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Recruiting – Master Prototyper & Machine Designers

Open Source Ecology is currently recruiting two key members to our team: a Master Prototyper and a Machine Designer. The pay is $4k/month for fully qualified candidates.  This is part of our work on the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS).

To apply, fill out the appropriate application survey:

Application Form – Master Prototyper

Application Form – Machine Designer

Recruiting Video


The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is an open source platform. It is a set of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts. The designs include everything from a tractor, to an oven, to a circuit maker, to a wide array of tools covering agriculture, construction, fabrication, energy, and transportation. We publish all of our plans and designs openly allowing anyone in the world to use, build upon, and contribute back to a common pool of human knowledge. That is the beauty of open source.

The main development facility of the GVCS is called Factor e Farm, our living laboratory on 30 acres, one hour away from Kansas City. We have an office with two fast internet lines and a workstation for CAD and video editing. We have a workshop, a 4,000 sf flexible fabrication facility, which includes mills, drills, lathes, plasma cutters, welders, torches, a surface grinder, and other tools. We are off grid, except for the fast internet.

Our organization is growing tremendously. As part of this growth, we are looking for seasoned professionals to join our core development team.

Master Prototyper

First, we are looking for a Master Prototyper. The ideal candidate would be a seasoned or retired machinist/fabricator/prototyper who is also up to date on digital fabrication. The candidate would also have a broad range of skills such as mechanics, hydraulics, electronics, automation, metal casting, and tool and die making.

Click image to apply

Machine Designer

Second, we are looking for a Machine Designer.  The ideal candidate would be not only a designer but also a builder and user of their designs to close the loop from design-for-fabrication to building human-centered machines. At this stage, we are working primarily on mechanical devices with basic automation, and we are moving in the direction of machines for precision fabrication, power electronics, and hot metal processing.

Click image to apply

Summary

To put this into context:  we were put on the world stage with my TED Talk, got some money, and I thought we would be done in no time.  But, we are a complex and large project, and it requires a solid team and organization to scale. I discovered that we need to transition from vision to institution, a solid, open source organization, to change the world. We need to recruit the world’s best to make this happen. Our immediate goal is to increase our prototyping rate from 1 to 3 prototypes built and documented per month by mid-year of next year. We are on our way to a scalable, open source product development pipeline based on industry standards yet open source.

Our goal is to develop a viable and replicable mechanism for increasing innovation way beyond the limits of proprietary research and development.

This is not a walk in the park.  It’s more about making history – a transition to the open source economy. The open source economy is an economy that optimizes not only production, at which the current system is relatively good, but also distribution. If you are up to this challenge, then we would like to see you on our team.

How to Apply

Click the appropriate link below and spend 10 minutes on our initial survey. We look forward to hearing from many of you, and please don’t hesitate to send us any suggestions on how to make this recruiting effort or messaging better. Please also pass this on to your networks.

Send an email to recruiting@opensourceecology.org to make a comment or ask a question.

3 Comments

  1. Rahul Dhinakaran

    Hello;
    Ive applied for the machine designer post through the link. Can somebody confirm receipt of the application?

    Regards
    Rahul

  2. Kody

    Have you considered using open innovation for your growth needs vs. hiring internally?

    What about contracting out to other design firms?

  3. […] paper on this forthcoming in the next issue of the MIT Innovations Journal). We are currently recruiting 4 machine designers, and we aim to get our prototyping rate to 4 prototypes per month at Factor e Farm by March of […]