A Change of Tone to Well Being (was Re: adult supervision)
Nathan Cravens
I might as well
resort to private email exchange if I wanted to have a nice and clean
debate, but why would I be avoiding dealing with pent up frustrations
of others and myself?
I know it devolves the debate but it also lets
us see how we behave under such pressure, and trains us to be better
at handling other people's frustrations and our own, but I admit we
sometimes poke around for trouble, which is also a way of exhibiting
frustration.
En garde!
Guys, kindly shut the hell up until you1> get some perspective2> remember that you're on the same sidethis is worse than watching factions of the left bitch about whether
or not it's acceptable to term one group or another "real marxists."If this is the level of organization and debate, the *technology*
will simply never reach a fraction of its full potential. If you're
going to have list war, cut to the bone and through it, and into the
new conceptual territory on the other side. If you're going to have
peace, put in the effort to give important concepts a URL (OSE or try
Appropedia, they're not deletionist at all) and reference them.En garde!Vinay
Vinay Gupta
Nathan Cravens
Vinay Gupta
> artificial boundary to overcome before getting things done. You
> see? The sass used would make it more difficult to see the light
> the engineering generates.
Dude, this kind of metaconversation is the problem, not the solution.
Shut up unless you're talking about things.
> The method of communication you used made things more
> "pathological." Do you see that now? Do you see you became the
> madness observed and that you generated more of it? You do not have
> to take part in that madness any longer to get things done. You can
> then focus instead of getting things done...
Furthermore, I'm not entering into further debate on this.
> Demonstrate, illustrate, and act in a manner that gets it done. If
> we see that it works better than the others, I and others will
> adopt it. It can be as simple as this: illustrate, demonstrate,
> act... You are good at this Vinay. You know this stuff; you've been
> in this business; so let's see a product and how to generate it.
> Persist in a way to make the knowledge available carefully
> balancing simplicity vs. detail.
I'd suggest this is done already.
> Make a step by step detailed instructional for constructing a
> Hexayurt. Start there, then work with OSE and Appropedia so to be
> at the same level of detail. The activities come from the goals.
> After the activities are complete and a success, document them in
> detail to share with the world so a passive audience can have the
> ability to become empowered after seeing what is made by their own
> two hands. Detailed and freely available documentation and
> instruction that produces greater material wealth than before will
> turn our enemies into our best friends.
>
Try our pages on appropedia.
> I act as if we are in the new age. Acting how we would like to
> live now is the fastest way to attaining how we like to live. To
> act differently would continue an age I would rather not live in.
>
> When speaking, I remind myself I am speaking to a dear friend. When
> I play this trick, I often have positive results. Use this trick in
> your public speaking Vinay, and I'm certain you will be far more
> persuasive and speak more fluidly -- there are no obstacles in your
> way. No matter what, they are your friend. This may take time to
> develop if the familiar ego was generated based on enemy images or
> the "badness" of things.
I think this artificial approach to communications is stupid and
counterproductive. No wonder you're having so much problem getting to
the point.
Artificial communication strategies lead to poor communication. Knock
it off and say what you mean. And could we now return the list from
pointless metaconversation to discussion of stuff, and it's doingness?
Vinay
Paul D. Fernhout
>> Yes, let's get shit done. Yet, the sass you used created an
>> artificial boundary to overcome before getting things done. You
>> see? The sass used would make it more difficult to see the light
>> the engineering generates.
>
> Dude, this kind of metaconversation is the problem, not the solution.
> Shut up unless you're talking about things.
Vinay-
On almost any other mailing list, it would probably be sensible to post
something discouraging meta-discussion (though phrasing it in a more polite
way, especially to the person who started the list and presumably has a good
idea of what he had in mind for what the list should be about).
Part of what this list is about (to me at least) is developing better ways
to work together on free and open source manufacturing projects. So, I'd
suggest meta-discussion (up to some point) is quite on-topic in "bringing
free and open source software methodology and philosophy to the
manufacturing world".
By the way, I too had a similar reaction as Nathan to your initial post and
the title. I know you're trying to help, so thanks for the good intent.
For example, in the current recent unpleasantries, what is it that is
perceived as scarce that people are upset about:
* Attention?
* Time?
* Bandwidth?
* Disk space?
* Processing by machines?
* Processing by humans?
* Filtering?
* Tagging?
* Civility?
* Commitment?
* Options?
* Community?
* Newcomers?
* Publicity?
* Reputation?
* Face-to-face interactions?
* Consolidation processes to remove duplication and create permanent resources?
Or something else?
Aside from any computer related limits, are the rest of these issues of
possible non-material scarcity ones that a post-scarcity society will still
have to deal with on a daily basis? Or will they mostly go away too?
Likewise, in trying to envision a new sort of society that might spring from
abundance (and, to coin a phrase, "social health"), thinking about new ways
to communicate about manufacturing as well as other issues (besides
hierarchical task-focused corporate speak) also seems "on topic".
We've seen the fruits of non-reflective engineering to produce post-scarcity
"things" in the destruction of Hiroshima, the erosion of topsoil in the
Midwest, the depletion of ground water lots of places, global climate
change, rising industrial illness in China, the development of military
robotics and bioweapons, and so on. The deep problems that caused those
events won't get solved just by more "things", although maybe more of the
appropriate "things" may be very helpful. But unless we have so way of
effectively discussing that (and working towards at least some shared values
and assumptions and dreams from which "things" spring), we may not get the
appropriate "things" we need for a sustainable (and generally happy) society.
With that said, I know there is already a tension here (as has been brought
up before) about people who want to talk about different aspects of all this
and are unhappy about what they see as distractions from that. One obvious
divide is, as you suggest, stuff on "things" like "nuts-and-bolts
engineering I'm doing (I being anyone themselves)" or "what's going on in
manufacturing elsewhere" versus other more meta-level things like
"discussion process" or "philosophy", "economics" and "politics". I think
that is a legitimate concern, and I personally would like to see a general
discussion by people here of why they signed up for this list and what they
expect of it.
One might even list desirable proportions of different types of discussions.
Here is one that you might at least grudgingly accept: :-)
Desired Discussion Ratio From an Engineering Perspective:
* engineering I'm doing: 60%
* manufacturing elsewhere: 25%
* tools: 13%
* discussion process: 0.5%
* philosophy: 0.5%
* economics: 0.5%
* politics: 0.5%
Personally, I might prefer more like:
* engineering I'm doing: 25%
* manufacturing elsewhere: 25%
* tools: 20%
* discussion process: 5%
* philosophy: 10%
* economics: 5%
* politics: 10%
But, one might also argue they could be separate but loosely linked mailing
lists. But they do overlap, and even "engineering I'm doing" could have it's
on-topic versus off-topic arguments, about what is a thing if it involves
software, or if it has lots of dependencies on commercial parts, etc. For
example, is a discussion of a system for analyzing manufacturing webs a
"thing"? I just added another category above for "tools" to fit that in. But
then are software tools different from hardware tools?
There may well be better categories, that's just a first attempt at some.
Someone would have to comb through the archives to abstract out the key
categories and then work out rough percentages of what we've actually been
discussions or posting on, including which threads get the most replies,
although unfortunately, with email, it's hard to tell if a post with no
replies was of great interest or not. (And even replies is probably not as
good an indicator as views or collective moderation.) As I think about that
now, I see discussions on "recruitment" should fit in there too. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Vinay Gupta
Hm. Well... fundamentally I'm not seeing this as going anywhere.
Because the list is really toxic. Because people are talking about
process issues - badly - rather than talking bout engineering.
See what I'm saying?
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 5355 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Paul D. Fernhout
> Hm. Well... fundamentally I'm not seeing this as going anywhere.
> Because the list is really toxic. Because people are talking about
> process issues - badly - rather than talking bout engineering.
>
> See what I'm saying?
OK, let's talk about engineering working social systems for this discussion
group. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
marc fawzi
I did not realize that discussions (no matter how out of hand they
get) could cause death.
marc fawzi
OK, let's talk about engineering working social systems for this
discussion group. :-)
>>
People can filter by topic if we adopt a "tagging" format for message titles.
So someone not interested in currency can set a filter to trash
anything that has the tag currency or money in it.
This way we can do not have to narrow the scope of the list or like
Bryan does complaining about things being out of scope when the
website for the list specifically says they're in-scope, e.g. new
economics. We wouldn't have to suffer death either by being exposed to
"toxic" arguments about arguments about arguments about arguments. The
nth level meta is useful to some but can be too much for others, so
the sender or someone else can recognize that and tag the title "meta"
... etc
Nathan Cravens
OK, let's talk about engineering working social systems for this discussion
group. :-)
Paul, you understand the point I made in this discussion? The foundation to build a community of sharing must be rid of the verbal methods as expressed here:
Shut up unless you're talking about things.
It will be more difficult to get what you want being that way.
"the list is really toxic"
I did not realize that discussions (no matter how out of hand they
get) could cause death.
We are better than this!
Paul D. Fernhout
And on that topic, I'd like to remind everyone about stigmergy, a process of
mediating interaction through artifacts (like improving each others designs
or building on each others emails or code, if freely licensed). From:
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php
"Although social mediation is an inherent part of collaboration, when
applied in traditional face-to-face collaboration social mediation can
provide a barrier to the rapid and seamless integration of contributions
that characterises projects such as Wikipedia.org and the Open Source
software movement. It may be that there is simply so much complex
information to be negotiated when people communicate directly that the
negotiations of the many collapse under their own weight without the
mediation of an administrative/stigmergic system. This is not to say that
social negotiation does not take place in stigmergic collaborative
contexts—it may even be essential to developing the collaborative
community—but rather that negotiation takes a back seat in terms of the
creative drafting process. Most (if not all) stigmergic wiki collaborations
have discussions associated with the content being developed, but it is
possible to contribute (to Wikipedia.org, for instance) without discussing
what you are contributing to or creating. Conversely, it is also possible to
take part in discussion without editing an article. Although such
discussions are most certainly an important and perhaps crucial form of
contribution, they are typically secondary to the objectives of the overall
project. For an example of a discussion accompanying mass collaboration, see
the Israel talk page at Wikipedia.org. In addition to such points of
discussion, bulletin boards, IRC (chat) and e-mail lists often support and
augment the negotiation."
So, whether discussions here or elsewhere work out productively or not, the
work goes on through indirect collaboration.
Conventional organizations like the US government or most big corporations
spend an enormous amount of time and money on social process related design
and training. OK, we may want something different, but if so, what?
Stigmergy is a big part of it; still, as above, stigmergic systems still
often involve discussions, so how should they happen, and if you are a
moderator on an open list, what are reasonable actions to take in certain
situations when those discussion are breaking down?
Here is a long study about the governance of one of the most successful free
and open source efforts on the planet, Debian:
http://www.techforce.com.br/index.php/news/linux_blog/scientific_study_about_debian_governance_and_organization
"The study analyzed 13 years of Debian Project history, interviewed some
Project participants and previous Leaders, and carefully observed patterns.
The open nature of Debian Project history, registered at discussion lists
archives and irc logs, meetings reports, were also used during the data
collection phase. The study is VERY interesting as scientific analyzed HOW
an open source project survived, evolved and flourished during 13 years,
overcoming many troubles only challenged by long term BIG communities,
reaching solid institutional foundations to resolve disputes. "
I had previously linked to this other general resource on this list, but I
will link to it again:
"Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software
Project" by Karl Fogel
http://producingoss.com/
but they still devote a substantial amount of text to social process issues:
"Chapter 4. Social and Political Infrastructure"
http://producingoss.com/en/social-infrastructure.html
and:
"Chapter 6. Communications"
http://producingoss.com/en/communications.html
Perhaps we all (myself included) have not been following the guidelines in
that book as well as we could. Still, they are not exactly 100% applicable
to this group, since this is sort of a meta-group to begin with, not about
any particular open manufacturing project, but about the topic in general. A
comparison might be the difference between a software mailing list about a
source code control system like SVN (the book's author was involved with
that), and a more general mailing list one like gnu.misc.discuss. Although
even that is not a great example since it is quite a bit FSF related -- I
can't think off-hand of any general enough list that parallels this one for
free and open source software right now, because that ecosystem has become
so diverse. There are perhaps some ones for content in general, expanding on
Creative Commons ideas or such as FOSS covers more text and image and music
and video content?
Maybe tagging topics would help as was suggested, but in practice I doubt
most people would follow any arbitrary guidelines. Maybe the open
manufacturing topic is just too big at this point to be held well by the
limited technology we currently use in terms of a mailing list? (I'm
currently working on something to help with that, previously posted on.)
Clearly, one thing we have here is some disagreements about the purpose,
goals, and values of this list. Just ignoring that seems the more toxic
thing to do, IMHO. Maybe we will find irreconcilable differences, and the
list will split, or some other option will be found. Better to work that
through now than to have people not getting what it is they want to find here.
Vijay, one further point on your comment. Calling a discussion list "really
toxic" seems to be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn't it? :-( I've
been on several lists (and read parts of the archives of many more) and seen
several flame wars (much worse than what happened), and I've seen the lists
get quiet for a couple days and then move on. It's unpleasant, but it
happens. The moderators on this list (Nathan, Bryan, myself) are obviously
concerned and trying to resolve the issue and prevent it from happening
again (even if one of them is a bit implicated too in some of the name
calling). But, this is really a learning experience for everyone. A group
(or moderator) is not perfect from the start, nor will it ever be perfect as
our definitions of perfection differ. So, to take one flame war which has
fizzled out (hopefully, although it had long been simmering, so we'll see),
and which the list moderators are currently trying to prevent happening
again, and generate a comments like what you said about the whole list
(adult supervision needed, really toxic), seems rather over generalizing,
yes? As well as to then dismiss sincere efforts to try to improve things?
The social dimension of design is very important, as you no doubt well know
from your own work. Product after product for the materially-poor world has
failed because it ignored social dimensions of a thing. Solar cookers faced
decades of resistance in some places because of fear that evil spirits would
move into uncovered food, or because of the timing of certain meals. Local
water supplies were neglected in favor of petitioning the central government
for hookups to distant water system because it was more prestigious for a
council to write a petition to the government that hire a local well
driller. Even in refugee camps, people are going hungry because the wrong
foods for their culture are made available (it's not true any starving
people will eat anything, most still have their pride and traditions). The
One Laptop Per Child project has ignored the village-oriented structure of
most of the materially-poorer but socially-richer world, otherwise it would
have been designed differently and been more effective and better received
(perhaps a central $2000 server hub and communications tower and lots of $20
ARM-powered mobile units which also worked as phones). And so on.
Anyway, can you make any suggestions how to talk about process issues in a
better way, since you have judged our attempts here as going "badly"? I
don't mean that sarcastically. I serious welcome your suggestions and
pointers to addition resources on that.
Still, there is no particular reason you should be interested in
participating or even reading or contributing to meta-discussions if you
find them meaningless. I'm sure everyone here will continue to enjoy more
down-to-hardware posts with information about all your open source or public
domain projects which you have impressively listed here:
http://guptaoption.com/map/
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
>> OK, let's talk about engineering working social systems for this discussion
>> group. :-)
>>
> Paul, you understand the point I made in this discussion? The foundation to
> build a community of sharing must be rid of the verbal methods as expressed
> here:
>
> Shut up unless you're talking about things.
Had it been to a member who was not the list owner, I might have said
something about it. It felt rude to me. Still, the intent is obviously to be
helpful (even though I also disagree with the premise of the comment to not
have meta-discussions on this list, given its broad charter.)
But these are not new issues to the free and open source community.
So, even if it is late in the game I suggest we all adopt this policy (and I
am sorry if this seems to single that comment out, it is not intended to be
specifically about any one person):
"Chapter 2. Getting Started: Setting the Tone"
http://producingoss.com/en/setting-tone.html#prevent-rudeness
"""
Nip Rudeness in the Bud
From the very start of your project's public existence, you should maintain
a zero-tolerance policy toward rude or insulting behavior in its forums.
Zero-tolerance does not mean technical enforcement per se. You don't have to
remove people from the mailing list when they flame another subscriber, or
take away their commit access because they made derogatory comments. (In
theory, you might eventually have to resort to such actions, but only after
all other avenues have failed—which, by definition, isn't the case at the
start of the project.) Zero-tolerance simply means never letting bad
behavior slide by unnoticed. For example, when someone posts a technical
comment mixed together with an ad hominem attack on some other developer in
the project, it is imperative that your response address the ad hominem
attack first, as a separate issue unto itself, and only afterward move on to
the technical content.
It is unfortunately very easy, and all too typical, for constructive
discussions to lapse into destructive flame wars. People will say things in
email that they would never say face-to-face. The topics of discussion only
amplify this effect: in technical issues, people often feel there is a
single right answer to most questions, and that disagreement with that
answer can only be explained by ignorance or stupidity. It's a short
distance from calling someone's technical proposal stupid to calling the
person themselves stupid. In fact, it's often hard to tell where technical
debate leaves off and character attack begins, which is one reason why
drastic responses or punishments are not a good idea. Instead, when you
think you see it happening, make a post that stresses the importance of
keeping the discussion friendly, without accusing anyone of being
deliberately poisonous. Such "Nice Police" posts do have an unfortunate
tendency to sound like a kindergarten teacher lecturing a class on good
behavior:
First, let's please cut down on the (potentially) ad hominem comments;
for example, calling J's design for the security layer "naive and ignorant
of the basic principles of computer security." That may be true or it may
not, but in either case it's no way to have the discussion. J made his
proposal in good faith. If it has deficiencies, point them out, and we'll
fix them or get a new design. I'm sure M meant no personal insult to J, but
the phrasing was unfortunate, and we try to keep things constructive around
here.
Now, on to the proposal. I think M was right in saying that...
As stilted as such responses sound, they have a noticeable effect. If you
consistently call out bad behavior, but don't demand an apology or
acknowledgment from the offending party, then you leave people free to cool
down and show their better side by behaving more decorously next time—and
they will. One of the secrets of doing this successfully is to never make
the meta-discussion the main topic. [An unfortunate situation at the moment
here, as this is a meta thread, but we are all learning.] It should always
be an aside, a brief preface to the main portion of your response. Point out
in passing that "we don't do things that way around here," but then move on
to the real content, so that you're giving people something on-topic to
respond to. If someone protests that they didn't deserve your rebuke, simply
refuse to be drawn into an argument about it. Either don't respond (if you
think they're just letting off steam and don't require a response), or say
you're sorry if you overreacted and that it's hard to detect nuance in
email, then get back to the main topic. Never, ever insist on an
acknowledgment, whether public or private, from someone that they behaved
inappropriately. If they choose of their own volition to post an apology,
that's great, but demanding that they do so will only cause resentment.
The overall goal is to make good etiquette be seen as one of the "in-group"
behaviors. This helps the project, because developers can be driven away
(even from projects they like and want to support) by flame wars. You may
not even know that they were driven away; someone might lurk on the mailing
list, see that it takes a thick skin to participate in the project, and
decide against getting involved at all. Keeping forums friendly is a
long-term survival strategy, and it's easier to do when the project is still
small. Once it's part of the culture, you won't have to be the only person
promoting it. It will be maintained by everyone.
"""
So, Vinay is certainly right if implying that rudeness feels toxic (can't
argue with feelings if saying "this list feels toxic to me right now"), or
as above that metadiscussion about flames can feel discouraging to people.
But, this list is relatively new, this movement for open manufacturing is
new, and so we are all learning here. Take this as we are all learning to
deal with situations like this in the future, building on the accumulated
wisdom of software FOSS projects, and we should be thankful for the
opportunity to learn these things so we can apply them in other situations.
Anyway, as above, the issue seems not so much ridding a community of
rudeness but how it is responded to.
--Paul Fernhout
marc fawzi
zero tolerance leads to tyranny, no?
resilience is, e.g. setting up filters ... if people don't tag the
title someone else will notice it and do it for them until it becomes
the norm
Vinay Gupta
Vinay Gupta
How it works.
There are three kinds of people: snacks, trolls and bastards.
Snacks are people without strong personal competence or will.
Trolls are people with strong personal competence, but without social
status. Many computer programmers and engineers are trolls. They live
in caves.
Bastards are people with strong personal competence and high social
status. Bastards who speak the truth about unpleasant things lose
their social status and become trolls.
What this means is two things: if you want to know the truth, ask a
troll. If you want people to do something, convince a bastard it’s
the right thing to do.
Within this framework one can see all politics…
=============
The point I'm making is that you're falling into really dumb social
antipatterns where substantive discussion is replaced with talking
about how people are talking. Quit it and get back to work.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 5355 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Paul D. Fernhout
Please note that in what I quoted, the zero tolerance involves pointing
rudeness out every time, not banning or censoring someone who is rude
(although the most extreme repetitive rudeness by the same person maybe
would be different). There is a learning process that goes on in any
community. So, essentially noting the rudeness in an email is "tagging" it
in a way. Again, there are several people who have recently used what can be
seen as rude language (as I see it, at least), so I am not singling you out.
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
> Dude, *get over it.*
>
> I'm putting this as plainly as I know how: shut up and get to work
> rather than wasting time and focus with endless process bullshit.
>
> If direct communication offends you, consider growing a clue.
Vinay-
Terms like "shut up", "process bullshit", and "consider growing a clue" can
appear rude.
That said, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Vinay Gupta
deliberately. Rudeness is also communication.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 5355 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
marc fawzi
I know and I concur. I was not thinking that. I was referring to
"resilience vs intolerance" as a general argument in the context of
governance, and guess what, it applies to the design of an economic
governance, not just social governance, which is why I brought it up.
There are a lot of lessons in what just happened.
For one thing, my tit-for-tat angle needs a major revising :-)
Another lesson is how a morally chaotic interaction between two or
three people can all the sudden become an attractor for some
outsider(s) to jump in and preach to us with rude language. It's like
a fight in some open crowded area between two or three people who are
familiar with each other. All the sudden, someone comes in from the
outside and starts telling everyone to shut up. It's an interesting
phenomenon, but it's very common at bars and in certain cultures.
I personally find it intriguing.
Marc
On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Paul D. Fernhout
Vinay Gupta
tie their own shoelaces.
Quit metadiscussion and get back to the technology.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 5355 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
marc fawzi
That's true between animals or drunk people at a bar maybe or as it
was the case here between frustrated nerds.
But not something to be proud of.
If you come back with a rude comment as a way to communicate then
please note that everyone is capable of being rude to incredible
degree but very few of us are capable of non-violent communication
that is productive in times such as these.
Paul D. Fernhout
> The point I'm making is that you're falling into really dumb social
> antipatterns where substantive discussion is replaced with talking
> about how people are talking. Quit it and get back to work.
Your story on your site is a rather narrow self-fulfilling prophecy of life
and politics -- one which I presume many here hope we can move beyond. That
is not necessarily to disagree with it as a current state of affairs in some
specific parts of our society. :-(
Again, without necessarily disagreeing with your point quoted above, as a
software developer, most of my time is spent thinking about how objects talk
to each other. That *is* my work. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_passing
"Alan Kay has argued that message passing is a concept more important than
objects in his view of object-oriented programming, however people often
miss the point and place too much emphasis on objects themselves and not
enough on the messages being sent between them."
Granted, people are not objects, so maybe, when all you have is a hammer,
everything looks like a nail? :-)
By the way, this page has a link for a really cool video on the future
directions of computing, with physical objects (with displays) that are
sending messages to each other as you move them:
"Demo of Spatially Aware Blocks "
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/13/1630232
"This 5-min demo just posted from last week's TED — got a big crowd
reaction. It's a new technology coming out of MIT, about to be
commercialized. Siftables have been seen before, but not like this. They're
toy blocks/tiles that are spatially aware and interact with each other in
very cool ways. Initial use may be as toys, but there's big potential for
new paradigm of spatially-aware physical mini computers."
--Paul Fernhout
Vinay Gupta
Don't tell me what I can or can't be proud of. The world is big and
complicated, and people are diverse. It took me a lot of work over a
lot of years to get good at strategic rudeness!
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 5355 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Vinay Gupta
I think the point I made was simple and clear: cut the yabbering
metadiscussion and get back to talking about technology. As
metadiscussions go it's neither deep nor useful, and some of the tech
bits have been very, very good.
If you *must* have metadiscussion, consider a separate list for
discussion of what is happening on the list where the actual thinking
happens.
I really mean this about the metadiscussion: it's *lame*
metadiscussion. You should have seen Anthro-L back in the day.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 5355 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
marc fawzi
"Typical" is relative to what one is used to.
It disempowers the sayer (those of us who have been rude) and empowers
the hypothetical "idiots" that you refer to, but the real idiots are
those who lose their empowerment.
The meta-discussion will continue as long as people want it to. We
can't have power over a debate by being rude regardless of our
motivation.
If somehow you have been empowered previously by being rude, I think
you're in for a surprise.
Marc
marc fawzi
Nice ending.
Vinay Gupta
Mate, when the time is right, I'll take it to fistfights if I have
to. In fact somebody punched me the other week in an escalated
discussion of whether fishing truly represented a tragedy of the
commons, or a technological failure of another kind!
Being rude is an *artform*. Scorn it at your peril!
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 5355 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
marc fawzi
dramatic increase in frustration in geek land.
Let's crash some submarines.
~~
Let me ask this (everyone):
What is the goal and scope of this loose team effort?
Can we have an "open production" competition of some sort to get this
loose team effort off the ground?
For example, can we each go back to the lab, build something useful
and then release it into the wild with full spec?
Seriously.
Marc
Vinay Gupta
Now we're talking.
I'd like to focus on the replicatability angle on this. I've found
that Hexayurts only started to get built when there were complete end-
to-end instructions *on video* showing every step in a ton of detail,
and written instructions too. Although I haven't yet popped the lid
on my AA1, the videos of how to put in more memory made me think I
could do it fairly easily, while the written instructions left me
nervous.
So I think that's one angle: making videos really helps people to
replicate good ideas. They're sort of fun to make too once you
realize it isn't TV :)
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 5355 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
marc fawzi
responsible for its demise. ;-)
I think this concludes my test of what it's all about.
Very similar to an IRC channel in governance.
Marc
Nick Taylor
> Now we're talking.
>
> I'd like to focus on the replicatability angle on this. I've found
> that Hexayurts only started to get built when there were complete end-
> to-end instructions *on video* showing every step in a ton of detail,
> and written instructions too. Although I haven't yet popped the lid
> on my AA1, the videos of how to put in more memory made me think I
> could do it fairly easily, while the written instructions left me
> nervous.
>
> So I think that's one angle: making videos really helps people to
> replicate good ideas. They're sort of fun to make too once you
> realize it isn't TV :)
>
> Vinay
http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/toys.html
except for basic post-cockup survival techniques and technologies rather than ways of keeping kids entertained. Based on your (Vinay) "six ways to die" model... a flatish hierarchy of needs.
For this to be as language/literacy agnostic, and viral as possible, the should be made with pictures / videos - and then text for things like BOMs / details etc, if and when possible/appropriate.
It would be cool if this could be made cell-phone accessible... but I'm not sure what the global state of cellphone technology is... and if it's WAP then the whole thing goes off the top of the pain-in-the-arse-meter.
I'm thinking possibly some sort of wiki arrangement - a survivapedia - or at least some sort of thing where contribution is more or less open to anyone... but the focus is on fast and easy transmission of ideas.
Obviously we'd need some sort of oversight to stop the thing filling up with conversations about how to have conversations about how to have conversations... but you um... get the general idea.
A kindof open/crowd-sourced survival manual for "what to do after day 3 (without electricity or water)"
We could call it "Disasters for Idiots".
or maybe not.
Nick
Vinay Gupta
Paul D. Fernhout
> I think the point I made was simple and clear: cut the yabbering
> metadiscussion and get back to talking about technology. As
> metadiscussions go it's neither deep nor useful, and some of the tech
> bits have been very, very good.
>
> If you *must* have metadiscussion, consider a separate list for
> discussion of what is happening on the list where the actual thinking
> happens.
>
> I really mean this about the metadiscussion: it's *lame*
> metadiscussion. You should have seen Anthro-L back in the day.
Anthro-L is an anthropology list, so it's not surprising they talked in ways
that people there were introspective and focused on the interpersonal, and
did so with a high degree of quality.
Here are nine types of intelligence, each involving different discussion
modes and topics. This list is derived from here:
http://www.macalester.edu/psychology/whathap/ubnrp/intelligence05/mtypes.html
Types of intelligence:
1. Verbal – the ability to use words
2. Visual – the ability to imagine things in your mind
3. Physical – the ability to use your body in various situations
4. Musical - the ability to use and understand music
5. Mathematical – the ability to apply logic to systems and numbers
6. Introspective – the ability to understand your inner thoughts
7. Interpersonal – the ability to understand other people, and relate well
to them
8. Naturalist Intelligence (“Nature Smart”) – Sensitive to living things.
9. Existential Intelligence – the ability to tackle deep questions about
human existence such as the meaning of life, how did we get here, and what
happens when we die.
I feel you are implicitly celebrating some of these forms of intelligence
and denigrating other ones in the context of this list. That's your choice
of what you value; I merely point it out.
Which gets back to questions I raised before, but I will be more direct in
asking it specifically of you.
What do you, Vinay, think the goals of this list community are (or should
be)? What do you expect to see here? What brought you to this community?
Until we understand that (both for yourself and others), it's hard to say
what discussions are appropriate or inappropriate, or how best to handle
them when they veer away from that ideal.
Now, it may seem obvious to you what the goals of this list are or should be
(or at least, your goal in participating on it). If so, please take a moment
post a reply on that. I want to know where you are coming from. This is a
chance for you to advocate for the importance of specific goals for this
list, in the interest in shaping the community norms in the way you want to
see them. Again, the answer to this question may seem obvious to you, but
I'd like to see it anyway, because, frankly, it is not entirely obvious to
me at this point what this list "should" be about, given the recent
discussions and different sentiments expressed.
It has become clear already that the "open manufacturing" community is large
and growing, even if in some ways 3D printing is still technically in the
stage that, say, Stallman was in the 1980s with his 2D printer problems. :-)
"Chapter 1: For Want of a Printer"
http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html
If today someone created one mailing list about "free and open source
software", would that be useful, and what would be discussed there? I would
think the answer would be "it would not be useful now", because too much is
going on in too many communities for such a general list to be useful. There
are endless lists on various software packages and languages (both from
developer and user perspectives), a few on the governance of various FOSS
organizations, several on discussions of licensing, several on comparing
packages and languages, plus lots more list on a variety of other topics (3D
graphics, sound processing, robotics, etc.). I'm not saying "open
manufacturing" is there yet, but that seems an obvious future parallel.
So, one thing I am trying to understand is if (as you suggest above in part,
and Bryan previously suggested with "openmanufacturing-dev") that this list
might be better split somehow into different communities with different
focuses although with some overlap. But, unless we understand where
different people are coming from, it is hard to understand how to do that or
if it is needed at all.
Also, I ask indirectly for developer reasons, because I'm working on some
social semantic desktop software
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
and would like it to be useful to open manufacturing, perhaps to help
address this issue of splitting interest groups but in a better way than
proliferating mailing list which have other various negative issue. But that
software is not quite useable, and these discussions are taking away from my
time to work on it, so, in general, I appreciate your sentiment to get back
to "work". :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Vinay Gupta
metadiscussion on this list is really, really bad. The quality of
technical content has been, at times, kind of astonishing (I'm
thinking of a post Eric made a while ago summarizing resources on
fabrication which looked like six months of thinking in one email.)
Therefore, as far as possible, quit metadiscussion and focus on the
technical aspects.
There may or may not be an unlimited number of kinds of intelligence
recognized in various ways by various people.
In terms of "goals" I do not think the list should have goals. People
have goals. Lists are where people exchange information. Permit
yourselves the luxury of doing what you do well.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 5355 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Paul D. Fernhout
> Mate, when the time is right, I'll take it to fistfights if I have
> to. In fact somebody punched me the other week in an escalated
> discussion of whether fishing truly represented a tragedy of the
> commons, or a technological failure of another kind!
>
> Being rude is an *artform*. Scorn it at your peril!
In your previous post, you suggest you do not think the list should have a
goal. But, you obviously have a goal in mind about how this list should be,
if you must value that goal enough to use (in your terms) "strategic
rudeness" to further that goal. You obviously must be valuing some
information over others, since you are trying to shut down conversation
about some things and promote discussion about other things, all without
making any specific points about how what you don't value is "really,
really, bad". I don't feel that is effective feedback to me. If you have
been on an anthropology list, I could hope you must have some links or other
resources you could share? This is not to disagree with the notion that
sometimes there may be appropriate times to be rude, or even to disagree
with your assessment, just to understand where you are coming from in your
priorities and ask for examples of better techniques.
Without a clear sense of a goal or goals of a community (as well as the
values and norms), it is also hard to see where "strategic rudeness" as you
put it makes sense in defense of that goal or goals, or where it goes astray
in trying to shape this list in some direction. Again, as I pointed out at
the start, this list is, at least in part, about adopting ideas from FOSS
software to apply them to manufacturing. Shutting down (meta) discussion
about how to run a FOSS community seems to be counter-productive in that sense.
It would seem to me that if, as you suggest above, you were engaging in a
recent face-to-face "escalated conversation" about society and technology
issues to the point where the other person punched you, something unusual is
going on, but not knowing all the details, or anything about who was
involved, there is no way for me to know what really happened, including
whether it was "performance art" or something else. So, I'm not saying that
is bad or good, just unusual. By the way, "de-escalation" is a major
technique of conflict resolution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-escalation
De-escalation helps in friendships, marriages, with neighbors, and with
child-raising, too, of course. So it is a good tool to have. Obviously, you
may be implying you were intentionally escalating that conflict for some
reason? If so, no tool will help prevent the typical outcome of any arms
race, which is that everyone suffers.
Even top US military leaders advocate alternatives to escalation:
"U.S. Military Chief Urges More Diplomacy"
http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=3899845
More on conflict resolution in general:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_resolution
"There are many tools available to persons in conflict. A way would be not
to fight over it, no violence, only talking out the problem. How and when
they are used depends on several factors (such as the specific issues at
stake in the conflict and the cultural context of the disputants). The list
of tools available to practitioners include negotiation, mediation,
community building, advocacy, diplomacy, activism, nonviolence, critical
pedagogy, prayer and counseling. In real world conflict situations, which
range in scale from kindergarten bullying to genocide, practitioners will
creatively combine several of these approaches as needed. Additionally,
practitioners will often specialize in a particular scale (e.g.
interpersonal, community or international), or a particular variety of
conflict (such as environmental, religious or organizational), and
repertoires of tools they find most useful"
More on de-escalation in general:
"Ten Critical De-Escalation Skills"
http://www.articlealley.com/article_12898_24.html
A useful set of skills are described there for dealing with conflicts, which
are easy to describe, though, admittedly, like most skills, require practice
to get better at.
Here is one tip from that last page that is relevant to my own behavior
right now, and which I may be messing up on even in these related threads:
"4. Perform a quick self-assessment. A potential helper must ask the
following questions. Can I avoid criticizing and finding fault with the
angry person? Can I avoid being judgmental? Can I keep from trying to
control the other person into doing something he or she doesn't want to do?
Can I keep myself removed from the conflict? Can I believe that the people
using anger have the right to make decisions and choices about how they meet
their needs and that they have within them the ability to make those
decisions? Can I try to see the situation from the angry person's point of
view and understand what need or needs he or she is trying to satisfy? And
finally, can I remember that my job is to place the healing of relationships
as my primary concern?"
As to rudeness' value in FOSS projects, the norm in paid projects in the USA
(even ones where the end result is intended to be public domain), seems to
be for some managers to use rudeness as a tool to assert dominance. Because
the employees have little choice but to comply or be fired (and then
potentially lose their home, their health care, even their marriage and
children, so, a real risk to be assertive) there is a high degree of
tolerance of rudeness based on fear.
US industrial policy (as well as the entire US currency system and "free
market fundamentalism" where all food is under lock and key) is set up to
maintain that high state of fear in employees:
"Cheap Labor Conservatives Issues Guide"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
Most manufacturing in the USA (or now, China, where things are worse on the
shop floor)
http://thechinaprice.org/home.html
is done in a context of employer/employee relationship, one often empowering
rude people. The "better" organizations usually make an effort to do
something about this, but there is only so much one can do about the
fundamental nature of a hierarchical corporate organization with a few
owners (or closely placed top managers) with most of the concentrated
wealth. So, people in corporate chains of command get a lot of positive
feedback as they employ rudeness towards a profit motive. Rudeness becomes a
form of "rankism":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankism
"Rankism is a term coined by physicist, educationalist and citizen diplomat
Robert W. Fuller. Fuller has defined rankism as: "abusive, discriminatory,
or exploitative behavior towards people who have less power because of their
lower rank in a particular hierarchy". Fuller claims that rankism also
describes the abuse of the power inherent in superior rank, with the view
that rank-based abuse underlies many other phenomena such as bullying,
racism, sexism, and homophobia."
In that sense, "open source" done in a corporate setting for pay is a
somewhat different thing than "open source" done as a hobby. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_amateurs
Unearned rank is harder to get on an open source project, and exploiting
well-deserved rank (example, good GUI programmer) outside its province is
also harder. We're all volunteers on this list, as far as our list
participation (to my knowledge). No one needs to be here directly to survive
economically (although obviously sometimes there are indirect economic
benefits to any sort of public participation).
So, I can see the value to the advice in that book on producing FOSS
software about "nip rudeness in the bud" as at least some of us here try to
build an alternative to business-as-usual. As Bob Black suggests:
"The Abolition of Work"
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism
are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately
de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace.
You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory
as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have
shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their
operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A
worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave,
and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how
fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating,
if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the
bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no
reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a
dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as
if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it
disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily
endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in
school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their
supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who
work?"
(As a reminder, your meta-comment was entitled "adult supervision", with all
the implications in there.)
By the way, one alternative idea for workplace democracy is the "balanced
job complex", but it is rare to find such organizations (some non-profits do
this):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_job_complex
"A balanced job complex is a way of organizing a workplace or group that is
both directly democratic and also creates relative equal empowerment among
all people involved. Specifically a balanced job complex is a collection of
tasks within a given workplace that is balanced for its equity and
empowerment implications against all other job complexes in that workplace.
It was developed as an alternative to the corporate division of labor. Each
worker must undertake some unpleasant disempowering task for some time each
work day or each week. All workers also share the more pleasant and
empowering tasks in the workplace. In this way workers share the burdens and
benefits of work that impact each persons ability to participate in directly
democratic decision making within the workplace. In order for balanced job
complexes to function there can be no owners or managers involved in the
workplace, as all tasks are balanced for empowerment. Balanced job complexes
are central to the theory of participatory economics which emerged from the
work of radical theorist Michael Albert and that of radical economist Robin
Hahnel."
Still, even in a corporate setting, rudeness often does not pay off. We'll
never know how much more "insanely great" Apple computer might have been
without Steve Job's rudeness, which led in part to his firing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
"While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic director for Apple, some of his
employees from that time had described him as an erratic and temperamental
manager. An industry-wide sales slump towards the end of 1984 caused a
deterioration in Jobs's working relationship with Sculley, and at the end of
May 1985 – following an internal power struggle and an announcement of
significant layoffs – Sculley relieved Jobs of his duties as head of the
Macintosh division."
People who work on open source projects on a voluntary basis do so for
different reasons that paid employees, who may feel their only choice is
*which* "cheap labor conservative" they want to have as a boss. Volunteers
have a lot of projects they can volunteer with, or they can start their own.
Most paid employees put up with a lot as, in Bob Black's words, they accept
being a "part-time slave" and so just have to put up with rudeness and far
worse in order to survive and live the life they have been taught to expect.
Granted, it is often the same person who lives eight hours or more a day in
corporate land or ever-more-hierarchical academia or the military who is
doing open source as a hobby, but the rest of his or her time that person is
often looking for something different. Some people escape to drugs, some
people escape to World of Warcraft (where they can be empowered in other
ways, including by harming others virtually in turn), and some people try to
envision something better. Some few lucky people build better 9-5
organizations, using ideas like the above "Balanced Job Complex", but it
goes against the grain of this culture so there are other costs there.
Still, in relationships that are not hierarchical (and maybe a mailing list
qualifies), rudeness can be used to maintain social norms. I assume you are
using it that way here. (Also, rudeness can be used for someone lower in a
hierarchy to express defiance of authority, obviously.)
But, volunteers don't have to tolerate rudeness for any reason, well meant,
or not, whether the rudeness is going down a hierarchy, up a hierarchy, or
across a meshwork. Volunteers may tolerate rudeness, either to humor someone
who they see as still growing, or because they feel the project is more
important than the disagreement right then, or because they don't notice it
or have low self-esteem and accept it. But in general, many volunteers will
just walk. Thus the point (building on your comment) about a mailing list or
other open source community potentially feeling "toxic", both for the people
receiving the rudeness and for bystanders. What that really means is, people
don't have to participate (or get fired), so if they are uncomfortable, they
may withdraw and focus on other things for a time or entirely (like focus on
a new project).
Now, because your rudeness has been directed against two of the list
administrators here, it's unlikely we will "walk" in the way another list
member might, even if it causes us stress. Also, I recognize you have good
intent here to make progress towards what you must see as a good goal (even
if that goal remains not explicit, with some model of a good community doing
information sharing about some specific topics only). But every time you use
"strategic rudeness" in a volunteer community, you run the risk that people
will "walk", and I'd expect that risk is higher than in paid projects.
Although people can walk in a sense even in paid projects by moving on to
other things after a time, since there are better and worse work
environments even in the corporate world.
Anyway, I feel the issue of effective creation and sustaining of communities
of volunteers is an important thing to think about for this list, and
important information to exchange, and this was an opportune time to discuss
it. You yourself obviously many not feel that way, and in the absence of
leadership of the type you expect, you are trying to provide it (and that is
commendable of you). Or, you might assume it is obvious or that communities
naturally know how to do this. Or maybe you assume that communities are best
managed by example (and perhaps using an apprenticeship model), and that a
little strategic rudeness from others in the community when norms are
violated keeps everything going as smoothly as possible.
Maybe the last is true? And maybe you are right in that sense? Maybe
communities are a more natural function and the social norms you are
advocating are good ones. It's an interesting thing (to me) to reflect on,
and thanks for indirectly bringing it up.
By the way, here is an essay by the way on how rudeness is contextual (both
about people, and about situations) -- so what may seem "rude" may actually
not be, and vice-versa:
"When is it Rude to be Rude? Politeness Across Cultures and Subcultures"
http://thormay.net/koreadiary/politeness.html
And here is a funny/sad five minute comedy short skit about someone with a
head injury in an accident who can then only talk in "pick up lines" and the
frustrating consequences to his life and relationships:
Pick Me Up - A Zebro Short
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5a5QIcQ68U
And here is a surprising story by a master of Aikido and conflict resolution
when a drunk person was being rude on a train:
http://www.wattstapes.com/dobson.htm
Those three links help put rudeness in perspective, and give us more options
for interpreting it and dealing with it. Again, I feel you mean well here,
even in your "strategic rudeness", and thanks for your perspectives and concern.
--Paul Fernhout
Smári McCarthy
that is the level of stuff and nonsense that travels through the wires
due to this list. I still try to read it, because honestly, this is
probably the most amazing collection of straight thinkers on this kind
of subject available, but at the same time there are entire threads
that I simply mark as read without actually reading just to get beyond
the pain of applying my mental capacity to pages upon pages of
bulshytt in search of those nuggets of gold that are there. Instead,
I'm starting to trust that somebody will share these nuggets with me
in a concise form whenever they've been simplified. The good stuff
will bubble up.
I am with Vinay 100% in his analysis: there's a lot of really good
discussions here, but people need to focus more on the goals in terms
of immediately achievable tactical wins and then very little but very
focused long term strategic talk. We all know what the future looks
like, that's why we're here. Let's stop trying to paint the same
picture from different angles onto the same canvas, bickering about
perspective, and start GETTING SHIT DONE.
Further, and I direct this to people who write the most lengthy
posts (I'm looking at you Paul and Marc): Please, oh please, stop
doing that. Put what's worth sharing on wikis and post links with
brief explanations of why this is worth reading.
- Smári
On Feb 19, 2:14 am, Vinay Gupta <hexay...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think the point I made was simple and clear: cut the yabbering
> metadiscussion and get back to talking about technology. As
> metadiscussions go it's neither deep nor useful, and some of the tech
> bits have been very, very good.
>
> If you *must* have metadiscussion, consider a separate list for
> discussion of what is happening on the list where the actual thinking
> happens.
>
> I really mean this about the metadiscussion: it's *lame*
> metadiscussion. You should have seen Anthro-L back in the day.
>
> Vinay
>
> --
> Vinay Gupta
> Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
>
>
> http://hexayurt.com- free/open next generation human shelteringhttp://hexayurt.com/plan- the whole systems, big picture vision
> Twitter: @hexayurthttp://twitter.com/hexayurt
Kevin Carson
> There are three kinds of people: snacks, trolls and bastards.
>
> Snacks are people without strong personal competence or will.
>
> Trolls are people with strong personal competence, but without social
> status. Many computer programmers and engineers are trolls. They live
> in caves.
>
> Bastards are people with strong personal competence and high social
> status. Bastards who speak the truth about unpleasant things lose
> their social status and become trolls.
>
> What this means is two things: if you want to know the truth, ask a
> troll. If you want people to do something, convince a bastard it's
> the right thing to do.
>
> Within this framework one can see all politics…
Rev. Ivan Stang divides society into Moes, Larrys and Curlys. The
Moes are the ruthless, power-hungry people who run all the major
institutions for their own benefit. The Larrys are the "normals," the
vast majority, who accept the mission statements of the organizations
and the good intentions of the Moes running them at face value, and
who provide most of the labor-power and cannon-fodder. The Curlys are
the creative types who keep rebelling and getting put down. The
Curlys' rebellion is largely futile. Sometimes the Moes succeed in
wiping most of them out, but realizing their mistake afterward attempt
to replace the lost creativity and vitality by raising up a new
stratum of false Curlys from among the Larrys.
--
Kevin Carson
Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Anarchist Organization Theory Project
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
Nick Taylor
Well, yes although to be fair I was imagining a few more pictures :)
I'm not sure about using a wiki per-se... I think the hierarchy needs to be more structured... something that is specifically set up for browsing - as opposed to searching which is what wikis do best.
If (as you say) the replication of Hexayurts didn't start in earnest until you put videos of the process up... how best to organise videos?
I think that's one of the things I like about that toys from trash site ( http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/toys.html ) - the main navigation is a gallery. It's so much more inviting than a wiki-style textual hierarchy... the bulk of which is hidden in successive pages.
Ought we rename the title of this thread?
Nick Taylor
> discussions here, but people need to focus more on the goals in terms
> of immediately achievable tactical wins and then very little but very
> focused long term strategic talk.
For what it's worth, I agree completely.
Intelligent people fuck themselves up in intelligent ways... or more accurately, with intelligent instantiations/manifestations of the same irresistable stupidity that everyone else suffers from.
I think what we're seeing here is people who simply can't stand not to have the last word... and Marc at least has all the symptoms of what I would describe as a memetic addiction - and any behaviour that gets attention is reinforced.
So maybe we should just let those so-afflicted, have the last word and move on. Much as I love a good punch-up, this isn't really what we're here for.
Paul D. Fernhout
> but people need to focus more on the goals
Thanks for taking the time to write that.
Could you please take five minutes more to broadly outline what you feel
those goals are? Is it just "make all manufacturing open source"? Or is it
something else? And how you see those goals relating to your vision of this
specific discussion list (as opposed to people having project-specific lists)?
How should this list be the same or different than, say, Vinay's "Open
Sustainability Network" Ning site here:
http://www.globalswadeshi.net/
Is that site less "toxic" as Vinay describes this one? If so, why? And as to
content, is it just as problematical, given long posts like this about
economics:?
"Gandhi's Economic Thought"
http://www.globalswadeshi.net/forum/topics/gandhis-economic-thought
Or does the web forum interface make a difference in making that information
more easily useable for you in the way you like?
I'm sincerely looking for your input in terms of defining what is or is not
on-topic in this "open manufacturing" list, or what tools might help with
that, since you express unhappiness with most of it. I will keep your
comments on my posts here in mind in future posts (and I am personally am
unhappy so much of my own time has been taken up by this recent situation).
But perhaps part of the issue is that different people have different
expectations or goals? There's nothing wrong with that, I'm would like to
come up with a way how we can create a framework to help everyone reach
their goals (in a mutually beneficial way). But, without clarity as to the
goals, and what people's expectations are for this list helping achieve
those goals, that is hard to do.
How can we create something that you like better (whether changing this
list, making a new list or lists each with a different focus, or doing
something else altogether)? Is Bryan's openmanufacturing-dev list the simple
answer?
Just "get things done" seems vague, as otherwise, why have this list at all?
Or, are you saying, just post about things you've done yourself
electro-mechanically? Are people looking for an announcements list of
milestones reached on open manufacturing projects? Do people want to know of
other projects going on in the world? Are people looking for a watercooler
to talk about projects similar to theirs? Are people looking to coordinate
efforts on some thing like an improved fablab? Or to make a fully
bootstrable system that can make a "toaster"? Are people looking to recruit
for a community for some specific new open manufacturing project? Or
something else?
One thing I have learned from this list (and other lists) is that there is a
lot going out there. So, is "open manufacturing" as an idea too big for one
mailing list to hold? I list more than a dozen "open manufacturing" projects
here on the OSCOMAK site: (that site is likely going away soon in its
current Semantic MediaWiki form, so this is not to promote adding to it):
http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Main_Page
And that list does not include most of the ones represented by people here.
How does one mailing list make sense in that context?
Maybe instead there is a desire for a few specific friendly practitioners
who know each other to hang out together who see eye-to-eye? If so, then
again, maybe there is a need for new lists for subgroups on the same
wavelength (again, like Bryan's list idea or something else). Then again,
should this list become that? Although I doubt that is feasible at this
point, including that it really maybe doesn't work with it's current
configuration that anyone can sign up, and that may not be its membership
base. Is this list then best used to incidentally coordinate starting other
"by invitation only" lists or whatever other approach worked, lists with
strict charters, or whatever?
Anyway, systems often need to reconfigure when they scale (at least if they
are not designed for that). So, are we encountering a scaling problem? Let's
say Marc and I quiet down (I'm ready to myself, this has all been a
distraction from something I am in the middle of programming, but it seemed
important). But, then what about the next two guys if the list continues to
grow? Without more clarity as to the list purpose, that's likely just going
to happen again.
Anyway, what is it in the "nuggets" of gold from the list that you found
interesting? Specific technical directions? Finding out about new projects?
Finding out about new processes? Are these nuggets the same for everyone,
and if so, is a separate list for them of value?
> We all know what the future looks like, that's why we're here.
I'd like to think that was true. :-)
Could you say that vision of the future in a sentence or two as a statement
of purpose that anyone would say, "Yes, if we could achieve that then a huge
investment of my time would be worth it"? You may well already have
something written you can draw from.
Some ideas as to an example of a purpose:
http://www.chaordic.org/who_we_are.html
"To develop, disseminate and implement new concepts of organization that
result in more equitable sharing of power and wealth, improved health, and
greater compatibility with the human spirit and biosphere."
The process the Chaordic Commons describes elsewhere on that site to refine
a shared purpose is part of what I am trying to do here, with repeated posts
for people to clarify their goals and expectations. I'm not saying we will
get to one, but the process itself may be useful in resolving some of the
conflicts here.
Consider these marketing activities, if you must, in terms of how to present
this group to others, or for how you can present what you do to others. But
they are deeper than that. There is obvious tension here because we don't
all agree on priorities or goals for this list community. But there are ways
to resolve that peacefully, including making more lists, using new tools,
changing this lists charter, and so on.
Still, any process like this suffers from not accommodating lurkers if they
don't speak up too, so I invite others to do the same.
--Paul Fernhout
Andrew Shindyapin
Still, any process like this suffers from not accommodating lurkers if they
don't speak up too, so I invite others to do the same.
Ok, as a lurker, here goes...
Just "get things done" seems vague, as otherwise, why have this list at all?
Or, are you saying, just post about things you've done yourself
electro-mechanically? Are people looking for an announcements list of
milestones reached on open manufacturing projects? Do people want to know of
other projects going on in the world? Are people looking for a watercooler
to talk about projects similar to theirs? Are people looking to coordinate
efforts on some thing like an improved fablab? Or to make a fully
bootstrable system that can make a "toaster"? Are people looking to recruit
for a community for some specific new open manufacturing project? Or
something else?
Yes please... where can I download my "factory in a garage" kit (besides RepRap)?
> We all know what the future looks like, that's why we're here.
I'd like to think that was true. :-)
Could you say that vision of the future in a sentence or two as a statement
of purpose that anyone would say, "Yes, if we could achieve that then a huge
investment of my time would be worth it"? You may well already have
something written you can draw from.
My problem is I have at least a half-dozen futures I really like, but I'm not sure how to get there from here: what can I do to play around with/hack out a start on a given future with tens of dollars a month and a few hours a week?
Paul D. Fernhout
Nick-
Saying someone has a "memetic addiction" etc. can be seen as a personal
attack, and that's probably not going to get us that far as a collaborative
group.
On your theme, you might like this book:
"The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action "
http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Doing-Gap-Companies-Knowledge-Action/dp/1578511240
"The authors describe the most common obstacles to action---such as fear and
inertia---and profile successful companies that overcome them."
I'm not going to disagree with you that knowing and not doing is a common
issue. Knowledge requires Wisdom to use well, but then it also takes Virtue
to put that Knowledge and Wisdom into action, as well as Resources.
Again, as in my other replies, could you please take five minutes to outline
your thinking about "what we're here for"? People keep acting like that is
obvious, but I have listed several reasons why it is not clear to me at this
point (including the growing number of open manufacturing related projects
and how to relate this list to them), and some clarity as to goals and
purpose could help with resolving or preventing these issues in the future
(as well as in explaining this list to others). How would you explain your
ideal "open manufacturing" list to others you wanted to joint it?
--Paul Fernhout
Bryan Bishop
>> Still, any process like this suffers from not accommodating lurkers if
>> they
>> don't speak up too, so I invite others to do the same.
>
> Ok, as a lurker, here goes...
>>
>> Just "get things done" seems vague, as otherwise, why have this list at
>> all?
>> Or, are you saying, just post about things you've done yourself
>> electro-mechanically? Are people looking for an announcements list of
>> milestones reached on open manufacturing projects? Do people want to know
>> of
>> other projects going on in the world? Are people looking for a watercooler
>> to talk about projects similar to theirs? Are people looking to coordinate
>> efforts on some thing like an improved fablab? Or to make a fully
>> bootstrable system that can make a "toaster"? Are people looking to
>> recruit
>> for a community for some specific new open manufacturing project? Or
>> something else?
>
> Yes please... where can I download my "factory in a garage" kit (besides
> RepRap)?
We're working on that. :-) There's been a lot of posts about how you
can help us work on that. Anyway, there's a few projects happening
down here in Austin, and after the phone call with Nathan tonight, I'm
considering holding a phone conference or something, or some more
formal announcement to the mailing list about what's going on.
I'll get you a link to that factory in a garage soon. It's on the todo list.
Vinay Gupta
Individual goals. There is no group here with sufficient cohesion to
have "goals" for the group. Group goals become meaningful when I'm
willing to alter course to meet your preferences, and that foundation
is not here.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
Vinay Gupta
Personal attack is perfectly appropriate when people are
destructively out of line, as should be perfectly obvious. I am
*profoundly* anti-process. The absence of destructive process-
oriented stupidity will accomplish all that needs to happen.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 5355 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Vinay Gupta
I think you might be an idiot. If I wanted to de-escalate I would do
so, and I am not interested in doing so. That ought to be perfectly
clear from my behavior.
My goal is to return this list to usefulness. There is no community:
I've met maybe one person on this list, and owe nothing to anybody on
it. No community == no community goal. I explained this.
Basically, get over yourself.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 5355 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Nick Taylor
>>
>> Intelligent people fuck themselves up in intelligent ways... or more
>> accurately, with intelligent instantiations/manifestations of the same
>> irresistable stupidity that everyone else suffers from.
>>
>> I think what we're seeing here is people who simply can't stand not to have
>> the last word... and Marc at least has all the symptoms of what I would
>> describe as a memetic addiction - and any behaviour that gets attention is
>> reinforced.
>>
>> So maybe we should just let those so-afflicted, have the last word and move
>> on. Much as I love a good punch-up, this isn't really what we're here for.
>
> Nick-
>
> Saying someone has a "memetic addiction" etc. can be seen as a personal
> attack, and that's probably not going to get us that far as a collaborative
> group.
> Again, as in my other replies, could you please take five minutes to outline
> your thinking about "what we're here for"?
Smári McCarthy
forums like these appropriate.
Technologies vary, I for one can't stand Ning or other off-email based
systems, but that's just me; that said I very much like Global
Swadeshi and consider myself to be a part of that group.
Each of us has goals. Most of us aren't honest about theirs for
whatever reasons. They may think they're on to something big that
nobody else will understand. They may think that the only way to
explain these great ideas is to rant profusely. I am generally one of
these people.
On the 4th of July last year I figured out what my plan was. A wise
man once said that you need to know exactly two things in order to
change the world: You need to know exactly what you want, and you need
to know exactly how to get it. I got into this game around late 2006
and since then the world has changed a fuckload. Only now do I feel
like I'm getting to be sufficiently on top of things that I can start
making proper claims. I know exactly what I want:
1. A decentralized peer-to-peer mutualist monetary system
2. A CyberSyn inspired peer-to-peer industrio-economic information
system
3. A direct small scale minimalistic democratic legislative process
4. A social network based judicial system
5. An end to the nation state and a free market on executive
authority
6. Radical decentralization of education, healthcare, and other
social services
7. Above all, the abolishment of the assumption of scarcity, which
no longer applies
To this end I have developed the technology behind nine individual
services which I am pushing both individually and as a whole on
several fronts. I have been enacting my will on the Icelandic
Revolution (sic) on the one hand and the failing powers of the current
Icelandic government on the other. I have been making contacts with
people the world over, attempting to show them how easy it is to
accomplish these seven ideas. I have been writing profusely,
secretively, and making lots and lots and lots of diagrams. Some will
be published soon. Don't hold your breath though.
I have the intention of chartering a company based on these
principles, as a method of using the broken systems as a tool to build
new ones. I shall do this once I find a country that is corrupt enough
to base it in. The corruption is important, as it will provide the
operation with a smokescreen against the lashback effect that will
inevitably come when the Powers That Be get a clue and Figure It All
Out. After my recent trip to Afghanistan, I am seriously considering
that country as my base of operations.
How does open manufacturing come into this? It is the core of item two
on the list: Without full disclosure of methods and processes and
radical decentralization of industrial manufacturing technology, no
industrio-economic information system will be able to sustain the
emergent properties required to ensure several necessary equilibriums.
That is to say: If there are two few entities producing statistics,
then the sample size is not large enough to produce valid estimates of
anything.
Put differently: Complete and utter unconditional freedom is
essential. Freedom to exist - the "human" right which even atoms have,
through freedom of movement, association, and so on through to
abstract freedoms such as freedom to think and freedom of speech and
freedom to act upon one's thoughts, all of these must be in harmony,
which means the systematic abolishment of all current methods of
control within our cybernetic. I will NEVER try to shove freedom down
people's throats, but I may have to let some morals slide in this
venture.
Each of us has goals. Those are mine. What have you been up to
recently?
- Smári
On Feb 19, 11:12 pm, "Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfernh...@kurtz-
Ted Hall, ShopBot
more moderate) ... but I'm happy for feedback, or to be told you don't
want to hear about this sort of thing.
factory-in-a-garage ~= a ShopBot
- Yes, crass and commercial statement, but our tools come as cheap as
the components can be bought. If one is interested in production or
mfg and not in making (re-inventing) tools, this is how to get quickly
into action.
- See ShopBot forum if you want a living example of a network of
fabricators working together sharing ideas and a mission (and there is
plenty of dirt on ShopBot there if you need it). This network also
regularly interacts in user meetings across the country. Democratic?
There are thousands of active participants. See what you think ...
- ShopBots come with design and cam software developed by a bunch of
guys interested in this topic, and committed to delivering something
that everyone can use and afford. They work with us on our open syntax
for CAM, and have an increasingly open system for creating user-
oriented post processors.
- ShopBot tries hard for customizability, configurability, and openess
in hardware and software while still getting stuff out the door that
performs at a high standard.
- The "CNC router" format for digital fabrication covers the broadest
material scales and types of any digital fab tool (from the desk to
the building).
- For anyone who has the technical savvy to participate in a web group
like this, running a ShopBot can be mastered in a matter of minutes
and designing for it in a few minutes more. There are only two reasons
that digital fab with CNC is not simply "printing" it out: 1) CNC
"printing" utilizes a cutter that has characteristics and shape that
must be accounted for in terms of machining the material; 2) CNC
"printing" requires firmly holding in place the material that is being
machined. Yes, you've got to figure out how to deal with these to
manufacture ... but, it is not that tough.
Perhaps an infomercial ... but I frequently find myself frustrated
with the lack of appreciation with what can be accomplished with the
tools at hand -- Of course, we produce one of them, but there are
others as well. One of Gershenfeld's motives in promoting Fab Labs has
simply been to illustrate how much can be accomplished in digital fab
with what's available. As I indicated elsewhere here, I think there is
far to much concern over "interoperability" -- it is not, in fact, a
significant barrier to putting todays tools for digital fab to much
broader manufacturing use.
Ted Hall, ShopBot
Bryan Bishop
> Perhaps an infomercial ... but I frequently find myself frustrated
> with the lack of appreciation with what can be accomplished with the
> tools at hand -- Of course, we produce one of them, but there are
> others as well. One of Gershenfeld's motives in promoting Fab Labs has
> simply been to illustrate how much can be accomplished in digital fab
> with what's available. As I indicated elsewhere here, I think there is
> far to much concern over "interoperability" -- it is not, in fact, a
> significant barrier to putting todays tools for digital fab to much
> broader manufacturing use.
Ted, when I mentioned interoperability earlier, I was actually talking
about parts specifications, in the sense of lego-like specifications,
not entirely in terms of interoperability as being a barrier to entry
of tools (which it sometimes can be, but I agree with you not in the
domain that you're talking about). Just us getting confused with each
other I guess.
Anyway, while ShopBot might be a factory in a garage, have you read
some of the earlier posts I linked to re: David Gingery? So, if the
idea is to get a self-replicating factory, it's probably not going to
be a single be-all-end-all device- like the RepRap, or Drexler's
molecular nanotechnology, but rather an ecology of tools that help to
build each other through some dependency between them.
(Coincidentially, this is another reason why it would be interesting
to do interoperability between parts (in a specification sense)- to
allow automatic computer design or analysis of designs to see whether
or not different parts/processes can be replaced to make it more
functional/capable).
Some old, but good posts to this mailing list-
http://heybryan.org/om.html
Herbert Snorrason
Hash: SHA1
Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
> Again, I feel you mean well here, even in your "strategic rudeness",
> and thanks for your perspectives and concern.
Here we come to the fundamental fallacy of non-violence, understood as
turning the other cheek: It doesn't work when the opponent simply
doesn't _care_ about moral posturing. That seems to be the case with
Vinay, here.
But there's another point I want to make: I'm a humanities major;
history, in particular. That's a subject not exactly known for clarity
or brevity. But even so, you manage to surpass everything I've read
during my studies. That includes the writings of people like Karl Marx.
In the original.
Say what you will, but that doesn't seem very practical-minded to me.
With greetings,
Herbert Snorrason
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Vinay Gupta
values are arbitrary choices and not everybody makes them. There's
been some confusion on this list about what values are absolute and
which ones are not...
It's all relative.
;-)
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 5355 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Samantha Atkins
- s
http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/science/how-it-works-1293
How it works.
There are three kinds of people: snacks, trolls and bastards.
Snacks are people without strong personal competence or will.
Trolls are people with strong personal competence, but without social
status. Many computer programmers and engineers are trolls. They live
in caves.
Bastards are people with strong personal competence and high social
status. Bastards who speak the truth about unpleasant things lose
their social status and become trolls.
What this means is two things: if you want to know the truth, ask a
troll. If you want people to do something, convince a bastard it's
the right thing to do.
Within this framework one can see all politics…
=============
The point I'm making is that you're falling into really dumb social
antipatterns where substantive discussion is replaced with talking
about how people are talking. Quit it and get back to work.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 5355 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
>> then move on
Vinay Gupta
Nick Taylor
>
> http://www.demos.co.uk/people/charlieedwards
>
> Good lunch meeting talking about local resilience through the economic
> decline etc. I do try and keep the yelling short and to the point, but
> I'm far from inactive in the real world.
>
> Vinay
Yea - although we hardly ever see each other any more, I still have a
bit of a soft-spot for the real world.
If anyone's still listening, something possibly to bear in mind about
Vinay is that (as far as I can gather) he's at least partly from a
country who's national musical instrument is also a (terrifying) weapon
of war - and was actually banned by the English at one point. It can
take a long time to get over these things, and under such circs, one
can't always be expected to be 100% polite.
Fantastically off-topic, I know... the only thing I can think of to
possibly drag it round, is that said musical instrument actually employs
a type of pneumatic capacitor, which I find quite interesting for some
reason... possibly because my brother has set up a pneumatic system so
he can open his front gate without having to get out of his car... and
the plumbing is in fact, just like lego... but the compressors (and
capacitors) are quite big an expensive, apparently.
I'm quite interested in making really fast, small robotic muscles (and
pneumatics are an option). I'm playing with things that are a bit like a
cross between an coil-actuator and a rail-gun at the moment.
But I digress.
Nick
Paul D. Fernhout
>> Again, as in my other replies, could you please take five minutes to
> outline
>> your thinking about "what we're here for"?
>
> We're here to talk about open-sourced manufacturing.
OK, that's a start. Then, how is this list supposed to be different than,
say, rec.crafts.metalworking:
"rec.crafts.metalworking"
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.crafts.metalworking/topics
with over 100000 messages in it, and which has a lot more about machine shop
techniques that people have openly shared than I could possibly catch up
with myself in many years?
By the way, even there, some posts are veering off these days into talking
about money: :-)
"Money.... (Pink Floyd was right)"
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.crafts.metalworking/browse_thread/thread/98753ea12655ba06#
"Everybody sort of knew this, I did as well, and said it here, but most
people were too afraid to mention it. Now the concept of a bank like
Citibank, with 2 trillion sized balance sheet, becoming insolvent and
facing a liquidity crisis, is not a pretty one, It evokes memories of
"Iceland". "
Or, how is this group different than, say, comp.robotics.misc with over
36000 posts with lots of freely shared useful electro-mechanical ideas?
"comp.robotics.misc"
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.robotics.misc/topics
So, what's the difference?
For me, one difference is talking about the conceptual frameworks around
open manufacturing, the best practices related to open projects, and the
tools to support them.
For example, on best practices (from software), I liked this video:
"InfoQ: Software Craftsmanship and Ethics"
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/craftmanship-ethics
"In this talk Robert C. Martin outlines the practices used by software
craftsmen to maintain their professional ethics. He resolves the dilemma of
speed vs. quality, and mess vs schedule. He provides a set of principles and
simple Dos and Don'ts for teams who want to be counted as professional
craftsmen."
That video is from a commercial perspective, but it's interesting to think
how those can be adapted to open source things.
On tools, there is the problem of 100000 posts on rec.crafts.metalworking
having a lot of information, but it is not accessible in a structured way.
Or, as Eric wrote, "ToolBook and The Missing Link":
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/4205d64009a98fce?hl=en
"Are you, as I am, starting to see a pattern here? It seems like
there's a Missing Link in the form of a kind of communications or
media gap."
Which is what I'm working towards (with the Pointrel Social Semantic
Desktop), as are many others.
Anyway, I'm just trying to explore what people's expectations are. Are
people seeing this list as a rec.crafts.metalworking list but only with open
source projects?
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
> Each of us has goals. Most of them don't line up. Some do, which makes
> forums like these appropriate.
>
> Technologies vary, I for one can't stand Ning or other off-email based
> systems, but that's just me; that said I very much like Global
> Swadeshi and consider myself to be a part of that group.
>
> Each of us has goals. Most of us aren't honest about theirs for
> whatever reasons. They may think they're on to something big that
> nobody else will understand. They may think that the only way to
> explain these great ideas is to rant profusely. I am generally one of
> these people.
:-)
Well, plans go through iterations. I'm sure people will be interested to see
them when they are ready. Marc seems to have unsubscribed from the list as
far as I can tell, but it is interesting the first thing you list is a
monetary system. :-) Which of these is most important or interesting to you?
Anyway, the deeper question as regards this list is, how do you see this
open manufacturing list fitting in to achieving your goals? Or how could it
be different to help with whatever you want to do (even if you revise or
focus your plans)?
> I have the intention of chartering a company based on these
> principles, as a method of using the broken systems as a tool to build
> new ones. I shall do this once I find a country that is corrupt enough
> to base it in. The corruption is important, as it will provide the
> operation with a smokescreen against the lashback effect that will
> inevitably come when the Powers That Be get a clue and Figure It All
> Out. After my recent trip to Afghanistan, I am seriously considering
> that country as my base of operations.
I suggest you watch the movie "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" before you do that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitty_Chitty_Bang_Bang_(film)
"At Baron Bomburst's palace, the vile Baron demands that Grandpa Potts make
the "Baronial" car float. Grandpa Potts is worried at first, but the
castle's resident inventors soon cheer him up, assuring him that he can
accomplish the task ("The Roses of Success") - he fails, and the car falls
apart on the last note of the song."
Why do I cite that example? Here is the analogous real-world failure
scenario to that movie plot which I envision for someone working outside the
framework of Western law and culture you are familiar with and possibly take
for granted. In a somewhat lawless place like Afghanistan, you could get
snatched against your will by other people country who learn of your
technical skill and want you to make rockets and bombs. They might cut off
your finger and mail it to your relatives and say you were killed stepping
on a landmine and that is all that was left (so no help for you from
outside). They might tell you unless you cooperate they will cut more and
more off until you do cooperate or you die. Now, maybe they might also offer
a carrot to go with the stick -- drugs (after addicting you), food, clothes,
water, and so on. Be careful out there. There are a lot of things wrong with
Western culture, and other failure modes for ventures, but that particular
one is less likely here (sadly, it does appear to be happening though, with
"extraordinary renditions" and so on). It's all nice to think about if you
were buddy-buddy with dictators or warlords who can make things happen, but
it isn't always clear what their real objectives are (some is just
emotional), and when such people show their nasty side, it can be more nasty
than you might imagine (Saddam Hussein's reign provides some examples). A
warlord who have seen many best friends and family killed may not hesitate
to cause more than a little damage to an outsider tangentially related to
the cause of those deaths. Also, unlike Iceland where you speak the
language, have friends and family, and know the climate and terrain, in the
mountains of Afghanistan, even if you escape, to get out of the country on
your own you will stand out and face rough terrain and people potentially
hostile to Westerners who speak a different language. And then there are
just the run-of-the-mill money driven kidnappers:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=afghanistan+kidnapping
And of course, there are the killer military robots the US has in that area,
too:
"President Obama 'orders Pakistan drone attacks'"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5575883.ece
"Missiles fired from suspected US drones killed at least 15 people inside
Pakistan today, the first such strikes since Barack Obama became president
and a clear sign that the controversial military policy begun by George W
Bush has not changed. Security officials said the strikes, which saw up to
five missiles slam into houses in separate villages, killed seven
"foreigners" - a term that usually means al-Qaeda - but locals also said
that three children lost their lives. Dozens of similar strikes since August
on northwest Pakistan, a hotbed of Taleban and al-Qaeda militancy, have
sparked angry government criticism of the US, which is targeting the area
with missiles launched from unmanned CIA aircraft controlled from operation
rooms inside the US. "
So, I'd suggest, don't give up on Iceland. :-) And with sovereignty, a small
population, and an educated population whose language you speak, the
potential for change there, even if small, is much larger than almost any
other place in the world. You've got geothermal, you've got rock, you've
even got a decent climate, what more could one ask for? :-)
I doubt you'd find someone talking like Vilborg Oddsdottir in Afghanistan:
http://features.csmonitor.com/economyrebuild/2009/01/22/will-social-safety-net-survive-iceland%E2%80%99s-crisis/
"Homelessness is as rare as ever here, slums nonexistent, and crime remains
low. People are losing their jobs, their homes, and their savings, but
Iceland’s well-developed social safety net is catching them long before they
hit the ground. This won’t change anytime soon, says Vilborg Oddsdottir, of
Icelandic Church Aid, a leading charity. “We will have no soup kitchens in
Iceland. … As you say: over my dead body.” Ms. Oddsdottir doesn’t mean that
people shouldn’t be helped, but that under no circumstances should anyone be
allowed to fall so low that they would have to stand in line for food. “We
are a very small nation, but we have built up a very good society … and we
can get through this without people queuing up with their children for
soup,” she says."
That is something, and someone, and someplace to be very proud of. :-)
Anyway, there is a lot one can accomplish within the Western/Northern
framework (even within capitalism as it continues to fall apart from
internal contradictions). The West/North continues to change. It is possible
this economic crisis will lead to some new perspectives. And in any case, we
may gradually move in similar directions as a society over time. Just a few
steps that you make in Iceland could be a big difference added to other
small steps integrated across the globe.
Also, as to "The Powers That Be", I feel it is a safe assumption anyone
working in this area is already closely monitored, with their social
networks mapped, potential interventions planned, their computer compromised
at the firmware level, etc. (Do you really know what is in those ICs on the
motherboard?) What holds the Powers back from doing more may just be the
uncertainty about whether "The Powers That Be" need an alternative (or
alternatively, whether to take this field seriously). Whether or not that
paranoia is all true is besides the point, but I feel it is the safest
assumption to start from. Remember, the Powers took out Cybersyn the first
time, even though it took overthrowing a democratically elected government:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile
Here is my perspective, as an alternative: :-)
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/5bd385feed4127d7
"""
Our biggest advantage is that no one takes us seriously. :-)
And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored,
which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends. :-)
And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a
profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves. :-)
"""
Obviously, hypothetically, that last assumption could be violated, say if
someone with an alternative community and a related consulting practice were
to tear things down here instead of build them up elsewhere, in order to
possibly gain some perceived short-term economic advantage in the current
scarcity-based economy. :-( But I'd hope such zero-sum thinking (even
unconsciously) would be absent in the people who signed up for this sort of
list. But, we were pretty much all raised in a society built around scarcity
assumptions, so it would certainly be understandable. It's hard to move
beyond those competitive and scarcity-oriented beliefs towards cooperation.
"No Contest: The Case Against Competition"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm
It took me a long time and a lot of soul-searching to open source various
software I had worked on for so long. It's taken me even longer to try to
learn compassion and patience and kindness, and I am still working on it.
From the movie Harvey with Jimmy Stewart:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042546/quotes
"Elwood P. Dowd: Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this
world, Elwood, you must be" - she always called me Elwood - "In this world,
Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was
smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me."
Here is part of a "business plan" I wrote twenty years ago or so for an open
source world-changing self-replicating business, which I posted here:
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/081919dbba30d1f7
I was writing up an employee agreement, and as it was in writing and then
reading "two weeks notice" that eventually made me realize it would never
work as a business, as there was a big difference between a citizen and an
employee.
And all "intentional communities" have related issues with equity.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22intentional+communities%22+equity
http://everything2.com/e2node/Legal%2520Structures%2520for%2520Intentional%2520Communities%2520in%2520the%2520United%2520States
Anyway, that's my own little ambitious scheme from way back when. :-)
It actually might be a lot more feasible today, except for the whole citizen
versus employee issue, or that fact that ideas like I outlined are now
taking place across a vast distributed network, so the ideas and hardware
are replicating, but in a different way then the very specific cellular
model I envisioned there. In general, since then I've learned a lot more
about the interplay of networks and semi-independent nodes.
> How does open manufacturing come into this? It is the core of item two
> on the list: Without full disclosure of methods and processes and
> radical decentralization of industrial manufacturing technology, no
> industrio-economic information system will be able to sustain the
> emergent properties required to ensure several necessary equilibriums.
> That is to say: If there are two few entities producing statistics,
> then the sample size is not large enough to produce valid estimates of
> anything.
Yes, but maybe that idea of open manufacturing by itself is sufficient to,
over time, and quiet gradually, transform the world towards most of those
other ideals you outlined? I doubt nation-states will ever go away anytime
soon, but they might become more ceremonial in some ways, like the role
played by the Queen of the Netherlands while most decisions are made in
other ways.
I'd also suggest that the more unrest there is, the stronger nation-states
might become. Look how strong Castro's hold over Cuba became because of the
US threats and embargo -- his regime likely would have collapsed decades ago
without an external threat to rally people around. Look how far the US has
milked "terrorism" for to turn the country more and more towards being a
police state. So, you need to be careful to support the trends you want
(playfulness, openness), while not give power to the negative ones (fear,
secrecy).
For a historic comparison, according to Prof. Stephen Cohen, who studied the
Soviet Union, there was a wide variety of opinions about the USA held by
different people in the Soviet leadership, but rather than support the
dovish people by the US actions, the US repeatedly did various acts
perceived as threatening, and every time there would be a cycle of the doves
losing power and the hawks proven right, until eventually, through its
aggressive military posturing actions, the US had over time created a very
hawkish Kremlin. While "war is a racket",
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
if the US had been serious about stopping the arms race, it would have had
more success by actions which supported the Soviet doves in their
assessments and predictions, rather than a situation where the hawks could
keep saying, "see, I told you so" and rise in power.
I see a parallels here with how one ideally presents open manufacturing. You
want to develop it in a way that at every step it seems like a good idea,
and supports people friendly to it, rather than empowering adversaries with
knee-jerk reactions. (One reason I got so upset about that DIY-bio picture a
while back.)
So, you might want to think about what sort of effects specific plans have
on the politics of the rest of the world, whether you contribute to openness
and playfulness in Western/Northern society, or whether they will create
more fear and closeness. There are tens of thousands of nuclear warheads
still lying around, just begging to be used, and then there are a whole host
of lesser measures that could be used against some venture in Afghanistan
perceived as a threat to the current order of things. I just don't feel an
extreme push is either needed or prudent. There are millions of people
working towards an open source future (if you include software developers),
and over time, that will slowly transform our economy. Even the economic
viability of one specific company is questionable under that situation and
the continual nature of such changes.
> Put differently: Complete and utter unconditional freedom is
> essential. Freedom to exist - the "human" right which even atoms have,
> through freedom of movement, association, and so on through to
> abstract freedoms such as freedom to think and freedom of speech and
> freedom to act upon one's thoughts, all of these must be in harmony,
> which means the systematic abolishment of all current methods of
> control within our cybernetic. I will NEVER try to shove freedom down
> people's throats, but I may have to let some morals slide in this
> venture.
Whether we want to build such societies that focus on any one extreme value
is a complex issue. See:
"Marxism of the Right" by Robert Locke
http://web.archive.org/web/20080117125733/http://www.amconmag.com/2005_03_14/article1.html
"The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom,
though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple
physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but
one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it
makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be
rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s wife. A family is in fact one of
the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it
derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once
they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease
or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of
happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern
governments. "
> Each of us has goals. Those are mine. What have you been up to
> recently?
Oh, a social semantic desktop to organize information (including about
manufacturing and discussions. :-)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
Which this thread has been distracting from.
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
> Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
>> Again, I feel you mean well here, even in your "strategic rudeness",
>> and thanks for your perspectives and concern.
>
> Here we come to the fundamental fallacy of non-violence, understood as
> turning the other cheek: It doesn't work when the opponent simply
> doesn't _care_ about moral posturing.
I appreciate your other comment on my writing and I will bear it in mind.
On non-violence, a favorite humorous story, from:
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/89q3/quaker.603.html
"""
Taken from Quakers Are Funny! by Chuck Fager, Kimo Press, 1987:
One World War II Quaker conscientious objector had been a professional
wrestler. Once when he and some other inmates of the Coshocton CPS camp in
Ohio made a trip into town, they were hassled about their pacifism by some
local youths, who insisted that only force could change the German's views.
In response, the ex-wrestler took off his coat, challenged one of the local
boys to a match, and promptly threw the townie across the room. He then
asked the youth, "Now do you believe that force won't change people's views?"
"Heck no!" the local boy hollered back.
"That's exactly my point," said the Quaker, who put on his coat and left.
"""
Or, for a longer analysis of the kind you find wordy: :-)
"Creating True Peace : Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your
Community, and the World" by Thich Nhat Hanh
http://www.amazon.com/Creating-True-Peace-Violence-Community/dp/0743245199
"""
Sometime, people who cannot find any way to resolve a problem with
someone else are tempted to eliminate the problem by eliminating the other
person. They wish the other person would just go away, die, or disappear.
That desire may be strong enough to lead them to kill. Killing another
person is not an act of freedom but an act of despair and great ignorance;
it will not bring freedom or peace. (page 92)
Our enemy is never another person; our enemy is the wrong perceptions
and suffering within him, within her [or sometime even within ourselves
about them]. When a doctor sees a person who is suffering, he [or she] tries
to identify the sickness within the patient to remove it. He [or she] does
not try to kill his patient. The role of the doctor is not to kill people
but to cure the illness within them. It is the same with a person who had
suffered so much and who has been making you suffer -- the solution is not
to kill him [or her] but to try to relieve him [or her] of his [or her]
suffering. This is the guidance of our spiritual teachers. It is the
practice of understanding and love. In order to truly love, we must first
understand. (pages 89-90)
All of us can practice nonviolence. We begin by recognizing that, in
the depths of our consciousness, we have both the seeds of compassion and
the seeds of violence. We become aware that our mind is like a garden that
contains all kinds of seeds: seeds of understanding, seeds of forgiveness,
seeds of mindfulness, and also seeds of ignorance, fear, and hatred. We
realize that, at any given moment, we can behave with either violence or
compassion, depending on the strength of those seeds within us. When the
seeds of anger, violence, and fear are watered in us several times a day,
they will grow stronger. Then we are unable to be happy, unable to accept
ourselves; we suffer and we make those around us suffer. Yet when we know
how to cultivate the seeds of love, compassion, and understanding in us
everyday, those seeds will become stronger, and the seeds of violence and
hatred will become weaker and weaker. We know that if we water the seeds of
anger, violence, and fear within us, we will lose our peace and our
stability. We will suffer and we will make those around us suffer. But if we
cultivate the seeds of compassion, we nourish peace within us and around us.
With this understanding, we are already on the path of creating peace.
(Pages 1-2)
"""
Everyone makes that sort of choice everyday. And non-violence does not mean
"non-engagement".
To put that choice of values in a somewhat open manufacturing context:
From:
"The Evolution of the College Dorm - Photo Essays - TIME"
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1838306_1759899,00.html
"""
Bucking the Trend
Not everyone agrees with the luxury-dorm fad. At Berea College in Kentucky,
school administrators have adopted a unique approach to the problem of
strangled budgets and coddled kids: Dorms are furnished by the college
crafts workshops, cafeteria food is provided by the school's farm, and
students are required to work 10 hours a week in various campus jobs. "It's
about identity and the culture you want to develop," says Gus Gerassimides,
the college's assistant vice president for student life. "Ultimately every
community has choices to make. It's who you choose to be."
"""
And even for violence, there are a range of possibilities. For example, had
the Allies focused their bombs on German power production facilities instead
of population centers, the war in Europe would have been over in months
instead of years. According to a debriefed German general, what the German
high command really lived in fear of was that the Allies would stop bombing
civilians and instead target their critical infrastructure like electric
power plants and synfuel plants. So, all that suffering for years stemmed in
part from a failure to look for alternatives and a poor understanding of
manufacturing and infrastructure.
Well, that, and a global Ponzi scheme:
"How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html
"Financing such home front "happiness" was not simple and Hitler essentially
achieved it by robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave
laborers. Conquered lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder,
and the Nazis exploited it fully, he says. Once the robberies had begun, a
sort of "snowball effect" ensued and in order to stay afloat, he says
Germany had to conquer and pilfer from more territory and victims. "That's
why Hitler couldn't stop and glory comfortably in his role as victor after
France's 1940 surrender." Peace would have meant the end of his predatory
practices and would have spelled "certain bankruptcy for the Reich." "
While not exactly the same, the economic underpinnings of modern economics
are predicated on certain amounts of continual growth in various ways (money
supply, exports, total demand). When that economic growth stops, or even
just pauses, we see economic disasters which make no physical sense, since
all the production equipment is still there, all the knowledgeable people
are still there, all the materials are still there, the roads, the power
generators, and so on, but everyone suffers as things grind to a halt as the
economic control system fails and everyone is sent home (if they still have
one). Which is why open manufacturing as an alternative might be so
important, so individuals can carry on even as the monetary control system
has seized up.
Hopefully, if I invoke Godwin's law on myself with this post, this thread
can come to a peaceful end. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Vinay Gupta
Violence is an effective solution for some classes of problem. So is
rudeness.
Don't limit yourself.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
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"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Ted Hall, ShopBot
to get me to some of the good themes here.
> Ted, when I mentioned interoperability earlier, I was actually talking
> about parts specifications, in the sense of lego-like specifications,
> not entirely in terms of interoperability as being a barrier to entry
> of tools (which it sometimes can be, but I agree with you not in the
> domain that you're talking about). Just us getting confused with each
> other I guess.
in the CNC world it has become a bit of a hot button for me with
respect to an obsession with the code that runs tools. Few seem to
realize that what we really need instead is a deeper level of coding
in the 3D models at the core of our work that will better anticipate
alternative fabrication needs so that CAM becomes a legacy. And there
is a lot of progress in this domain ...
Yet, when you speak of "interoperability" in terms of "parts
specifications", I'm probably still not clear. Are we in the domain of
talking about making of the tools, as suggested further down in your
post, or are we speaking about it in terms of parts in manufactured
products (I realize that these could also be tools, but for the moment
will make a distinction)?
If we are on tools, one of my earlier goals was to make a distinction
between a time a little further down the road when a solid batch of
modular components for digital fab tools will likely come available vs
today when the range of manufacturing priorities makes it difficult to
produce tools whose components are not specialized and vertically
integrated into specific machines in order to optimize their
performance and cost. Motors and their drives are a good example.
Today they need to be optimized to the sizes and uses of the tools to
be practical. However, it is not difficult to imagine, for example, a
type of linear motor/activator that could be more generic and
scalable. [Gershenfeld has a prototype for something like this can
that can be produced in a current Fab Lab, though it does not work
well enough to do anything useful yet. Knowing Neil, it's probably
open source somewhere on a Fab Lab website as well.] Our goal at
ShopBot has been to be modular and interchangeable across as wide a
scale as possible. You can cut a circuit board with a small ShopBot,
or fab a house with a bigger one, and in each case you are using
exactly the same motors, drives, and linear motion and structural
components -- and for that matter, all the same software components
except those at the first design stage.
But I'm thinking you are talking about "part interoperability" at the
level of manufacturing and the making of goods. For me, this is more
interesting because this is where the magic of digital fab lies. Yes,
digital fab, at least theoretically, can result in 3D printing of
finished objects ... someday. But at the moment and more
pragmatically, digital fab allows the production of parts and
components that are qualitatively different than earlier periods. It
is an analog-digital distinction in the sense that digital fab allows
a new level of complexity and reproductive accuracy. This complexity
and accuracy comes at very little cost and it is instantly in the
hands of anyone with a digital fab tool. This is in contrast to
earlier methodologies which might allow the accurate production of a
complex part, but would require high level of skills, experience, and
effort to attain it. It is just as easy for a CNC tool to cut a
precisely curving line as to make a straight cut. It is just as easy
for a CNC tool to machine an intricate connection as to make a butt
joint. And I'm thinking that of particular concern for this group, the
digital fab tools allow for easy sharing of the part specs over wide
networks while still getting 100% fidelity in the produced components.
All this is by way of saying that digital fab allows reproduction of
interoperable parts. Beyond or along with (depending on your
perspective) it allows reproduction of parts of high complexity,
including complexity that contains the specifications for assembly.
While today's digital fab tools may not yet practically produce
finished and assembled cell phones, they do make practical the wide-
spread production/reproduction of parts that contain their own
assembly information and enforce correct assembly in the (loosely
digital, here) lego fashion. It's this ability to easily spread
reproductive fidelity over a broad network that makes what I think of
as distributed production or open manufacturing possible and
interesting.
> Anyway, while ShopBot might be a factory in a garage, have you read
> some of the earlier posts I linked to re: David Gingery? So, if the
> idea is to get a self-replicating factory, it's probably not going to
> be a single be-all-end-all device- like the RepRap, or Drexler's
> molecular nanotechnology, but rather an ecology of tools that help to
> build each other through some dependency between them.
not sure how it applies to the present issues. A traditional machine
shop, or woodshop, or plastics shop with multiple tools that are each
employed for an individual process in the production of a part is not,
to my mind, where we are headed with digital fabrication. Not that we
won't all need to have a few hand tools for a long time, but the idea
is to get as many of the process aspects of production as possible
incorporated into a single fabrication system. Take ShopBots and
woodshops. Yes, a ShopBot can do most of the tasks of traditional
woodworking and might be conceived as a multi-tool that replaces a
table saw, a band saw, a drill press, a lathe, a planner, a router, a
shaper, a panel saw and so on. However, it would be missing to point
to then use the ShopBot to drill holes or make the cuts for your next
project. The idea is to use it to make the part or project itself.
Digital fab allows a shift in the level at which fabrication processes
are integrated. Rather than the integration occurring in the
craftsperson's head during the process of production, it occurs at
design time. It can also be shared and communicated.
There was a good example of all this at the Austin Maker Faire where a
new, back-yard-shed type of structure, designed by a group of MIT
architects, was assembled on site. This structure was not built using
tradition stick-building methods of carpentry, but was assembled from
CNC-cut plywood parts that went together in an interlocking, lego-
like, or jigsaw-puzzle like fashion. The fits between the pieces were
so tight, that no attachment hardware (nails or screws or glue) was
required. The parts' fit and assembly was specified by their shape and
could only go together in one correct way. Assembly could be done by
someone with no skill. The only assembly tool required, other than the
single digital fab tool that cut the parts, was a rubber mallet.
http://www.shopbottools.com/spotlight.htm#MIT%20Architects
Here's the full size house version ...
http://www.shopbottools.com/teds_report.htm#HouseOpen
Perhaps I am a bit too hung up here with producing and manufacturing
stuff today vs contemplating what we might be able to do with tools in
the future. I do enjoy pondering self-replicating tools -- but this
can degenerate pretty quickly into dreaming. Sure, the RepRap stuff is
great, but that original ShopBot of 16 years ago that I described
earlier, self-replicated the same 60-70% as the RepRap, as have many
others. At the Maker Faire in San Mateo last year, I gave a talk in
which I showed pictures of all the home-brew, digital-fab tools that I
could find. They are fun and there is some really creative stuff that
may emerge as useful for practical manufacturing. They communicate the
idea of digital fabrication. But what I also tried to also illustrate
was that we have some pretty good tools with which we can already do
some real stuff ... (ok, getting old)
I don't mean to suggest that people who own ShopBots are aware of all
these concepts and are engaging in open-mfg, distributed-production,
etc. Most are just trying to get out their next cabinet or sign job
using our tools. However, there are some on whom the message is not
lost. If you haven't seen it before, have a look at Olivier Geoffroy's
business, "Unto This Last" (from Rushton), and read his business
philosophy. Single-handed, this guy has developed an open-
manufacturing model and has developed both the infrastructure and
business model to support it. It works and he has been supplying
furniture in the UK for years. And, he does some neat design stuff:
http://www.untothislast.co.uk
Ted Hall, ShopBot
Herbert Snorrason
Hash: SHA1
Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
> I appreciate your other comment on my writing and I will bear it in
> mind.
Although, it would appear, pay no attention to it. Oh, well.
> On non-violence, a favorite humorous story, from:
> http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/89q3/quaker.603.html """ Taken from
> Quakers Are Funny! by Chuck Fager, Kimo Press, 1987:
>
> One World War II Quaker conscientious objector had been a
> professional wrestler. Once when he and some other inmates of the
> Coshocton CPS camp in Ohio made a trip into town, they were hassled
> about their pacifism by some local youths, who insisted that only
> force could change the German's views.
>
> In response, the ex-wrestler took off his coat, challenged one of the
> local boys to a match, and promptly threw the townie across the
> room. He then asked the youth, "Now do you believe that force won't
> change people's views?"
>
> "Heck no!" the local boy hollered back.
>
> "That's exactly my point," said the Quaker, who put on his coat and
> left. """
Yes, but you seem to have completely failed to grasp my point, as well.
I was not arguing for the efficacy of force, least of all when it comes
to having an influence on opinions. I was arguing for the _inefficacy_
of martyrs. If one method doesn't work, that's no support for the
position that another does.
> Or, for a longer analysis of the kind you find wordy: :-)
I _did_ point out that I've read Marx, didn't I?
> Everyone makes that sort of choice everyday. And non-violence does
> not mean "non-engagement".
Non-violence means different things to different people. The stuff you
posted is interesting. The arrogance and condescension are striking.
"Here is truth," it says, "come to it." My reply, I have to admit, is
simple: "Buzz off." These arguments are not new to me. They're still as
fanciful and nonsensical as they were when presented by charlatans and
frauds. They still manage to miss the point completely, while creating
some sort of sanctity around their adherents. It divides the world into
good and evil, and creates a higher value, a divinity, which overrules
the considerations of men. It is, fundamentally, a religious argument.
There's a quote I rather like, which touches upon this subject: "A
jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of
all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of
Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to
abolish him." Finding the source is left as an exercise for the reader.
> "Ultimately every community has choices to make. It's who you choose
> to be."
Interesting contradiction. "The community" has choices to make.
How does the community make that choice?
> And even for violence, there are a range of possibilities. For
> example, had the Allies focused their bombs on German power
> production facilities instead of population centers, the war in
> Europe would have been over in months instead of years. According to
> a debriefed German general, what the German high command really lived
> in fear of was that the Allies would stop bombing civilians and
> instead target their critical infrastructure like electric power
> plants and synfuel plants. So, all that suffering for years stemmed
> in part from a failure to look for alternatives and a poor
> understanding of manufacturing and infrastructure.
Are you _insane_? Population centres are easy to rebuild. Populations
replenish themselves. But significant industrial equipment, whose
operability after the war would be critical for the occupying force, and
whose profits should be returned to owners, often in the US? No, that
should be kept as much intact as possible, if there is to be any sense
in the operation.
War is rational. If you convince yourself otherwise, you stand no chance
whatever of understanding what's going on in this world, whether past,
present, or future.
> While not exactly the same, the economic underpinnings of modern
> economics are predicated on certain amounts of continual growth in
> various ways (money supply, exports, total demand). When that
> economic growth stops, or even just pauses, we see economic disasters
> which make no physical sense, since all the production equipment is
> still there, all the knowledgeable people are still there, all the
> materials are still there, the roads, the power generators, and so
> on, but everyone suffers as things grind to a halt as the economic
> control system fails and everyone is sent home (if they still have
> one). Which is why open manufacturing as an alternative might be so
> important, so individuals can carry on even as the monetary control
> system has seized up.
Remarkable. What is the novelty introduced, in this context, by "open
manufacturing"? I will contend that there is none whatsoever. In fact, I
will go farther. I will contend that the system you are arguing against
has already faced a crisis of similar magnitude, and prevailed. I
contend that all the alternative solutions we argue for today were clear
to people at that time, and even earlier. I contend that today offers no
unique opportunities for the conquest of bread.
With greetings,
Herbert Snorrason
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Smári McCarthy
As a semi-daily ShopBot user (got a PRSAlpha 120x60 at my lab), I have
a
few thoughts on Shopbot interoperability..
Currently, if I want to use the Shopbot, the controlling computer must
be running Windows. Failure number one. Failure number two is that the
software crashes regularly (Error 91 is permanently burned into my
retina, the only solution I know to it is to delete shopbot.ini and
start over)...
As far as I know, Shopbot is primarily a hardware producer, and the
hardware is darned good. Really really nice equipment. But the
software
sucks ass, I'm afraid, and the fact that there is no available free/
open
documentation to the USB protocol being used to control the machine
directly is sad.
I'd love it if the hardware were open too, but that wouldn't do people
nearly as much good as having the software open would.
(Oh, btw, thanks for the mention of the Nerd Surge on the ShopBot
blog!
- http://shopbottools.com/pressmedia.htm )
- Smári
On Feb 21, 1:36 pm, "Ted Hall, ShopBot" <tedhall.shop...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Smári McCarthy
On Feb 21, 5:10 am, "Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfernh...@kurtz-fernhout.com>
wrote:
> them when they are ready. Marc seems to have unsubscribed from the list as
> far as I can tell, but it is interesting the first thing you list is a
> monetary system. :-) Which of these is most important or interesting to you?
of currencies: as money is scarce and the "game" revolves around
competing for the ability to repay debt, people are driven to
antisocial competitive activities that permeate through the entire
system and cause all sorts of horrible problems. So a lot of my focus
is on figuring out how to solve this problem in the monetary system so
that we can, as a people, move the fuck on to more important issues.
I'm sorry, but Marc's idea of energy-based money is retarded. It
completely ignores ephemeralization and it places work such as
organizing information at a great disparity with more energy-intensive
work such as mining. It also creates the potential for "energy-
inflation" where people try to perform as energy-intensive tasks as
possible in order to yeild more massive returns, e.g., blow up the
mountain rather than dig a tunnel through it because it makes for
better accounting.
> Anyway, the deeper question as regards this list is, how do you see this
> open manufacturing list fitting in to achieving your goals? Or how could it
> be different to help with whatever you want to do (even if you revise or
> focus your plans)?
lot of the discussions are horribly silly, a lot of really smart
people hang out here, united by the common ideal of liberation of
manufacturing methods, and in the long run I think we'll all benefit
each other greatly.
More goal oriented discussions would be a nice change, but I think
we're getting there.
> I suggest you watch the movie "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" before you do that:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitty_Chitty_Bang_Bang_(film)
> "At Baron Bomburst's palace, the vile Baron demands that Grandpa Potts make
> the "Baronial" car float. Grandpa Potts is worried at first, but the
> castle's resident inventors soon cheer him up, assuring him that he can
> accomplish the task ("The Roses of Success") - he fails, and the car falls
> apart on the last note of the song."
assure you I wouldn't dream of doing anything that would threaten my
safety, I kind of like my life despite all its flaws.
> So, I'd suggest, don't give up on Iceland. :-) And with sovereignty, a small
> population, and an educated population whose language you speak, the
> potential for change there, even if small, is much larger than almost any
> other place in the world. You've got geothermal, you've got rock, you've
> even got a decent climate, what more could one ask for? :-)
> low. People are losing their jobs, their homes, and their savings, but
> Iceland’s well-developed social safety net is catching them long before they
> hit the ground. This won’t change anytime soon, says Vilborg Oddsdottir, of
> Icelandic Church Aid, a leading charity. “We will have no soup kitchens in
> Iceland. … As you say: over my dead body.” Ms. Oddsdottir doesn’t mean that
> people shouldn’t be helped, but that under no circumstances should anyone be
> allowed to fall so low that they would have to stand in line for food. “We
> are a very small nation, but we have built up a very good society … and we
> can get through this without people queuing up with their children for
> soup,” she says."
here in 1992. Just this morning I was walking through down town
Reykjavík and passed by two different groups of bums sitting in murky
corners trying to ignore life. Last night, on the ferry ride to
Reykjavík, the first place candidate for the Progressive Party in the
south Iceland electorial district was wasted, his drunken staggering
being orthogonal to the 3 meter high waves outside being the only
thing that kept him standing.
The well-developed social safety net has caused dozens of families
homelessness recently, while financial institutions and insurance
companies refuse to extend foreclosure deadlines - just yesterday
morning somebody close to me narrowly avoided bankruptcy over a
relatively minor issue.
But you can't expect the folks at the churches to know this.
Hjálparstofnun Kirkjunnar (Icelandic Church Aid) seems oblivious to
this kind of thing despite Reykjavík's only soup kitchen having been
operated in a building adjacent to theirs until it was closed down due
to "zoning conflicts" several months ago.
> Also, as to "The Powers That Be", I feel it is a safe assumption anyone
> working in this area is already closely monitored, with their social
> networks mapped, potential interventions planned, their computer compromised
> at the firmware level, etc. (Do you really know what is in those ICs on the
> motherboard?) What holds the Powers back from doing more may just be the
> uncertainty about whether "The Powers That Be" need an alternative (or
> alternatively, whether to take this field seriously). Whether or not that
> paranoia is all true is besides the point, but I feel it is the safest
> assumption to start from. Remember, the Powers took out Cybersyn the first
> time, even though it took overthrowing a democratically elected government:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile
kill you."
I expect I'm being monitored. I expect most people on this list are.
But the beauty of the entire thing is that the folks breathing on the
other end of the wire really, really don't know what's coming, even
with us being horribly open about the entire thing. In a world where
context is everything, people without it will fail.
We will win this war.
> Oh, a social semantic desktop to organize information (including about
> manufacturing and discussions. :-)
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
looking at. Explain plx? :)
You might be interested in Google Protocol Buffers, the most brilliant
thing I've seen all day. http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/
- Smári
Joseph Jackson
>
> Remarkable. What is the novelty introduced, in this context, by "open
> manufacturing"? I will contend that there is none whatsoever. In fact, I
> will go farther. I will contend that the system you are arguing against
> has already faced a crisis of similar magnitude, and prevailed. I
> contend that all the alternative solutions we argue for today were clear
> to people at that time, and even earlier. I contend that today offers no
> unique opportunities for the conquest of bread.
>
> With greetings,
> Herbert Snorrason
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hopelessness of hope? The quote is from Mikhail Baukunin, although I
remembered Benjamin Tucker citing Baukunin.
http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/tucker/tucker2.html
And on the contrary, the solutions proposed on this list are becoming
feasible for the first time in history because of the presence of
enabling technologies--the existence of the list itself attests to
this. Da Vinci had ideas about human flight too--took a while for us
to actually pull it off. See P2Pfoundation. http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Manifesto
Paul D. Fernhout
> I expect I'm being monitored. I expect most people on this list are.
> But the beauty of the entire thing is that the folks breathing on the
> other end of the wire really, really don't know what's coming, even
> with us being horribly open about the entire thing. In a world where
> context is everything, people without it will fail.
>
> We will win this war.
Your point on context is very insightful; I liked it a lot.
With that said, I feel we would be better of using a different metaphor than
"war" or even "winning". Check out "Finite and Infinite Games":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games
"In short, a finite game is played with the purpose of winning (thus ending
the game), while an infinite game is played with the purpose of continuing
the play."
>> Oh, a social semantic desktop to organize information (including about
>> manufacturing and discussions. :-)
>> http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
>
> Downloaded, installed, mulled over... I'm not entirely sure what I'm
> looking at. Explain plx? :)
> You might be interested in Google Protocol Buffers, the most brilliant
> thing I've seen all day. http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/
All these Pointrel system versions are about using RDF-like triples to store
information.
It's still bleeding edge stuff and I don't want to use up good will of early
adopters until it is better and there is a packaged release. Still, to see
what I am up to, check out the latest from SVN:
http://pointrel.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/pointrel/trunk/Pointrel20090201/
That version (Pointrel20090201, in Java) is different from the download file
(an earlier version, in Jython). The current system supports multiple users
coordinating work using a shared directory, FTP site, or PHP web script (the
script is in webserver, you need to make a "transactions" directory with the
right permissions). There are a few applications in the examples directory:
http://pointrel.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/pointrel/trunk/Pointrel20090201/org/pointrel/pointrel20090201/examples/
There is a simple to do list application, and a simple collage application.
There is example data for them if you check out the whole tree
(TestArchiveExamples). There are three applications for synchronizing
(Directory, FTP, HTTP CGI). Right now, you have a local directory that
stores transaction files (with data in RDF-like triples), and you can
synchronize that data using those synchronizing applications. The backend
architecture may be refactored (see redesign.txt for plans) to be more
generalized, so you can just use remote archives without copying them
locally. This system will be of no significant interest to most people here
until there are manufacturing related applications that run on top of this
(where you could collaborative edit a design, or categorize posts from
rec.crafts.metalworking or here, or whatever else people want to do). It's
designed to be decentralized with local copies of things, but still
synchronizeable with a work group by various backends. Anyway, one big
benefit is that almost anyone can put up a PHP script somewhere and have a
collaboration space (perhaps protected using SSL and .htpasswd), whereas SVN
and so on take more effort to set up (even git requires a host etc.) and
such systems don't address the issue of any semantic commonality of data
being stored. Note, by the way, that one could use Git or SVN to coordinate
the transaction files this system creates, so it is not mutually exclusive
of such systems -- I'm just trying to lower the bar for collaboration with
supporting FTP and HTTP and a shared directory. The big thing is the triples
and transactions (the transaction idea the way I do it is different to my
knowledge from anything else out there -- reifying transactions as files,
and that is a big change from the last version).
--Paul Fernhout
Ted Hall, ShopBot
> As a semi-daily ShopBot user (got a PRSAlpha 120x60 at my lab), I have
> a
> few thoughts on Shopbot interoperability..
Just a comment on the Windows thing: We would like to make our tools
available to a more open operating system. But about 95% of our
customers have Wintel systems (actually 97.3% based on today's web
hits). It is simply the most accessible, affordable, modular?
controller for our tools. And you can run one of our tools on any old
wintel computer with an interface that the world understands. It does
not make it right or desireable. Free and open is relative to what
people have available and understand. But the common availability,
people's familiarity with, and the modular nature of the wintel box is
one of the main reasons we can make digital fab a whole lot more
affordable than it would otherwise be.
The Windows thing also bears on your other other comment. The USB
protocol is not being used to control the machine in the sense of
passing vector data to an outboard motion-control board, as would be
the case with a more traditional CNC tool and as I think it may appear
on first inspection that we do. Rather, nearly all the motion
processing work is done on the PC, with only an extremely low level of
timing and step info streamed to the outboard control card. Doing it
this way is much less expensive than developing specialized boards.
Over the years that data stream has evolved into a relatively complex,
convoluted, and highly specialized set of transactions (I won't say
kludge) designed to optimize the motion in these particular tools. By
not publishing it we're not trying to protect it, as much as simply
feeling it is so arcane we can't imagine fully documenting it in a way
that makes sense out of the context of the primary software on the PC.
More importantly, because all the real motion processing happens at
the level of the PC software, access to our protocol would not get you
much in terms of running it from a different OS. For example, a
vectored move is not sent at the level of the USB pass.
That said, we are very interested in being open and supporting
development. The outboard controller card is a very straightforward
SiLab variation on the 8052. Our system, and the controller and its
connections are published in the following pdf:
http://www.shopbottools.com/files/ShopBotControlCardConnections.pdf
And, on our developer sites:
http://shopbotdev.pbwiki.com/ and http://www.shopbottools.com/developers.htm
Should one want to develop their own control from a low level, we have
not protected the controller in any way, and one could load their own
low-level motion processing system into it (either using our loader or
standard JTAG access to the MCU, the connector is on the card). This
would, in fact, be considerably easier and more straightforward than
trying to make sense of our system. You could organize things any way
you wanted.
If one's interest is trying to develop something at a higher level, we
are doing our best to provide developer access to higher level
commands through our software, appreciating that we are now in the
context of Windows. If you are interested: download and install our
current beta software which includes a Programming Handbook describing
how to access ShopBot in several ways from outside software. It is
straightforward to set up your own interface for controlling the tool.
(Current ShopBot software and beta software is always available for
free download from our website.)
Sorry if this sounds too much like PR. My primary intent on this group
site is to just try to communicate a bit about what it feels like to
share some of the broader goals of the group, while struggling with
the reality of actually making the tools and building stuff.
[Smári, One of the downsides of the Wintel/USB arrangement that we use
is that in the context of electrical machinery and industrial power
sourcing there is a greater susceptibility to communications
disruption by electrical noise than we would like. This sounds like
what is generating your error. We are usually able to eliminate this
distraction by working a bit on the grounding or wiring layout of
specific installation. If you are not the person in your lab who
purchased the ShopBot, you may not be aware that we provide free 24/7
tech support. Give us a call during working hours. Or, leave a phone
message or email in evenings or weekends and someone will usually get
back to you in a few hours by phone or email. We should be able to get
this one straightened out -- probably with a couple of pictures of the
details of your setup.]
Ted Hall, ShopBot
Bryan Bishop
> Bryan, first thanks for the group synopsis links. These were helpful
> to get me to some of the good themes here.
You're welcome :-). Many of us on this mailing list have put our
emails under a Creative Commons or GFDL license, so that this
information can one day be turned into a book, or turned into some
other document that we can distribute so that if the list ever happens
to die (oops), we can make sure these themes aren't sent to hell-- but
it doesn't look like that is going to be happening any time soon.
>> Ted, when I mentioned interoperability earlier, I was actually talking
>> about parts specifications, in the sense of lego-like specifications,
>> not entirely in terms of interoperability as being a barrier to entry
>> of tools (which it sometimes can be, but I agree with you not in the
>> domain that you're talking about). Just us getting confused with each
>> other I guess.
>
> Second, sorry for taking-off on "interoperability" ... I'm afraid that
> in the CNC world it has become a bit of a hot button for me with
> respect to an obsession with the code that runs tools. Few seem to
> realize that what we really need instead is a deeper level of coding
> in the 3D models at the core of our work that will better anticipate
> alternative fabrication needs so that CAM becomes a legacy. And there
> is a lot of progress in this domain ...
That's interesting. I do follow the trends in that domain of CNC/gcode
interoperability. Recently there was a publication/summit or
conference of one sort or another about "MTconnect", an XML protocol
for shop floor interop, but it seemed immature, people are still
talking about it and nobody is really implementing much because of
"licensing" and other artificial barriers. It would be funny if it
wasn't so sad.
It's my understanding that CAM tools usually do feature-recognition,
right? And that these features are then scrutinized for different
manufacturing processes, right? Whereas, feature-based CAD would be
able to encode that information as one is computationally modeling and
designing the part. And if this is the case, one of the things that is
interesting from a part-level interop standpoint, is that this could
allow standardized instructions for each of those parts. So for
instance, if you include a USB connection in your design under the
software repository with the tools I'm designing, you'd also be
including all of the instructions (in a computer-readable format
(which can be translated to human text (but not the other way
around))) necessary for building that USB port part. Now, the
interface for using this system may or may not end up looking like a
traditional CAD sketch pane, but that's another matter.
> Yet, when you speak of "interoperability" in terms of "parts
> specifications", I'm probably still not clear. Are we in the domain of
> talking about making of the tools, as suggested further down in your
> post, or are we speaking about it in terms of parts in manufactured
> products (I realize that these could also be tools, but for the moment
> will make a distinction)?
Yes, so that distinction is really not important- I feel that it is
important that we define how to define hardware, so that we're not
going to be stuck sorting through 20,000 different ways to do a screw,
only to figure out that the one that you've been using in your
specialty crazy custom design from the ToolBook or 'tool commons' as
it were, is only meant for specialty situations or something, and
can't handle the stress, strain or load that you're going to be
subjecting it to. This is a poor example on my part. But this is kind
of just rambling on .. it's the "under the hood stuff" for things like
'toolbook' and 'SKDB' and 'unptnt'.
> If we are on tools, one of my earlier goals was to make a distinction
> between a time a little further down the road when a solid batch of
> modular components for digital fab tools will likely come available vs
> today when the range of manufacturing priorities makes it difficult to
> produce tools whose components are not specialized and vertically
> integrated into specific machines in order to optimize their
> performance and cost. Motors and their drives are a good example.
> Today they need to be optimized to the sizes and uses of the tools to
> be practical. However, it is not difficult to imagine, for example, a
> type of linear motor/activator that could be more generic and
> scalable. [Gershenfeld has a prototype for something like this can
> that can be produced in a current Fab Lab, though it does not work
> well enough to do anything useful yet. Knowing Neil, it's probably
> open source somewhere on a Fab Lab website as well.] Our goal at
> ShopBot has been to be modular and interchangeable across as wide a
> scale as possible. You can cut a circuit board with a small ShopBot,
> or fab a house with a bigger one, and in each case you are using
> exactly the same motors, drives, and linear motion and structural
> components -- and for that matter, all the same software components
> except those at the first design stage.
That's interesting, is that "distinction" in the form of a
mathematical relationship that I can look at, have you developed that
line of thought further to the extent that I can poke and prod at it
some more? :-) The tendency to do vertical integration versus the time
at which the components are modular and scaleable, I mean.
> But I'm thinking you are talking about "part interoperability" at the
> level of manufacturing and the making of goods. For me, this is more
> interesting because this is where the magic of digital fab lies. Yes,
> digital fab, at least theoretically, can result in 3D printing of
> finished objects ... someday. But at the moment and more
> pragmatically, digital fab allows the production of parts and
> components that are qualitatively different than earlier periods. It
> is an analog-digital distinction in the sense that digital fab allows
> a new level of complexity and reproductive accuracy. This complexity
> and accuracy comes at very little cost and it is instantly in the
> hands of anyone with a digital fab tool. This is in contrast to
> earlier methodologies which might allow the accurate production of a
> complex part, but would require high level of skills, experience, and
> effort to attain it. It is just as easy for a CNC tool to cut a
> precisely curving line as to make a straight cut. It is just as easy
> for a CNC tool to machine an intricate connection as to make a butt
> joint. And I'm thinking that of particular concern for this group, the
> digital fab tools allow for easy sharing of the part specs over wide
> networks while still getting 100% fidelity in the produced components.
That's right- the part specs are important and their standardization,
or encoding into a computer format, in the same way that the
electronics industry has (more or less) down for electronic design
automation, is of big importance to the themes I see interacting in
these domains. Earlier this year, I posted a rant to this list about
Eli Whitney and how the whole "industrial revolution" and
"interchangeable parts" thing was somewhat of a scam- it was really
more about "precision parts", or repetitive manufacturing of specific
parts.
Whereas I see that 'industrial revolution' as incomplete, or lacking-
it would have been fantastic if "interchangeable parts" would have, to
some extent, been "interoperable parts", and even now I suspect I
might be missing a part of an even larger picture, but this serves as
a good incremental development, especially for things like Eric's
"fabber media", and so on.
> All this is by way of saying that digital fab allows reproduction of
> interoperable parts. Beyond or along with (depending on your
> perspective) it allows reproduction of parts of high complexity,
> including complexity that contains the specifications for assembly.
> While today's digital fab tools may not yet practically produce
> finished and assembled cell phones, they do make practical the wide-
> spread production/reproduction of parts that contain their own
> assembly information and enforce correct assembly in the (loosely
> digital, here) lego fashion. It's this ability to easily spread
> reproductive fidelity over a broad network that makes what I think of
> as distributed production or open manufacturing possible and
> interesting.
So it's interesting that you bring up legos. One of the issues with
legos is that it's about the equivalent of a 'planned economy': in
other words, the lego standards are top-down enforced. Whereas in
reality, what we see is that hardware design comes from around the
world and in many different CAD formats, in many different styles; so
how do we do interoperability without holding a gun to every
designer's head? How do we extract the maximum value of being
organized without stiffling people just because they don't know to
call their doorknob a doorknob, or not stiffling people such that we
don't force them to have "six round circular extrusions on the top of
each brick in precisely this order" (legos)? But still preserving that
trend towards 'specs', perhaps in copying the electronics industry and
their datasheets, which I've long dreampt of having for mechanical (or
other) components. Even biological components, which is how we're now
moving towards BioBricks in synthetic biology:
http://biobricks.org/
http://partsregistry.org/
http://syntheticbiology.org/
"""
Using BioBrick™ standard biological parts, a synthetic biologist or
biological engineer can already, to some extent, program living
organisms in the same way a computer scientist can program a computer.
The DNA sequence information and other characteristics of BioBrick™
standard biological parts are made available to the public free of
charge currently via MIT's Registry of Standard Biological Parts.
Any individual or organization is welcome to design, improve, and
contribute BioBrick™ standard biological parts to the Registry. For
example, in the summer of 2007, over 600 students and instructors at
60+ universities around the world are making, sharing, and using
BioBrick™ standard biological parts as part of the International
Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition.
The BBF supports an open technical standards setting process that is
used to define BioBrick standard biological parts, and other technical
matters relevant to synthetic biology research and applications. Feel
free to join or contribute to the work of the BBF Technical Standards
Working Group if you are interested.
"""
"""
We are currently working to
* help specify and populate a set of standard parts that have
well-defined * performance characteristics and can be used (and
re-used) to build biological systems,
* develop and incorporate design methods and tools into an integrated
engineering environment,
* reverse engineer and re-design pre-existing biological parts and
devices in order to expand the set of functions that we can access and
program,
* reverse engineer and re-design a 'simple' natural bacterium,
* minimize the genome of natural bacteria and build so-called
protocells in the lab, to define the minimal requirements of living
entities, and
* construct orthogonal biological systems, such as a genetic code with
an enlarged alphabet of base pairs.
"""
>> Anyway, while ShopBot might be a factory in a garage, have you read
>> some of the earlier posts I linked to re: David Gingery? So, if the
>> idea is to get a self-replicating factory, it's probably not going to
>> be a single be-all-end-all device- like the RepRap, or Drexler's
>> molecular nanotechnology, but rather an ecology of tools that help to
>> build each other through some dependency between them.
>
> David Gingery's accomplishment is really creative and amazing. But I'm
> not sure how it applies to the present issues. A traditional machine
> shop, or woodshop, or plastics shop with multiple tools that are each
> employed for an individual process in the production of a part is not,
> to my mind, where we are headed with digital fabrication. Not that we
Right- I think it would be ideal to run some design studies to figure
out to what extent a certain machine is made up of parts and
components that can be built by other machines, where those parts of
those other machines can be built by the current machine under
examination in the first place, i.e. "dependency loops". I think of
Gingery's work as sort of an "entry point" to some of that "looping"-
but maybe that's not true? Maybe there's another way?
> won't all need to have a few hand tools for a long time, but the idea
> is to get as many of the process aspects of production as possible
> incorporated into a single fabrication system. Take ShopBots and
Yes. Cram as much fabricational capacity into a small a space as
possible (or reasonable- still have to have room to work and use the
equipment).
> woodshops. Yes, a ShopBot can do most of the tasks of traditional
> woodworking and might be conceived as a multi-tool that replaces a
> table saw, a band saw, a drill press, a lathe, a planner, a router, a
> shaper, a panel saw and so on. However, it would be missing to point
> to then use the ShopBot to drill holes or make the cuts for your next
> project. The idea is to use it to make the part or project itself.
Yes! So if you took the readout of all tools from human civilization,
and if there also happened to be specs in some standard format for all
of them, you could to some extent figure out which ones can be used to
make the parts or projects for the other tools. I don't know if
reprap's idea of compressing it all into one design, in an ad-hoc
nature, is a sufficient design methodology (also, whether they are
truly about self-replication, or if they are about being a rapid
prototyper is still up in the air, a sort of gender identity disorder
perhaps (I say this humorously, reprap lovers of the list, please
don't stone me to death)).
> Digital fab allows a shift in the level at which fabrication processes
> are integrated. Rather than the integration occurring in the
> craftsperson's head during the process of production, it occurs at
> design time. It can also be shared and communicated.
That integration needs to be computationally recorded- not just
socially recorded (which is just as bad as "in the mind of the
craftsperson").
> There was a good example of all this at the Austin Maker Faire where a
> new, back-yard-shed type of structure, designed by a group of MIT
> architects, was assembled on site. This structure was not built using
> tradition stick-building methods of carpentry, but was assembled from
> CNC-cut plywood parts that went together in an interlocking, lego-
> like, or jigsaw-puzzle like fashion. The fits between the pieces were
Huh, I think I squeezed pass their display and got a few splinters on
my shirt. It was in a really weird position, I don't know why I
avoided figuring out what it was.
> so tight, that no attachment hardware (nails or screws or glue) was
> required. The parts' fit and assembly was specified by their shape and
> could only go together in one correct way. Assembly could be done by
> someone with no skill. The only assembly tool required, other than the
> single digital fab tool that cut the parts, was a rubber mallet.
>
> http://www.shopbottools.com/spotlight.htm#MIT%20Architects
> Here's the full size house version ...
> http://www.shopbottools.com/teds_report.htm#HouseOpen
Hrm. That's awesome. I'll have to think about this some more. I wonder
what our architecture enthusiasts on the list think about this?
> Perhaps I am a bit too hung up here with producing and manufacturing
> stuff today vs contemplating what we might be able to do with tools in
> the future. I do enjoy pondering self-replicating tools -- but this
> can degenerate pretty quickly into dreaming. Sure, the RepRap stuff is
> great, but that original ShopBot of 16 years ago that I described
> earlier, self-replicated the same 60-70% as the RepRap, as have many
> others. At the Maker Faire in San Mateo last year, I gave a talk in
Yes. So, the 60-70% issue is a confusing one. Does 60% count? Does 70%
count? Either it replicates or it doesn't? This is where I like to
cite Freitas' work on this, from his book on kinematic
self-replicating machines:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/e4c375acce772250
(quoting it below, but then responses to the rest of your message)
Freitas clearly outlines the issue of closure engineering that
shouldn't be ignored in his KSRM book and AASM report:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/4ff7a92e2425dde2
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASM53.html#536
http://www.molecularassembler.com/KSRM/5.6.htm
Which I'll quote from again:
================
Fundamental to the problem of designing self-replicating systems is
the issue of closure.
In its broadest sense, this issue reduces to the following question:
Does system function (e.g., factory output) equal or exceed system
structure (e.g., factory components or input needs)? If the answer is
negative, the system cannot independently fully replicate itself; if
positive, such replication may be possible.
Consider, for example, the problem of parts closure. Imagine that the
entire factory and all of its machines are broken down into their
component parts. If the original factory cannot fabricate every one of
these items, then parts closure does not exist and the system is not
fully self-replicating .
In an arbitrary system there are three basic requirements to achieve closure:
Matter closure - can the system manipulate matter in all ways
necessary for complete self-construction?
Energy closure - can the system generate sufficient energy and in the
proper format to power the processes of self-construction?
Information closure can the system successfully command and control
all processes required for complete self-construction?
Partial closure results in a system which is only partially
self-replicating. Some vital matter, energy, or information must be
provided from the outside or the machine system will fail to
reproduce. For instance, various preliminary studies of the matter
closure problem in connection with the possibility of "bootstrapping"
in space manufacturing have concluded that 90-96% closure is
attainable in specific nonreplicating production applications (Bock,
1979; Miller and Smith, 1979; O'Neill et al., 1980). The 4-10% that
still must be supplied sometimes are called "vitamin parts." These
might include hard-to-manufacture but lightweight items such as
microelectronics components, ball bearings, precision instruments and
others which may not be cost-effective to produce via automation
off-Earth except in the longer term. To take another example, partial
information closure would imply that factory-directive control or
supervision is provided from the outside, perhaps (in the case of a
lunar facility) from Earth-based computers programmed with
human-supervised expert systems or from manned remote teleoperation
control stations on Earth or in low Earth orbit.
The fraction of total necessary resources that must be supplied by
some external agency has been dubbed the "Tukey Ratio" (Heer, 1980).
Originally intended simply as an informal measure of basic materials
closure, the most logical form of the Tukey Ratio is computed by
dividing the mass of the external supplies per unit time interval by
the total mass of all inputs necessary to achieve self-replication.
(This is actually the inverse of the original version of the ratio.)
In a fully self-replicating system with no external inputs, the Tukey
Ratio thus would be zero (0%).
It has been pointed out that if a system is "truly isolated in the
thermodynamic sense and also perhaps in a more absolute sense (no
exchange of information with the environment) then it cannot be
self-replicating without violating the laws of thermodynamics"
(Heer,1980). While this is true, it should be noted that a system
which achieves complete "closure" is not "closed" or "isolated" in the
classical sense. Materials, energy, and information still flow into
the system which is thermodynamically "open"; these flows are of
indigenous origin and may be managed autonomously by the SRS itself
without need for direct human intervention.
Closure theory. For replicating machine systems, complete closure is
theoretically quite plausible; no fundamental or logical
impossibilities have yet been identified. Indeed, in many areas
automata theory already provides relatively unambiguous conclusions.
For example, the theoretical capability of machines to perform
"universal computation" and "universal construction" can be
demonstrated with mathematical rigor (Turing, 1936; von Neumann, 1966;
see also sec. 5.2), so parts assembly closure is certainly
theoretically possible.
An approach to the problem of closure in real engineering-systems is
to begin with the issue of parts closure by asking the question: can a
set of machines produce all of its elements? If the manufacture of
each part requires, on average, the addition of >1 new parts to
product it, then an infinite number of parts are required in the
initial system and complete closure cannot be achieved. On the other
hand, if the mean number of new parts per original part is <1, then
the design sequence converges to some finite ensemble of elements and
bounded replication becomes possible.
The central theoretical issue is: can a real machine system itself
produce and assemble all the kinds of parts of which it is comprised?
In our generalized terrestrial industrial economy manned by humans the
answer clearly is yes, since "the set of machines which make all other
machines is a subset of the set of all machines" (Freitas et
al.,1981). In space a few percent of total system mass could feasibly
be supplied from Earth-based manufacturers as "vitamin parts."
Alternatively, the system could be designed with components of very
limited complexity (Heer, 1980). The minimum size of a self-sufficient
"machine economy" remains unknown.
===
===
According to the NASA study final report [2]: "In actual practice, the
achievement of full closure will be a highly complicated, iterative
engineering design process.* Every factory system, subsystem,
component structure, and input requirement must be carefully matched
against known factory output capabilities. Any gaps in the
manufacturing flow must be filled by the introduction of additional
machines, whose own construction and operation may create new gaps
requiring the introduction of still more machines. The team developed
a simple iterative procedure for generating designs for engineering
systems which display complete closure. The procedure must be
cumulatively iterated, first to achieve closure starting from some
initial design, then again to eliminate overclosure to obtain an
optimized design. Each cycle is broken down into a succession of
subiterations which ensure qualitative, quantitative, and throughput
closure. In addition, each subiteration is further decomposed into
design cycles for each factory subsystem or component." A few
subsequent attempts to apply closure analysis have concentrated
largely on qualitative materials closure in machine replicator systems
while de-emphasizing quantitative and nonmaterials closure issues
[1128], or have considered closure issues only in the more limited
context of autocatalytic chemical networks [2367, 2686]. However, Suh
[1160] has presented a systematic approach to manufacturing system
design wherein a hierarchy of functional requirements and design
parameters can be evaluated, yielding a "functionality matrix" (Figure
3.61) that can be used to compare structures, components, or features
of a design with the functions they perform, with a view to achieving
closure.
* To get a sense of the complex iterative nature of closure
engineering, the reader should ponder the design process that he or
she might undertake in order to generate the following full-closure
self-referential "pangram" [2687] (a sentence using all 26 letters at
least once), written by Lee Sallows and reported provided by
Hofstadter [260]: "Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his
sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's,
forty-six e's, sixteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fifteen i's, two
k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty-five n's, twenty-four o's, five p's,
sixteen r's, forty-one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, four
x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven
hyphens, and, last but not least, a single !" Self-enumerating
sentences like these are also called "Sallowsgrams" [2687] and have
been generated in English, French, Dutch, and Japanese languages using
iterative computer programs.
Partial closure results in a system that is only partially
self-replicating. With partial closure, the machine system will fail
to self-replicate if some vital matter, energy, or information input
is not provided from the outside. For instance, various preliminary
studies [2688-2690] of the materials closure problem in connection
with the possibility of macroscale "bootstrapping" in space
manufacturing have concluded that 90-96% closure is attainable in
specific nonreplicating manufacturing applications. The 4-10% that
still must be supplied are sometimes called "vitamin parts." (The
classic example of self-replication without complete materials
closure: Humans self-reproduce but must but take in vitamin C, whereas
most other self-reproducing vertebrates can make their own vitamin C
[2691].) In the case of macroscale replicators, vitamin parts might
include hard-to-manufacture but lightweight items such as
microelectronics components, ball bearings, precision instruments, and
other parts which might not be cost-effective to produce via
automation off-Earth except in the longer term. To take another
example, partial information closure might imply that factory control
or supervision is provided from the outside, perhaps (in the case of a
lunar facility) from Earth-based computers programmed with
human-supervised expert systems or from manned remote teleoperation
control stations located on Earth or in low Earth orbit.
Regarding closure engineering, Friedman [573] observes that "if 96%
closure can really be attained for the lunar solar cell example, it
would represent a factor of 25 less material that must be expensively
transported to the moon. However, ...a key factor ... which deserves
more emphasis [is] the ratio of the weight of a producing assembly to
the product assembly. For example, the many tons of microchip
manufacturing equipment required to produce a few ounces of microchips
makes this choice a poor one – at least early in the evolution – for
self-replication, thus making microelectronics the top of everyone's
list of 'vitamin parts'."
================
> I don't mean to suggest that people who own ShopBots are aware of all
> these concepts and are engaging in open-mfg, distributed-production,
> etc. Most are just trying to get out their next cabinet or sign job
> using our tools. However, there are some on whom the message is not
> lost. If you haven't seen it before, have a look at Olivier Geoffroy's
> business, "Unto This Last" (from Rushton), and read his business
> philosophy. Single-handed, this guy has developed an open-
> manufacturing model and has developed both the infrastructure and
> business model to support it. It works and he has been supplying
> furniture in the UK for years. And, he does some neat design stuff:
>
> http://www.untothislast.co.uk
"We design along a single principal; less dependence on heavy
industrial processes, more use of innovative digital tools adapted to
the small workshop."
"Instead of buying furniture from a warehouse outside of town, we
thought you would prefer a visit to a workshop close to the city
centre: everything you buy from us is made at the back of our shop,
on a digital router."
= The Pleasure of Making Things Differently =
"Unto This Last is the title of a book written in 1860 by John Ruskin.
He advocated a return to the local craftsman workshops, having a few
doubts about the human cost of the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to
today's technology, we make distributed manufacturing happen - with a
competetive edge. If you continue to support our approach, we plan to
grow by duplicating our workshop in other locations, for your
convenience, and the pleasure of making things differently."
Maybe we should catch up with this fellow some time. Also, by the way,
posting details on the controller design and software for shopbot on
this list might allow some of us to make a linux-ized version of it,
such as the driver protocol or something, or at least make something
that can be ran under 'wine'. Smari, does the Windows shopbot software
work under wine? Have you checked?
Vinay Gupta
Ted, could I make a suggestion?
I think it's very likely that your tools - given their arcane nature
- are of little use to your competitors, if you have any to speak of.
If you opened the code of the existing applications you have, and
continued to sell the hardware, it's quite possible the development
community would do things like improve the APIs for driving the shop
bot from external software like Blender, clean up the UI of the
existing tools, improve stability and so on - without empowering your
rivals in significant ways.
Furthermore, even if you wind up with your rivals picking stuff out
of your code base, if you used the AGPL or possibly GPL3, they would
have to open their code to incorporate anything from the release,
which might prove useful to you in your own right.
Finally, as they say, the risk is not piracy, but obscurity. If you
got first rate clean-as-a-whistle fully-buzzword-compliant open
source software to drive the shopbot written by the open source
community - who might well be deeply fascinated with the opportunity
to step out of the virtual and into the real - it might grow the
total market for this kind of CNC tools (and therefore your customer
base) far faster than any strategy which did not allow open
development of the toolbase would.
What do you think? Could you explain why you think there would be
negative consequences rather than positive ones to open sourcing the
existing shopbot applications? There may well be something that I
have not thought of, but on first blush it seems like it might be a
relatively inexpensive way of getting way better software written at
minimal expense to the company.
Thoughts?
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Smári McCarthy
Ted, I totally agree with this. There are two benefits to be had from
this:
1. There is a significantly large technical user base that can and
probably will contribute to your software, which is to your benefit.
2. There are groups working on free software for CAM devices, such as
the Fab Lab's (rather disappointly slowly progressing [partly my
fault])
Kokompe project. There is a general consensus that a piece of software
that is capable of reading all major formats and talking in a
meaningful
way with all major devices is a good thing to have. Currently a very
large number of CAM devices are well understood and documented, and
Shopbot is in my opinion the most valuable piece missing from the
puzzle
at the moment.
Please liberate the Shopbot!
- Smári
>
> http://hexayurt.com- free/open next generation human shelteringhttp://hexayurt.com/plan- the whole systems, big picture vision
> Twitter: @hexayurthttp://twitter.com/hexayurt
Nick Taylor
I'm quite interested in this at a broader level - aside from the
pragmatic/adaptive advantages, open-sourcing of code appears (to me at
least) to be becoming a sort of emergent morality.
Paul D. Fernhout
> Ted, I totally agree with this. There are two benefits to be had from
> this:
>
> 1. There is a significantly large technical user base that can and
> probably will contribute to your software, which is to your benefit.
>
> 2. There are groups working on free software for CAM devices, such as
> the Fab Lab's (rather disappointly slowly progressing [partly my
> fault])
> Kokompe project. There is a general consensus that a piece of software
> that is capable of reading all major formats and talking in a
> meaningful
> way with all major devices is a good thing to have. Currently a very
> large number of CAM devices are well understood and documented, and
> Shopbot is in my opinion the most valuable piece missing from the
> puzzle
> at the moment.
>
> Please liberate the Shopbot!
Here is another suggestion based on what Ted had previously written:
> > The Windows thing also bears on your other other comment. The USB
> > protocol is not being used to control the machine in the sense of
> > passing vector data to an outboard motion-control board, as would be
> > the case with a more traditional CNC tool and as I think it may appear
> > on first inspection that we do. Rather, nearly all the motion
> > processing work is done on the PC, with only an extremely low level of
> > timing and step info streamed to the outboard control card. Doing it
> > this way is much less expensive than developing specialized boards.
> > Over the years that data stream has evolved into a relatively complex,
> > convoluted, and highly specialized set of transactions (I won't say
> > kludge) designed to optimize the motion in these particular tools. By
> > not publishing it we're not trying to protect it, as much as simply
> > feeling it is so arcane we can't imagine fully documenting it in a way
> > that makes sense out of the context of the primary software on the PC.
> > More importantly, because all the real motion processing happens at
> > the level of the PC software, access to our protocol would not get you
> > much in terms of running it from a different OS. For example, a
> > vectored move is not sent at the level of the USB pass.
Ted could build an interface box to go between ShopBot and a computer (or an
ethernet network).
So:
ShopBot -- usb -- interface -- usb -- PC.
or
ShopBot -- usb -- interface -- ethernet -- PC network.
The interface might need to accept vector paths and return queries as to the
ShopBot's status. If the interface had an ethernet port, then anyone could
send data to it or check on it. It would be nice if the interface box had
extra USB ports or parallel ports so one could stream extra data like images
from a local USB camera to the network or control add-ons. (There are
security issues there, obviously, if anyone on the network could start up
the ShopBot.)
Computers have gotten so cheap over the last few years compared to when the
early ShopBot controller decisions were probably made. One source on this:
http://www.linuxdevices.com/
For example anybody can get an ethernet network router that runs GNU/Linux
for $100, and an entire rugged OLPC costs $200. Entire networked inkjet
printers are $300. (And obviously Stamp computers are even cheaper.) Build
these routines into that embedded box, so a PC can talk to the box in some
standard way, and then the box talks to the ShopBot. Hopefully, the
real-time control needs would not be that critical? Probably ShopBot could
sell this interface box for, guessing, $300 or so as an add-on using some
small but robust off-the-shelf embedded computer (ignoring software
development costs, which would drive the cost higher). Or, ShopBot could
make just that one set of software available for people to install on their
own converted ethernet network routers (either as proprietary or open source).
It's nice to think people will step forward and slog through previously
proprietary code to make it better for free, but it doesn't always happen
(in fact, it may rarely happen in a lot of cases). It depends on how well
the code is written, what platform it is on, and so on. Also, often old
proprietary code has various proprietary dependencies, not the least of
which is, what open source developers want to be developing on Windows if
they can avoid it? But an open interface lets anyone write software on their
own computer in any language and on any operating system to drive the
interface. So, then someone might write tools for, say, Blender to send data
to the interface box.
Open Source is great, but an "open interface" is often easier as a first
step for all sorts of reasons.
Anyway, would such an interface box be something that might help, Smári?
What would it have to do for you to find it useful?
--Paul Fernhout
(By the way, Ted, ShopBot looks great for serious shop use, but a $1000 or
so mini system may fit hobbyist budgets better with lesser needs (like
something you stick a Dremel tool in). I know I'd love such a system at that
price point that fit on a desktop just for turning out a few small wooden
toys I could design together with my young kid, or for putting a robot
gripper and a USB camera on for pick and place. There are plans on the web
for making such things yourself, plus there are CNC mini-lathes and mills
for $3000 or so, but for some people it would be nice to just get an entire
simple system with a similar gantry configuration, even if it could only do
small projects with less precision. Granted, it might not be worth the
liability or potential bad PR if people were disappointed, but if I can buy
a $300 networked printer or flatbed scanner, I'm really surprised I can't
buy a gantry crane robot-like thing for $1000.)
Ted Hall, ShopBot
all ...
There are two general software issues here:
1. The first is in relation to CAM and the code a tool uses -- as
referred to by Smári and others.
2. The second is with respect to the software that reads the CAM
generated code and moves the tool around -- as per Vinay, Bryan and
others (and Smári earlier).
With respect to #1. This is the one that I referred to earlier in
terms of it not being as big a problem as it is sometimes made out to
be. It is the case that most all tools for digital fab are set up to
read some sort of file generated by either a CAD or CAM program.
Additive 3D printers are using a very different creative process than
subtractive 3D tools, so the instruction files can be quite different.
Indeed, there is little logic for the files being similar, though at
the level of the 3D model, it would be nice to have a system for
extracting the information for each type of fabrication process more
easily.
Subtractive 3D tools use some variation of plotter code or gcode (or
our ShopBot OpenSBP language). But 95% of all the lines in a typical
file are nothing more than the coordinates of the next move, in up to
6 axes and prefaced by some sort of marker. Translating between these
formats is trivial and it is relatively easy to create a converter to
do it. CAD/CAM design programs oriented to machining simply offer the
output in whatever specific form the tool requires. This is not a
particularly big adjustment for somebody owning a single tool. Yet I
appreciate it can be a pain in a situation like the Fab Labs, where it
seems that every tool has a different CAM file format (usually
referred to as a toolpath file, cutting file, or part file).
It would be nice if they all used the same format, but even then,
files would not be interchangeable between tools. That's because the
specification of the toolpath for something like a laser cutter is
different than the toolpath for a cutting tool. In the first case you
make a center-line cutout, in the second you need to compensate and
offset for the diameter of the cutter and adjust for speed and cutting
direction depending on material. In addition, depending on the nature
of the part being machined there may be many nuances to the cutter
path in order to get the best machining or cutting. At the present
time we interpose CAM between the CAD design and the tool, just so the
machining strategies can be fully specified and inspected. Sure, at
some point it will hopefully become possible to build so much
information/intelligence into the 3D model that we can simply take the
model to the tool and a tool path will be applied that is appropriate
to the tool, the particular cutter, and the material.
Yes. The Fab Labs are working on a universal system to drive all
tools. I, for one, will be happy to use it. But it has a way to go. It
works at a demo level, but does not produce tool paths that yield the
machining quality expected in an industrial wood or metal shop.
And, just so it is clear, ShopBot primarily reads 2 code formats
transparently. G-code and OpenSBP code. They are closely related. G-
code is often referred to as an industrial standard but it is actually
highly specific to individual tools, difficult to read, and has
limited provisions for programming. ShopBot's OpenSBP code syntax has
mnemonics that are more human friendly, with the same commands used at
the tool when it is operated by instructions from the keyboard. It
also has a built in, BASIC-like, programming/scripting language.
ShopBot reads the two formats interchangeably and they can be mixed
and matched. ShopBot also has built in converters for easily cutting
dxf, hpgl, and bitmap/jpg files. [We are publishing our syntax as an
open standard as OpenSBP and setting up a group of advisors to manage
it ... but this is more to provide something of a temporary format of
convenience for people. It has a relatively limited usefulness and was
not designed to integrated into 3D models, which is the direction we
need to move and for which there are other projects underway.]
The whole CAD/CAM system for CNC will be improved over time, but I
don't believe that it is currently a limiting factor to the adoption
of digital fabrication or open/distributed manufacturing. If you are
interested in this, there is a trial version of the CAD/CAM software
that we ship with our tools that you can try out. It's not a big deal
to get to a tool path. This software is what one might call 2.5D in
that it allows working with different levels of machining and will
tool path but not design, a 3D model. The primary problem that people
have with CAD/CAM and CNC is in the difficulty and expense of full 3D
CAD/CAM design.
On the second issue. That of the ShopBot software that reads the
ShopBot code and runs the tool. I should just say that the reason not
to make it open has less to do with protection from competition than
with simply not having the resources to make it happen. It would be a
huge distraction for a very small development group. We're hoping to
move on to a completely new version ourselves this year, and we'd
rather invest our efforts in that -- perhaps constructing from the
ground up with respect to an open version. As I indicated above
though, if one wanted to write code to control our tools at the level
of the outboard controller, it would make more sense just to start
with new controller code. The links above provide the full specs for
our pin-outs on what is a very straightforward MCU that can easily be
loaded with alternative code. This would be a much easier and more
direct approach that trying to make sense of our data stream.
That said, and at the risk of sounding defensive, our software already
runs well and robustly (despite the problem that Smári reports with
disruption from electrical noise). We have had numerous operators and
engineers who run large, expensive, industrial CNC report that our
software performs better than their industrial CNC systems. We're
happy to compare the ease-of-use, features, configurability, and
programability of our Control Software to that on any CNC controller.
Our software runs on 6000-7000 tools around the world and does
everything from cut wings for stealth fighters at Boeing to doing
custom decorating projects for Ty Pennington on Extreme Makeover. We
just don't see the need to re-engineer our software so that it will
run on computers that our customers do not have access to and are not
comfortable with -- as well meaning as this interest in Linux is.
Would our form of digital fabrication catch on faster if it ran in
Linux ... I don't see any evidence for it.
So the challenge of bringing digital fabrication using affordable CNC
to the garage factory is not, in my opinion, related to the
idiosyncrasies of CAM code or to the fact that the control or
operating system software is not open source. Here are a few of the
more pragmatic problems facing the garage fabricator.
- The low end tool has a router as a cutting tool rather than an
industrial spindle ($3K +). The industrial spindle delivers more
consistent power over a range of speeds this give better cutting in
plastics and aluminum. It also has much less run-out in the bearings
to provide smoother cuts and longer cutter life. The spindle is quiet,
the router is so load it is difficult to work around. But the spindle
is a big price adder (no good low-end spindle is made in the US).
- Material hold-down on an industrial-level tool will usually be done
with powerful blower that is used in a universal vacuum system in
which suction is provided over the entire bed through a bleeder board
($7K +). This allows holding material for cutouts of any kind of shape
without worrying about losing vacuum because of cutting through the
material. Besides the cost, these blowers consume a large amount of
electricity. We need better ways to hold materials.
- Changing cutting tools is a hassle. Many industrial tools have
automatic tool changers ($12K + includes a spindle with draw-bar).
These work great, but because there is an industrial standard that has
been in place for many years, there are few obvious ways to accomplish
automatic tool changing for less money.
- The networks that would deliver work distributed to small shops do
not exist. There are some networks for support in place, but few for
access to design content, production materials, or potential customers
for goods or services.
Paul,
ShopBot has an open interface something like you suggest. Any vector,
ShopBot Command (e.g. settings, switches, etc) can be sent to the
interface. This interface sits in the Windows box, but as you suggest
this can be just stashed at the back of the ShopBot and addressed over
a network or the web if one does not want to look at a Windows PC. As
you indicate, it does not make a lot of sense to try and re-make
something out of our software. Even we are planning on starting fresh
next time ... it would just not be efficient for anyone's goal and
there is little reason in anycase.
And on the cost thing. Our goal was to provide a real tool capable of
machining wood, aluminum and plastic at a professional level in terms
of cut quality and performance. The pricing of our tools has crept up
a bit since their introduction at ~$3K, but their capabilities are
those of considerably more expensive tools. The escalation was driven
by customer requests for power, speed, and rigidity. We're pretty
happy with them at the moment. We've thought about making a lighter
duty tool such as you describe that could be used for models and
training (and there are a couple prototypes in our shop). But we would
be starting from scratch with this as our existing modular components
would be too expensive at this scale. Maybe some day. We do make our
Control Cards and software available to developers who want an off-the-
shelf system that is ready for them to run their motors on tools like
you suggest. This means they do not need to re-invent the wheel just
to get nifty little desktop mill.
Ted Hall, ShopBot
Nathan Cravens
ben lipkowitz
> It would be nice if they all used the same format, but even then,
> files would not be interchangeable between tools. That's because the
> specification of the toolpath for something like a laser cutter is
> different than the toolpath for a cutting tool. In the first case you
> make a center-line cutout, in the second you need to compensate and
> offset for the diameter of the cutter and adjust for speed and cutting
> direction depending on material. In addition, depending on the nature
> of the part being machined there may be many nuances to the cutter
> path in order to get the best machining or cutting. At the present
> time we interpose CAM between the CAD design and the tool, just so the
> machining strategies can be fully specified and inspected. Sure, at
> some point it will hopefully become possible to build so much
> information/intelligence into the 3D model that we can simply take the
> model to the tool and a tool path will be applied that is appropriate
> to the tool, the particular cutter, and the material.
This is the premise behind STEP-NC. Unfortunately it's locked behind
jealously guarded copyright by ISO and costs about $10k to get the
standards documents (wild-assed guess) but it might be possible to
reverse-engineer the standard from the published EXPRESS code files, which
are sort of like XML DTD's but for CAD files. Anyone interested?
Smári McCarthy
going to be horribly pragmatic and may damage the brains of
philosophers. Read on at your own risk.
Ted,
I agree with what you're saying to an extent... while I also agree
with Nathan's idealistic suggestion that you open up the hardware
specs etc, I think that that's a different and less important thing to
be discussing right here and now.
What we should be focusing on is the software side of things. I take
it you agree that your software is not your value-product and that you
gain nothing from keeping the source closed.. but you make a valid
point about there being a certain amount of effort involved in opening
up a software project.
I'll suggest an alternative that will minimize effort on your end
and maximize the potential for returns:
1. Go to the root of the source code and do:
1.1 wget http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt -O COPYING
1.2. cd ..
1.3. tar -zcf Shopbot-Controller-Software.tar.gz shopbot/
2. Upload the tarball to your website.
3. Put a post on your website saying that you have distributed the
software open source, but at this time you will not accept feedback
except in the form of patch files (diffs), and that they should be
sent to an e-mail address you set up for the purpose.
4. Forward all e-mail on that to me. I'll make the work of patching
it happen for a while, and let you know how it goes.
The beauty of this is that you get me (and people who are willing to
help me) to work for free on your behalf until such a time as you see
your company fit to take over the task. You don't need to deal with
any of the overhead until you've seen that it is starting to benefit
you. If at any time you feel it isn't benefiting you, you pull the
tarball off your site and stop maintaining it. You can rm COPYING from
the source folder, and only have the old unmaintained version of the
control software floating around cyberspace just in case anybody is
interested.
You have to bet absolutely nothing except all of the ten minutes
it'll take to post it online, and the potential for returns is that
you get amazing patches back from a community that you aren't
responsible for building, because it already exists and is ready,
willing, and able.
I dunno. If I were in your shoes, I'd go for it. Sound good?
- Smári
On Feb 22, 3:22 am, "Ted Hall, ShopBot" <tedhall.shop...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Herbert Snorrason
Hash: SHA1
Joseph Jackson wrote:
> Why bother to follow this list then Herbert? Merely to point out the
> hopelessness of hope?
No. Because precisely understanding this is _vital_ for success. It is
foolishness to think that technical innovations are going to solve the
social issues for us. Technology is not The Solution®. It's part of a
solution.
> And on the contrary, the solutions proposed on this list are becoming
> feasible for the first time in history because of the presence of
> enabling technologies--the existence of the list itself attests to
> this.
What solutions, to what problems? This list has, so far as I have seen,
concerned itself with _technical_ issues, with the handful of exceptions
being of the "look what new technology makes possible" type. It's those
exceptions that I don't like. (And, incidentally, prompted this whole
episode.) Why not? The social issues we're confronting today aren't new;
and the solutions to them aren't new either. They were possible,
feasible even, in earlier times, including the early twentieth century.
To actually _solve them_ requires understanding why these paths weren't
taken in earlier times. Not handwaving about brilliant new ideas that
are so obviously the way forward that of course they'll be used.
With greetings,
Herbert Snorraso
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ben lipkowitz
> Yes please... where can I download my "factory in a garage" kit (besides
> RepRap)?
> My problem is I have at least a half-dozen futures I really like, but
> I'm not sure how to get there from here: what can I do to play around
> with/hack out a start on a given future with tens of dollars a month and
> a few hours a week?
Ted Hall, ShopBot wrote:
> factory-in-a-garage ~= a ShopBot
>
> - Yes, crass and commercial statement, but our tools come as cheap as
> the components can be bought. If one is interested in production or
> mfg and not in making (re-inventing) tools, this is how to get quickly
> into action.
so, given our dear lurker's $10/month budget, and the cheapest shopbot
system coming in at just under $6700, it would take about 55 years before
he could do ANYthing. So, saying "just buy a shopbot" is not helpful. At
least the reprap project is trying to get component costs below the price
at which they can currently be bought. Component cost is usually much
higher than hobbyists are willing to pay, since motion control is aimed at
industrial users who have much higher performance and reliability
requirements and are spending other peoples' money in the first place.
so, that said, what are some viable alternatives for digital manufacturing
on $10/month that could actually make a difference in the world?
* learn how to program a bare AVR microcontroller ($2) on a breadboard ($6)
* hack a discarded inkjet printer
* using the z-corp plaster process
* or try hot saturated sugar solution into powdered sugar
* turn it into a light milling machine by adding a dremel tool and another printer axis
* etch and drill circuit boards
* mill extruded polystyrene foam into neat shapes
* bury them in sand and dump molten metal in it (lost foam casting)
* coat them with fiberglass and resin
* do vacuum forming in your oven on these foam shapes
* innovate a new repstrap design
* experiment with extruded ceramic slurry
* experiment with laser diodes from discarded CD/DVD-RW drives
* learn how to use laser printer toner transfer to etch circuit boards
* transfer these skills to photochemical milling
* print and build papercraft models with scissors and glue
* transfer your papercraft skills to custom inflatable sculptures
* do the same with sheet metal or rigid plastic sheet
* write a program which instructs the user how to build arbitrary 3d models from drinking straws
* experiment with homebrew DNA isolation procedures (see diybio)
* build an online map of interesting dumpsters for parts and materials salvage
* find collaborators in your area with tools, materials, and money
be sure to document and share whatever you do so that others aren't
starting from scratch.
I guess this list should go on a wiki somewhere..
-fenn