Funding Discusssion

Chris, Lonny, Curt, Ryan, plus Respected Others,

ßChris, Lonny, Curt, Ryan, plus Respected Others

Where are you all now? Are you involved in Appropedia full time?

I am land-based, http://www.flickr.com/photos/11113094@N03/, and we're looking for people to come here and live the developments in real life. And, I propose that if we are talking about the developments of Appropedia style, we need to live them. Hence a call for a real physical community. Please keep that in mind as you go about your work.

Now, to fund people, we need mechanisms. My strongest proposition is to deploy flex fab of products that work.

Ex: hexayurt. This is the only REAL product we have so far, and on that: what could be said for kits for storage sheds? In the US, people buy these silly little sheds for big bucks, i think like $700, perhaps 1/2 or 1/3 the space of a hexayurt. What's the latest on foldout kits? We should orchestrate an effort to have fabrication - say aluminum-foam-aluminum sandwiches - that would make superstrong panels. This is regardless of any major deal Vinay may strike on fabrication. We should have many such fabricators, worldwide.

Can we orchestrate any parallel effort to collect open products that we can start producing, with low startup costs? I had a discussion on this with Vinay, where we concluded - "Marcin, finish your CEB, and then offer your own product." I agree, but we should be in product development mode in the background - since apparently - we have all this synergy. As such, we can work together on product development, 'sharing development costs.'

The goals are humble. The metric is, how many of our products - full fledged, pure passion decentralist empowerment wares' - are getting out into the public. That is our duty, moral imperative, if we claim to propose a better world, if we claim that our products may be better.

Bottom line - we need right livelihoods generated out of our work - that's the civilization engineering that we need to address. Otherwise - that civilization engineering is addressed by the Man.

I would like to see some hard-hittin' deployed on viable economic models. I think if we put our heads together, we can come up with concepts, already available, that could actually support further development. I propose funding flex fab by preorders - from those supporters who see the vision - but who will also be buying a quality product.

Note that i propose real production, not pure information work. But perhaps the time is too early for real production, and we should focus on other means of funding.

Ok, I put this up at the wiki, we should keep track of this discussion.

Marcin