting tangible results with sufficient frequency, and also building our personal lives with reasonable efficacy along the way.  I think these things go hand in hand quite well.  We build things that suit us, and collaborate with others, save our work and ensure it is visible to the rest of the world for easy copying. 

 There is some slight overhead in publishing  metaphorical source code, but as with many floss projects, the methodology can be such that this happens relatively naturally, by doing thing in a way that allows off site people to look into the internals of what we are doing. Also, documenting for our future selves and coleagues requires reasonable documentation etc. which tends to be reasonable to others as well.  Like having the stuff to steal nuclear secrets, if you are engaged in effective engineering, other people can profit from your results, even if you tried to slow them down.  Of course we would be naturally motivated to make it as convenient as practical to build on what we do to get the funding from outsiders, though.

The location and land prices are a big problem, indeed.  Some loaner vehicles would help.  Being able to earn money while there would help.  for the longer term, though, the sheer size of this enterprise is so great that there is more than enough money to have sites it in a city.   Have you heard of the fab city initiative?  city planners aiming for Zero manufacturing imports.  The city makes all its own stuff.  In shenzen, apparently they are quite big on open source type approaches, for much the same reasons as you and I naturally like them; they work for us.  Such an attitude could be adopted to a broader variety of manufacturing, with less demanding performance requirements.

it.s  just a bit hard to bootstrap in the city. We are at such a primitive stage we still have to start way back there, I think?  And personally I want to be in a quiet area, but that doesn't actually need to be far from a city.  Privacy is important though, to be able to do what we need to.  Zoning etc is a major problem, and privacy helps a lot.  So may semi nomadic capability.  Buildings, gardens, roads etc are hard to take with us, but with some heavy equipment access, probably which we develop and manufacture, relocating may be reasonable.  Access to technology changes the game some, Enough to give us an edge.   As another poster alluded to wrt hopping from one garage to another.

I am not terribly concerned about dealing with intentional community stuff, people or history.  I don't think there would be much overlap. I am not even particularly inclined to farm.  If we have the land, sure, an orchard an things would be nice if someone wants to get that going.  It is nice to have, for real. they have some great stuff at ose.  But ultimately we face the challenge of finding a viable concept, and it doesn't need to include food production on site.  We just need an improvement over e.g. sensorica and ose. an improvement in terms of efficiency, but also mostly just in efficiency of labor hours, and more more more.

If we take a good look at the existing projects, and carefully try to improve on only the points where it is most promising, and otherwise copy it, in order to avoid breaking the model, that seems promising to me.  Or to start with a conve tional small business with a flagship project like mold sdm, then expand, like sensorica did.  Like agile development, take what works and modify it.

A hobby based community is also not at all what I want to be part of... not even a hacker base or a farming thing.  Or the kind of open source stuff which is just tinkering.  .I want to proceed to do things, very very real things. the most important things I can even think of.  When you are doing that, even a bad day is a good day.  This is powerful, and a way to live.

  I believe one of the most  fundamental things we must do is think in collaboration as a group, but productively, with reasonable efficiency, watching ourselves to be sure we are actually getting somewhere over time.  The money is ultimately there, because this whole idea has that much oomph to it..  There are s lot of people like Creation flame, guys that are interested.  Also there is a lot of new money from bitcoin, for instance. Techies generally are not that poor, really.

[Anthony Douglas]

Thats what I mean, provisioning of actual needs, that includes food etc. . I did that we have to have those things along the way, if that's what you mean, though.

We do, though. Some of them, mostly. Food, certainly I am able to buy.  

I don't mind that 99 percent of people won't be suitable,  there is a good contingent of people who are. Like me.  Plus people can train up a lot once they get there. There is always tons to do I this business, and there is room for almost anyone that gets along with the others.  Honestly, even working hard is not critical; worst case scenario they are like the pet cat.  If that led to not getting along, then that's different.

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[Gerry]

Oh well, I was hoping to get a job like that, but if there is only one in the country ...

Seriously, I too have been thinking about this sort of thing and more generally as it applies to any "bits to atoms" type open design. I took VLSI design as and undergrad in the early eighties, and I have like 40 years in software and systems as well as shop skills. I'm too old to do any huge project myself, but I know that the right kind of self-organizing systems can probably do it.

Some of the discussion here does point right to the problem area, the financial system doesn't have any way to capitalize commons based enterprise. Most people think the financial system is something set in stone, but in truth it is only a few centuries in the making. Some scholars (see Benkler, The Wealth of Networks) have identified the new mode of production (commons based peer production in Bendler's words). What I don't see is any new financial forms being invented to plug this gap. Some folks in the alternative currencies areas have some good ideas, but all of this needs a modest kick to get established right.

Gerry Gleason

http://gerry.wagn.org/

On Sunday, July 8, 2018 at 8:29:58 AM UTC-5, Anthony Douglas wrote:

I have been searching for this for many years, and made some attempt to built it.  

For every project posted on here, it seems clear to me that there is far more right around the corner.  Including actually finishing or doing a good job on whatever is mentioned.  Because let's face it, a lot of our projects are not finished, or the very limited amount of labor time going in really shows.

Open source ecology is the only thing that seems to have been even trying to do this.  But not any more.  They have gone down a different road, focused on holding workshops a free times a year, while the buildings and equipment sit idle.

There was an initiative back in 2013 to start what the founders called an open source r&d factory.  It was also a spinoff of ose.  In previous history, ose had been intending to become a virally replicable 200 person village of basically people doing development work, for things directly needed, like housing etc. And building, to deploy and pout straight to work that development effort.

The big picture of such a village is really just people doing what they always do, but with a much higher level of knowledge and skill, especially I the technological domains, collaboration, and with a certain emphasis on directly meeting needs rather than trying to engage in so much market trade, with focus on these things stemming from essentially just more and broader understanding of what is going on in society and how things work.  Market trade, in reality mostly ends up being doing what the rich people tell us to do, then paying all the money back to them for half assed approximations of what we actually need.  Grossly, severely inefficient, thereby squandering the power that technology and the built equipment base gives us in other ways.

Many people have announced or tried to start satellites of ose.  Almost all failed.  I went to one project, open land lab, but they are no good. The guy is the manager of a fab lab, that's where his enthusiasm is from.  But he is really not doing anything.

There is a project called reset society.

  There is one called one community, but they seem to lack explicit interest in really embracing technological development, which is critical because the technology we have is not suitable for our purposes in many ways, to effectively implement a village with small scale manufacturing, for instance.

There are various attempts at hack bases which have some tangential application. But not much really.   Same deal with maker labs.

If I am to ever be a part of such a thing, it looks like I am going to have to build it myself.   And it seems to me like most of the most interesting projects are not going to get anywhere without it.  

[Anthony Douglas]

There is patreon, and crowdfunding in general is developed to some degree.  Ose makes use of the so called true fans model, again basically subscribers. They got about $4000 a month from that as of 2014.

It sounds like you are talking mostly about bolus startup capital.

Fundamentally, when I look at the satellite map or go driving around, though, that land is owned by other working people, largely.  And also almost entirely unused, in rural areas or even lower density areas of the city.  

We the people do actually have the capital, too do what we really need to do, is what I mean.  People just are not using it at all. The land sits vacant, fallow, unused.  The equipment sits there. As at ose right now, three must be a million or two bucks of welding equipment, buildings etc. sitting there.

Secondly, the ultimate bottom line is that this is all deeply political.  What we want is inherently the opposite of what the wealthy class, which controls the financial capital, wants.  They are not going to be doing much any time soon to solve this lack of capital problem for us. It's part of how they control us.  Although there are some subversives among them like the shuttleworth people.

In seeing money as only one part of larger scale collaborative methods, I don't see it as as much of a barrier as most people do.  The challenge is how to align incentives, make people empowered and understand things about how the world works, and proceed to action.  We in the tech community especially are not so hard up and hand to mouth we can't do higher level longer term things like this once we understand which way to go.  People spend vast amounts of time and effort on stuff like burning man. If we talk about things, come to a real worthwhile vision, there is a solid amount of capital in our own pockets already to get this party started.  We don't need the bankers permission, and we cannot realistically expect to get it very often either.

--

[Patrick Anderson]

>> the financial system doesn't have any way to capitalize commons based enterprise

In the world of bits, the GNU GPL is designed to insure the consumers gain at-cost access to the Sources of Production as an answer to the potential impediment to Freedom created by those who will not allow access.

In the world of atoms, consumers owning the Means of Production may conflict with some interpretations of Marx, but actually puts the worker in an even better position, since the consumer will surely allow access, and yet the worker is not required to supply that expensive Capital. 

[Tux Lab]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 9:03 AM, John Griessen <jo...@industromatic.com> wrote:
> How do you reconcile your sourcing strictness with
> the fact that a large fraction of electronic chips are made in
> Asia in places like Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Hungary,
> Philippines, Japan.

The only rule I have for sourcing is that I prefer not to buy from
nations that aim their missiles at us, so I am perfectly okay with the
countries you listed. Most countries, including ours(USA), has its
own human rights problems, however, in democratic countries, we can
openly discuss our problems and find ways to solve them.

> Many are from China like ONSemi, Intel's newest fab, most memory chip
> makers, one TI plant? ...
>
> China is the most authoritarian, but has connections with the rest, and much
> economic trade with them also.
>
> Printed circuit assemblies might be higher percentage made in Asia even
> though some are assembled in Mexico...
> Mexico is almost an authoritarian regime... That requirement not to trade
> with anyone questionable
> creates a large hurdle for becoming profitable and surviving.

China's authoritarian capitalism is unique among our adversaries.
Plenty of countries dislike us, but not other country in the world,
not Russia, not NK, nor ISIL, had an economy that can power its
ambition to dominate over us. Of course, China had help. We
decimated our own manufacturing sector with tax policy that
incentivizes speculative investments, along with our insatiable
appetite for cheap disposable products.

The world's supply chain is too globalizes to untangle and corporate
interests are too entrenched to dislodge. However, I do strongly
believe it is in our best interest to shift our supply chains away
from China toward other nations that shares our democratic ideas,
which unfortunately is not a very high bar at the moment.

[Gerry]

On Thursday, July 19, 2018 at 9:00:56 PM UTC-5, Anthony Douglas wrote:

There is patreon, and crowdfunding in general is developed to some degree.  Ose makes use of the so called true fans model, again basically subscribers. They got about $4000 a month from that as of 2014.

This isn't a terrible model. I think the crowdfunding trend is too new to really have the reliability and availability needed to rely on it. I suspect it ends up circling around to marketing. Those with the best story and saies energy will get funded, but that isn't necessarily the people who have the knowledge and do the work. Funders need feedback about where the money is most effective and as several have suggested, the building of the community(s) and their networks of support (not thinking so much money, but the ecologies of the fields and projects). You see lots of stuff get started and lots of great fragments of the overall vision, but what will trigger the phase transition?

This may be all we have until the transition happens (is forced by the collapse and inadaquacy of what we have now)

 

It sounds like you are talking mostly about bolus startup capital.

Fundamentally, when I look at the satellite map or go driving around, though, that land is owned by other working people, largely.  And also almost entirely unused, in rural areas or even lower density areas of the city.  

Yes and no. I'm in a city and there is lots of under-utilized land. Who owns that? It isn't the working class. I wish I had access to the maps that would tell me where in my city land is being "banked" by speculators until they can make some real money on it. I suspect that favorable tax treatment is actually what makes this possible. The taxes are low because the assessed value of the unimproved land is low, but the city and county should use tax policy to lower the future value and force sale.

 

We the people do actually have the capital, too do what we really need to do, is what I mean.  People just are not using it at all. The land sits vacant, fallow, unused.  The equipment sits there. As at ose right now, three must be a million or two bucks of welding equipment, buildings etc. sitting there.

This is a really good point. I'm not sure how to find out what similar resources are going under-used in my area. All of this could be solved with a great website to map the resources. Both the physical/capital resources and the human ones. Maybe more important is that we develop the right kind of database and visualization tools to create and maintain an overall development roadmap. I hear that in other comments as well, the need to know what is done, and in particular to map out the parts of the roadmap for the shared tools, like this website to do the mapping.

My biggest open source contribution has been to a Wiki/Database platform that already has all the necessary core features, and I'm hopping to engage teams in extending/customizing it. It is currently called "WAGN", http://wagn.org/ but will be rebranded as Decko sometime soon. It is the underlying platform for WikiRate http://wikirate.org. This customization for this project has been funding for a couple of years by an EU grant.

 

Secondly, the ultimate bottom line is that this is all deeply political.  What we want is inherently the opposite of what the wealthy class, which controls the financial capital, wants.  They are not going to be doing much any time soon to solve this lack of capital problem for us. It's part of how they control us.  Although there are some subversives among them like the shuttleworth people.

I think the most important target for P2P production is democracy. I've been writing and thinking about Peer to Peer Democracy for some time now. Of course this has the same funding problem as the other projects and it is again the opposite of what the people in power want. In autopoetic terms, the political system we have now is highly efficient and producing and re-producing itself as a network of processes. I imagine an army of peer production precinct captains. The old political machines filled those positions with patronage workers, but we need to fill them with P2P collaborators. With the kind of active socially networked crowd sourced commons that this could produce, nobody would ever be elected without satisfying the demands of this network.

The only question is how do we make sure our crowd sourced empire is run by benevolent dictators?

 

In seeing money as only one part of larger scale collaborative methods, I don't see it as as much of a barrier as most people do.  The challenge is how to align incentives, make people empowered and understand things about how the world works, and proceed to action.  We in the tech community especially are not so hard up and hand to mouth we can't do higher level longer term things like this once we understand which way to go.  People spend vast amounts of time and effort on stuff like burning man. If we talk about things, come to a real worthwhile vision, there is a solid amount of capital in our own pockets already to get this party started.  We don't need the bankers permission, and we cannot realistically expect to get it very often either.

I agree completely with this. One barrier is that our communities have a lot of healing to do before they are ready to do what needs to be done. Yes, it is all about empowerment. Yes, about how the world works so we  can be design collaborators for our collective future, but maybe moreso about how to work in community. How to heal themselves; how to be leaders; how to learn independently. 

Yes, there is also a lot of "slack", surplus wealth and energy that can be invested in collective goals. I think if you get a critical mass moving it the right directions, there is plenty of spare time and capital that can be pooled. This also gets back to my comment about not having the financial system/tools to support this well. I have been thinking on what sort of solutions are needed here, and again I find there are many others thinking in similar directions, but still not enough alignment and well placed voices to spark it off.

[John Griessen]

I was at the public library branch near me and picked up a new book "we Do Things Differently" by Mark Stevenson
and recommend it for subject line action that was discussed here recently. The "full time facility"
needs structure and community to work, right?

Do it in Detroit, and advantage the renewable energy methods now available is the outcome of reading this book. Give it a look.
You'll see what I mean. It's hard to compress into a few lines though, so read the synopsis:
http://wedothingsdifferentlybook.com/introductory-chapter/ if you need to, then check out the book.

https://atlasofthefuture.org/futureread-we-do-things-differently-mark-stevenson/

[Anthony Douglas]

Detroit? I lived I Windsor for a while, and checked out the Detroit scene, but it didn't look very interesting.  It does have cheapness going for it.  But I dont think you could ever be able to just get on with building some buildings and doing some stuff.  The regulations and various excuses to tax you are killer in any north american city, probably.

I'm talking about taking plywood and lumber structure, or thin shell concrete, putting a membrane over it and burying it with dirt.  You get one skylight.  Earthcrete floor.  An insulated tent goes inside for winter time, with forced ventilation and solar heating, water tanks for heat storage.  Maybe the floor would be a foot or two below grade. That's a suitable building for my budget and needs. I don't think you could ever do that in the city.

[John Griessen]

On 07/25/2018 07:49 PM, Anthony Douglas wrote:
> The regulations and various excuses to tax you are killer in any north american city, probably.

If you read the book "We do things differently" You'll see that Detroit's collapse
means it has 50% extra infrastructure for free, and collapsed government also.
Very easy to get things done that effect growth.

If you can tolerate the current conditions of lots of poor people and crimes frequently.
Would have to integrate with the community there or else be an enemy.

[Anthony Douglas]

:), well it's not that collapsed, I can tell you, the city certainly looks and operates normal enough. I will have a look at the book, but I think it sounds like a different ball game.  They still have zoning and inspectors and insurance restrictions just like other cities.