Man, there is like nothing happening in this group, sort of reflecting the larger world of open manufacturing.

[Anthony Douglas]

I'm actually significantly perplexed at how little activity there is.  It's the same on fab lab forums.

On Sun, Jul 8, 2018, 9:29 AM Anthony Douglas <anthony....@gmail.com> 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.  

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[Nathan Cravens]

Hi Anthony,

Acquiring the skills takes a tremendous amount of passion, but also a
dedicated team with that passion. It also needs funding. Why funding
is hard is because of the anticapitalistic aspects of open
manufacturing culture (namely OSE and some of my ideological views
posted on this list in years past) with no clear product or a variety
of products that would take decades to create with teams of people.

Wevolver i think sets a realistic standard; its essentially a hardware
incubator that nurtures open hardware. The Open Source Hardware
Association, with its yearly conferences is also a promising group
that can help people meet other people working on open hardware
projects.

I think through hubs like incubators and the like, a team can assemble
around a product that works better than traditional market products.
There is a hunger for humanitarianism to be an ethical norm not just
for disaster relief or foreign aid, but for a global humanitarianism.
Open manufacturing as an idea can help make the project replicable by
another potential team that works face to face or some digital hybrid
of information sharing and gathering at a meeting place, a hub, a
place to work side by side, a place to be alone together.

Open source has to a degree become a mainstream thing; developers know
the benefits of open sharing of code can greatly accelerate a project;
and it seems that companies do what they can to make aspects of thier
product open source without giving away too much of the asset. I
suppose with really expensive product like GPUs it would not matter if
the information was open source, because chip fabs are expensive, and
a good team--another valuable asset--takes years to develop.

I think what you are getting at is there is a lack of leadership in
the open source movement. My hope is that there will be no need for
leadership and that free and open source principles will just get
baked in. I see open manufacturing going slow, but computing and
software going steady, so I am not distressed because I see on the
horizon with apps like Slack and Loomio, intelligent agents or AI
powered products will further aid collaboration, the sharing of
information and resources, and the ability to group people to complete
a project and make that project successful in the years to come.

The trend is groups of people around one or a small set of products,
instead of the homesteading sort of approach that OSE champions. I'm
sympathetic to both approaches, but I think a group that sticks to
just a few projects that get the most attention will work better than
a whole toolset that may not have enough talent to make itself a
reality.

I think we are all waiting for the next wave. There is a sort of
cultural war going on, people are gaining more of a political identity
that is polarizing; much of it a huge farce and distraction from the
engineering and hard work that needs to get done.

Apple and other companies are starting to help people, in response to
public outrage, to manage their time without wittering it all away on
social media; I think apps that help people plan and use time wisely
will be a greater benefit than any single leader, although leadership
could help bring people together and attract more people to a more
radical form of making. The purpose of a product should lead a team
rather than a person, ideally.

My own personal view is very weary of leaders and groups in general,
but that is because of my background and mental limitations. I have
chosen poverty over lying to myself, which is not a choice even most
people should make. We need groups and leaders to move forward --
until we don't.

What I am really perplexed by is how we sacrifice ourselves to a
wealthy elite while most of us remain on the edge of poverty. This
problem could have been nipped during the Robber Baron era, but has
long continued. Wars, from the Spanish-American War onwards to today's
War on Terror I suspect where the grand distractions away from any
great social reformations. I wonder how much automation it will take
before we put our identities aside and have more meaningful rather
than productive lives?

Nathan

P.S. Great documentary on AGI and ASI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL94X1sgCHg
Sometimes, I like to nerd out on graphics.
SIGGRAPH 2018 - NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang - Reinventing Computer Graphics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY28N0kv7Pk
On Tue, Aug 21, 2018 at 10:10 PM Anthony Douglas

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[Anthony Douglas]

Whoa, I guess I was thinking more grassroots stuff, rather than what Apple is doing or whatever.

It's not so much leadership as doing, to me, though. There had to be people on the ground, with a building or buildings, and tools, doing stuff to develop open physical hardware.

There is sensorica... A very little bit. Ose a very little bit. Thanks for mentioning wevolver, I will check that out.

Like you say, there is a lot of actual engineering to do. Funding is also a barrier, but it's sort of a sub problem.

If I could go join the war somewhere, I totally would have a long time ago. There is nothing. I have been to sensorica, it is much too small to try to make your job. Arg.

I'm know there are a great many people like me, willing and able to get this shit really going, but our time is all squandered instead. I know several of them, including people I met at ose, friends, and my own brother.

[Tux Lab]

It's the chicken or the egg argument. Open source manufacturing
needs to attract enough people for it to become economically
sustainable, however, because it is not currently economically
sustainable it can't attract enough people.

Then there's the danger of doing the upfront R&D work only to have
some factories in China reaping the rewards, ie 3d printers.

However, I am still attracted to the idea of domestic manufacturing.
I am in Los Angeles, where is everyone else located at?

[John Griessen]

On 08/27/2018 03:06 PM, Tux Lab wrote:
> However, I am still attracted to the idea of domestic manufacturing.
> I am in Los Angeles, where is everyone else located at?

Texas.

--
John Griessen
blog.kitmatic.com Austin TX building lab gear for biologists

[Anthony Douglas]

Oog, I'm I ottawa, Ontario, Canada

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[semeiotike]

Seattle.

[Eric Hunting]

Cerrillos, on a mesa in the desert south of Santa Fe NM. Oddly enough, a place briefly mentioned in Nader Khalili's Sidewalks On The Moon. 

[Ted Hall]

Hello Nathan and Anthony,

I don’t communicate as much here as I would like, but I’m prompted to comment in this thread on “Nothing happening …”.

As noted by many, there are differing perspectives and goals within the area of open hardware. With our “Handibot” project we have been committed to open source software, open source electronics, and open source hardware (beyond the electronics) – but we are trying to do it within the framework of a financially sustainable manufacturing operation.

I’m thinking that one of the interests in this thread is in tools for doing open source hardware or identifying site-resources-networks for promoting open source hardware. We are a little different because we are just trying to do it, and at the moment not worrying about the rest of the world. Here is a link to why we are trying to do it and how we see open manufacturing and the importance of digital fabrication to making it happen:

https://handibot.com/blog/2015/02/collaborative-product-development-in-an-open-source-hardware-environment-thoughts/

With a few exceptions, most activity in open source hardware is in open source electronic hardware. There are far fewer efforts in making general things for which the design and making are shared openly using digital technologies (OpenROV and Lasersaur being the two exceptions that come to mind).

We’ve been working on our Handibot project for years now. We have done some things well, some things not so well. Lots of frustrations – and, of course, we have learned a lot. In particular, we’ve not done as well at inspiring an open source development community as we hoped:

https://handibot.com/open-source.php#open_innovation

This is partly our fault for not making enough effort. But the reality is that it takes a lot of work and resources just to get a product out the door. There is often not enough energy left to encourage and promote further engagement beyond providing good customer support. And, we have found the outside interest in the open source aspect of our project to be very limited. That may be simply because the community is not large enough to have a critical mass of those who get enthusiastic about development.

Other issues have to do with the difficulty of creating compelling participatory environments. This takes effort and resources that even well-principled companies have difficulty sustaining it – particularly in the absence of interest. And, obviously, it is self-defeating not to be working at it because good documentation, support for on-boarding, and straightforward software tools are what help drive interest.

I have hopes for OSHWA in all this. But for us, the organization has not been particularly helpful. First there is the problem that we are not hardware in the electronic-hardware sense, and second, there seems to be a discrimination against “commercial” open source hardware; there being limited interest in the challenge of making open manufacturing actually work.

We do continue to plow along at it. Here’s a current argument for this type of digital manufacturing:
https://medium.com/@tedhall.shopbot/eating-our-own-dogfood-or-is-this-just-shameless-promotion-d370589eb129

I, disappointingly, don’t have much to report on “distributed manufacturing” yet because we just haven’t gotten to the volume where a second or third production site would be financially sustainable. Hopefully we’ll get there at some point and begin to explore how this aspect of open mfg can work.

Thus, in terms of the challenge raised by the title of the thread, as they say, hardware is hard and energizing the “open” part of open manufacturing is even harder.

The world has made heroes of “makers” who manage to get their hardware projects VC-funded and shipped to China to be made by someone else. I’m all for doing some manufacturing ourselves in our communities. But the momentum is developing only slowly …

Regards,

Ted Hall

Handibot/ShopBot 

[Nathan Cravens]

Great to hear from you Ted!

I might have given the impression there is less momentum in open manufacturing, however true that may be, the ethos seems to bake in with every successive generation. When looking at the rise of hackspaces while also including the rise of startup incubators--while in 2016 onward gamer collectives have become a thing--there at least is more interest in developing technologies outside the usual means, even if the end goal is to make an exit and start something else (like buy an island and tell the world to f-off). And there is a tremendous amount of value to come with that 'success' as 90% of tech startups fail. It would be interesting to know the percentage of hardware startup failure, but it is probably safe to say it is at a similar rate. Go to any hackerspace or startup incubator and you will probably find at least one person who has heard of Open Source Ecology, if not OSE (which I will give some software incubators might not) they will know something less obscure like Tensorflow, which with AI being the trendy thing the past few years, just about any coder will know of it. 

Elon Musk smoked green and didn't swear on a popular podcast, so the world must be getting better. :p There's still an issue in Yemen, but Syria looks like it is winding down. There is still a bit of alarm in Europe with a lower-case fascism rising its head, but so long as the Middle East starts becoming relatively stable such overly protective sensibilities should subside.

For those less inclined to tech, an art club might be a good fit. I visit one called Ground in Hull occasionally and have made friends. I found the local startup scene too prickish and members only; preventing the robots from doing everything, sucking up every year for funding from the Gods, so they can make a golden exit. On the other side of the spectrum, every community art club will have its techies of the Stallman variety.   

I think once robotics are dexterous enough (from point-cloud to actuation) to build the GVCS, such distributive movements will set on fire, while the majority of people will just be happy to install the latest app for the next gimmicky thing to distract themselves from the fewer repetitive tasks they will have to compete for. At some point it looks like it will take a revolution once AI (robotics included) take enough 'income' from the penny paying jobs. Perhaps if more people are engaged in something meaningful, the less gimmicky things will be desired and we then find more collective interest in 'real' stuff. Unfortunately, my generation and younger cannot afford real stuff while pensioners in Russia will be less likely to live long enough to receive one. Technology is to blame, labor is segmented enough to become outsourced, but there is not enough interest to measure or willingness to blame what is successful for the few.  

This year we now can count two companies surpassing the trillion dollar mark and much of that is thanks to Internet freedom and the free software (Ⓐ) and government (☭) spending that underpin it.   

(Wrote this while listening to Do LaB Tor at LIB 2018 / https://soundcloud.com/thedolab/tor-lib-2018 ) 

[Anthony Douglas]

Whoa, I would not depend on or wait for any of that stuff.  It's totally hollow.  

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[Eric Hunting]

This brings up an interesting point; how open manufacturing is connecting to the arts scene. I think this has always been around but became more apparent with the rise of Burning Man which has often served as a testing ground for digital fabrication and new open source architecture. (as was the case with Vinay Gupta's Hexapod) Digital fabrication has been a boon to contemporary artists. 

In Santa Fe a maker community has sprung up around an avant garde arts project called [Meow Wolf](https://meowwolf.com/) that was sponsored by writer George RR Martin. It created the first makerspace in the city, right in the same building as the Meow Wolf exhibit and setup for its creation, which then later moved to an independent facility, creating MAKE Santa Fe, a youth maker program, and a custom CNC shop called [Extraordinary Structures](https://extraordinarystructures.com/) that got a little notoriety for building a Tiny House demo deriving from WikiHouse. Santa Fe has generally been known as a fine arts nexus with many galleries concentrated around the more upper-class north-eastern portions of the city, but largely focused on traditional southwestern and native art styles suiting an older clientele of wealthy retirees and tourists. In recent years the once abandoned but recently revived (thanks to the establishment of the Railrunner commuter train) railyard part of the city became an avant garde arts hub attracting younger gentrification refugees from the west coast, resulting in a flurry of contemporary style building construction in a town that once demanded everything be made in the adobe pueblo style. 

[Nathan Cravens]

If you are gonna troll me Anthony, be more specific. :p This list abides by the Noisebridge hackerspace motto "Be Excellent to one another". You know, as if we are all at War, but all on the same side in charge of our Darling's Manifest Destiny. Starting an address with "Your Excellency" ect. would be a good start. Observe the letters of Ben Franklin to Thomas Jefferson--you know shit like: "My best wishes attend you, being with great and sincere Esteem, Dear Sir, Your most obedient & most humble Servant" ect, ect. A notable contemporary would be the kindness and leadership of Mitch Altman. Hair dye and tattoos optional. He created a device to turn off distractive devices; that is very kind indeed. 
 
Sup Eric. There is a nice bit of gentrification toward the central and eastern edges of Hull, with tourist traps like The Deep and startup incubator and Stallman killer C4DI. Hull calls itself the City of Culture for 2017 and has continued self aggrandizement schemes from imported talent for the next few years. For some weeks Ground has a space in Fruit Market: Humber Street which tries desperately to get cash from the Marina dwellers and  the sneerdom of Victoria Dock. I live in Old Town. 

One ongoing scheduled event at Ground is Skillabalooza (https://ground.tk/events/skillabalooza-2018-09-18/), a skill sharing fest (as festive as tea and biscuits (cookies) go (they are perplexed by the phrase 'chicken fried steak', so we're even. . "It's not chicken?!" is a common refrain), which should be in any open manufacturing toolkit. It seems to be in DARPA's version as well. . .

• Establishment of military-service-affiliated Manufacturing Demonstration Facilities that: serve as repositories of focused manufacturing knowledge and infrastructure; independently demonstrate designs, manufacturing processes, process models and manufactured products; and curate and assess manufacturing models, qualification schema and material/processing properties data. These multi-user facilities are intended as a lasting, shared resource to provide the manufacturing community with greater access to the Open Manufacturing program and its research.

I'd bring crumpets and have a cuppa with those chaps at DARPA anytime. I could translate British jargon for them at least. There's a skill worth sharing.  The Ground skill share motto "Do it Yourself. Do it Together" is pretty neat. I should probably go to one. 

Eric. I'm starting a James Burke binge beginning with Connections 1,2,&3 followed by The Day the Universe Changed. I really hope Mr. Burke doesn't die and he gets his ass out of retirement and writes a book with at least 13 episodes of video content based on his 2017 monologue The End of Scarcity. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09jvfc4) VPNnnit. If he doesn't, I suppose we'll have to write it with the likes of Paul Fernhout, Kevin Carson, you, and Charles Collis, (or anyone else who has read this far) ideally.  There's a really great book along these lines with amazing breadth called Soonish, which I look forward to returning to.    

I'm a drummer in a band now. Wish me luck!

On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 6:11 PM Eric Hunting <erich...@gmail.com> wrote:

This brings up an interesting point; how open manufacturing is connecting to the arts scene. I think this has always been around but became more apparent with the rise of Burning Man which has often served as a testing ground for digital fabrication and new open source architecture. (as was the case with Vinay Gupta's Hexapod) Digital fabrication has been a boon to contemporary artists. 

In Santa Fe a maker community has sprung up around an avant garde arts project called [Meow Wolf](https://meowwolf.com/) that was sponsored by writer George RR Martin. It created the first makerspace in the city, right in the same building as the Meow Wolf exhibit and setup for its creation, which then later moved to an independent facility, creating MAKE Santa Fe, a youth maker program, and a custom CNC shop called [Extraordinary Structures](https://extraordinarystructures.com/) that got a little notoriety for building a Tiny House demo deriving from WikiHouse. Santa Fe has generally been known as a fine arts nexus with many galleries concentrated around the more upper-class north-eastern portions of the city, but largely focused on traditional southwestern and native art styles suiting an older clientele of wealthy retirees and tourists. In recent years the once abandoned but recently revived (thanks to the establishment of the Railrunner commuter train) railyard part of the city became an avant garde arts hub attracting younger gentrification refugees from the west coast, resulting in a flurry of contemporary style building construction in a town that once demanded everything be made in the adobe pueblo style. 

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[Alfred Lewis]

Have any of you guys heard of Open Manufacturing Platform? What do you think of it? I would like to know your opinions. Thanks

On Tuesday, August 21, 2018 at 3:10:03 PM UTC-6, Anthony Douglas wrote:

I'm actually significantly perplexed at how little activity there is.  It's the same on fab lab forums.

On Sun, Jul 8, 2018, 9:29 AM Anthony Douglas <anthony...@gmail.com> 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.  

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[Anthony Douglas]

It's a sub system that extremely wealthy people can use to employ normal manufacturing equipment.  Not interesting.

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