Yesterday, Mathew, Nick, Jeremy and I participated in the conference call on extending our collaboration ability. One major issue that we face is the large scope and difficulty of explaining the process of building the world’s first, replicable, off-grid Global Village, via the Global Village Construction Set.
We made 2 conclusions in the conference call.
- We are going to focus all of our energy on just the CEB press for now, because we can demonstrate the complete Product Development Cycle by example only. We can’t explain the product cycle – because we don’t even know ourselves what it is until we go all the way through Product Release.
- To help others understand the integrated ecology of the Global Village Construction Set, we’ll start moving on to ecological diagrams of operations, and how the different technologies fit in that ecology. The first diagram is the Solar Energy Cycle. You can see the rough sketch.
We have updated the Global Village Construction Set – so read about the changes that have been made. The same functionality still exists, with minor refinements and simplifications in the way we present the entire package. Still, we make the bold claim that the set, along with a few other readily-accessible technologies – is sufficient to provide an infrastructure for advanced civilization. The items mentioned in the GVCS constitute a package of items that are currently not open source or replicable, therefore fraught with high costs – such that creating a replicable global village from existing components is difficult and expensive, if not impossible, in practice.
Here is the updated Set:
And here is the set rewritten in pictures:
From now on, I shall toil you less with diagrams of words, and more with diagrams of pictures. While we have already shown a simple set of component icons for an open source technology pattern language, we’re going further with pattern language concepts to explain the individual, integrated technologies. We’re moving from components more to integrated technologies, and from the integrated technologies to ecologies thereof. Different infrastructures and ecologies, such as solar power infrastructure, fabrication ecology, or waste resource cycles – may be explained now by using icons.
I have to go now and write my Oekonux 4 presentation (coming up next weekend in Manchester, UK) using some of these icons. If you are interested in meeting up during the conference, let me know as well.
Am I the only carnivore here?
I see a picture of a cow and a duck, but not the extra infrastructure I assume you will need for livestock: fencing (galvanized wire extrusion?), veterinary equipment/supplies, butchery tools, and refrigeration.
I’ve been wondering how you will deal with livestock feed. Do you anticipate using high-protein concentrate (grains) at all? How will you store/mix the components? You can minimize the amount of concentrate you use for meat production–the animal has a year or two to convert grass to your food. But when you look at dairy and egg production (where you are eating what you put in the animal a few days earlier), I don’t see how you can avoid the need for some high-protein concentrate feed.